monday, may 31
all in the wrist
thursday,
we had enough people for ultimate
for the first time in over a month
i have to guess that the look of actual,
simple joy i noticed on other faces
reflected my own.
the next day i piled stuff in the car
and left for a small lake in northeast
nebraska with a stocked trout stream
and nice campgrounds
i caught two fish all weekend
but that wasn't really the point -
i tried fly fishing for the first time ever
and discovered that like most things,
frisbee included,
it's all in the wrist.
two related thoughts
first, it is extraordinarily difficult
to transmit enthusiasm.
i am always amazed by those individuals
whose ability to communicate is equal to some
great passion. they do not always work for
good and too many are dishonest
or deceived in what they love
but they seem to leave some mark
on everyone they meet
less rare but harder to find
there are quiet people full of amazing knowledge
everywhere i go
there is some good chance
you are one of them.
second, the world at times seems
filled to overflowing with the
worthwhile objects of enthusiasm
there are more things worth loving
and hating
than a single life could possibly encompass:
it is easy enough to believe that you will
lose little, if you never hate all that invites it
but there are ten thousand things it would be good to embrace
and as many places worth walking
so it helps to know
that there are other lovers
this is a shared task
— no less impossible in its totality
but hopeful all the same.
i would rather be a forest than a street
i am well convinced
that it is often bogus to draw artificial
distinctions between man (humanity i mean)
and nature
we are no less natural
than trees or aardvarks
and thus our works,
if i may be forgiven so broad a possessive,
are as natural as an
ant hill, a beaver dam,
the climate wrought by
oxygen-producing proto-plants
but the fact that there is an order
with which it seems disharmonious
or at least dishonest
to claim too disconnected a status
for humanity's effects and projects —
well, doesn't that
and much other evidence
(the ugliness of a plastic wrapper
in the mud alongside a streambed,
the ease with which we distinguish
the made from the grown)
signal some unique quality in all this structure —
and thus the reality of a countervailing quality
we often reach for with such loaded, inadequate terms
as organic?