April 26 2022

 Once I took my little girls fishing. 

It was because it was a life experience I thought they should have. 

A life experience on the order of ocean swimming. 

Not that I had ever fished my own self or even wanted to fish.

The thing was, fishing presented itself. 

There was a place meant to bring children to fish. 

It was a couple of big water filled holes with willow trees on the banks. 

There were logs to sit on. 

In the water there were fountains, a thing that detracted or distracted or seemed unnatural. 

Like the velveeta cheese bait. 

And yet here in this experience I discovered something. 

When you fish, the world changes into a place of becoming.

I knew this as we squeezed the cheese rounds onto the hooks. 

The little girls were dismayed at the process, the hooks, the idea of hurting the fish. 

I was ready to talk right then about becoming vegetarian. 

They were not interested in giving up eating animals, although I could see something deep within them squirm and sigh. 

What happened then is I showed them about sitting with the world and being more like a tree.

I showed them about absorbing the light on the water until they were that light. 

We sat with our rods and lines like Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer.

It all became as familiar as brushing teeth. 

We each caught a trout. 

To have that success with the velveeta and bamboo poles was satisfying as finding an opal in the dirt. 

After that on a summer night at Faria Beach we ran out onto the sand at one in the morning. 

The grunion were running. 

We grabbed at them as they flung themselves onto the wet sand.

The beach was transformed into a sea of flashing silver. 

This was not fishing like the other time. 

These are my only two experiences catching fish to eat. 

The hole in the ground, that was as if in another lifetime, fishing in mountain streams had been as natural a thing as walking to the library.

#NaPoWriMo