I just completed my 2nd book on fly fishing, the outdoors and spirituality. The book is titled, "Life and Death in the Middle: Reflections From the Seam Line. It is available on Amazon. My good friend Mike Aleckson and I co-authored the book. Below are some of the themes we wrote about.
I think my whole life I had a fascination with strange events, things that would happen, most often in the outdoors, that I could not easily rationally explain. And even though I could not fully understand these events I treasured them in my heart. This book is in essence a collection of those events in the form of stories. I can call these events a Something, or a “God thing,” a mystery.
I remember the pond in northern New Jersey that a strange man, the scary caretaker of that place gave me permission to fish and how that changed my life, giving me the skills to learn to fly fish and how 15 years later I would use to become a guide in Colorado. It all seems mysterious, that frightening man calling me over one day to talk to him, yelling across the pond to me, not to run away. How and why did that happen?
And the times that I guided an individual on the South Platte and on their very first cast they caught a fish, perhaps a trophy fish, and we stood in awe, not of each other, but before Something else that was bigger than us, bigger than “beginners luck” and certainly bigger than my guiding technique and skills.
Or the countless times that the stranger on the river who was time and time again a teacher to me, about kindness, or love, as though I were being invited to help him or her, to share a fly, a hole, or maybe they had some thing to share with me and how that Something was far more important and bigger than the fish we caught.
This book will not provide easy clear cut answers to lifes mysteries. But we will consider them and contemplate these deeper aspects of life as we journey outdoors into the wild.
