Thistle Creek is a place I'd fish even if there weren't any fish around. Even if the wind blew like a crazy man. Even if it was still February. Even on a Saturday...



Once, I floated across Long Willow Bottoms with a fishing pole in hand after reading a lakeside sign that said all the fish had been poisoned and killed so that a more native brand of trout could replace the Brook Trout that had been in there. I didn't catch anything. I didn't even cast.



I fish places. I don't often fish for fish.

Perhaps the most original and influential Greek poet of the 20th century was Constantine P. Cavafy (also known as Konstantin or Konstantinos Petrou Kavafis.) He wrote the following in his poem 'Waiting for the Barbarians':

....night is here, but the barbarians have not come.

And some people have arrived from the borders

and said that there are no longer any barbarians.



-And now, what will become of us,
without the barbarians?

Those people were some kind of solution.

I hope that sometime soon, we may again need Barbarians, as we have in the past.

Edward Abbey wrote: “Belief? What do I believe in? I believe in sun. In rock. In the dogma of the sun and the doctrine of the rock. I believe in blood, fire, woman, rivers, eagles, storm, drums, flutes, banjos, and broom-tailed horses....”

Rocks do not breathe, the sun doesn't whisper, trees do not talk, elk don't preach , clouds do not aspire to immortality (or mortality, for that matter). We use words like "soul" and "spirit" to say what it is that makes alive and human.

Animists assert that it is possible to "speak with" and "listen to" trees and elk, flowers and trout, robins and clouds, rocks and rain.



Trees teach philosophers what they have been teaching the pagans and children for many years: respect, intimacy and eco-responsibility. (Children are soon removed from the tutelage of trees by us adults—because we don't want them to grow up crazy. Pagans and philosophers are not feared by directors of curriculum and policy. They are usually left alone.)

Acting as if everything is alive leads us away from an obsession with deity and towards an interest in nearly everything else.



However, you don't have to believe that some-thing is a person or has a soul to treat it as a person. When we think of how we treat people we often think of how we'd like to be treated...in many of us there is a desire to see the world we live in treated in the same way...there is something intrinsic to animism as a life way, or a way of relating to life, that is very much appealing to me.

I think teaching is school is very, very difficult...



I've needed something optimistic about for some time now. Clint Eastwood, as “Man-With-No-Name” says, 'I've never seen so many men wasted so badly' in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. These lines are delivered while our hero is watching a bloody, human engagement over a bridge during the American Civil War.

He and Tuco, i.e. “The Ugly,” blow that bridge to Hell, thus giving the men on both sides nothing more to fight over.

I have the intense, unshakable urge to blow my bridge to Hell, metaphorically speaking...I'm sure...

The truth is, everyday we watch people being wasted...and sometimes we get to do something about it and sometimes we don't. But, then again, that's not very optimistic at all, is it?

My first fish of this new year was a hybrid trout, "born" over one hundred miles from where it was planted in a man made irrigation pond. It was then washed into a creek during high water. There, it lived happily until I annoyed it.



It snowed, as they said it would. It's nothing to worry about or be thankful for, it's just a thing that happens ocasionally this time of year. I wasn't going to leave if it didn't snow, and I'd stay even if it snowed more...lots more...

Yesterday, I was miles from home, wandering creeks and looking around in South Central Utah. This patch green grass was made possible by an apparently warm(er) water spring struck me as odd, but beautiful.



There is always snow, but there is always green grass...both somewhere, sometimes at the sameplace.

Henry David Thoreau said, “We can never have enough of nature.”

More and more, the only place where anything matters is at home, the school, or in the woods, canyons, mountains and etc.

Life is becoming more simple.

Last night I dreamed. I was sitting on a bitter-smelling, rain soaked, fallen aspen in Big Basin of Black Canyon with a weapon on my lap. The wind rustled the moist, yellowing grass. I was breathing deep, sucking thin air, sweating in the shade.

Soon the wind dried my soaked back, a thoughtful wind that delivered an intentional kiss sent from a Winter to come.

Dreams of my mountain adventures haunt me as I struggle to sleep during the dark nights we endure.



Electronic representations of the first snowstorm in Black Canyon remind me of a sleeping world far from this one. A world that exists in dreams and memories, but one I can't touch smell feel or wander...and won't be able to until late May or early June. I will dream many dreams before then.

But, the sun is on the move...and we have more of it now than we did a week ago.

Buddha taught that, “three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.”

I'm going to need more sun, if I can't have the canyons.

Is there spirit in inanimate objects? Does God want me to have dominion over the things he created for me to abuse? Once upon a time, a colleague of mine who is a vegetarian, was asked, right there in the faculty room, this question: Why are you a vegetarian?

All conversation stopped.

“I don't know, I just don't like the idea of eating anything that had a face.”

“What about the scriptures? You know the Doctrine and Covenants.”

This just got interesting...

“I don't really read Mormon scriptures.”

Someone else, a relief society president (no kidding) said, “you should read them...I mean God wants us to use the gifts that he provided for us.”

“Once, my mom gave me a fire extinguisher as a Christmas gift,” I said, in an attempt to change the subject, “I told her that I'd hang it on the wall in my basement..for the meth lab.”

We haven't spoken of vegetarianism or meth labs, as a faculty, since...

I really like Edward Abbey:

"If the life of natural things, millions of years old, does not seem sacred to us, then what can be sacred? Human vanity alone? Contempt for the natural world implies contempt for life. The domination of nature leads to the domination of human nature. Anything becomes permissible."



If we can convince ourselves that God wants us, nay, would be offended if, we didn't dominate nature...then yes...any number of sins are not only permissible, but sanctioned by God.

I, personally, still like meat, I'm not...one of THOSE...you know what I'm talking about.