Catch and Release

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Drip. Drop.

We outpour until empty. We wait and hold and carry until full. We outpour until empty.

Although Acorn Lake had supplied him with a new adventure and plenty of perch, parked near Crows Lake his campsite was nearly the same as it was when he was a boy. It felt like his. Home base was a place from which to go adventuring.

This morning, upon its blue-gray face cool raindrops pattered and plucked all about the surface in circles and plops, speckling the canvas through the cool hours of the morning.

Breezes touched in gusts, feathering as a finger would the broad spaces with rippling waves, patterns of movement keeping his eyes more than hungry to follow the wind wherever it pressed. There were deeper swells fanning more slowly and other ripplings trailing away with haste as the gale came and withdrew its invisible caresses.

Out in the deeps the chop increased with crushed whitecaps bubbling over while the skies grew more cloudy and the mist of early dawn clung wet to everything alive and green and bouldered and of bark and twig and blade and leaf; rain even found its way through the sifting teeth of the gravel beneath the stump he chose.

The whole world was trickling.

It would never end.

It was a pain to put together a fire with everything soaked, but I managed to get one going and was glad I kept some kindling in the tent on purpose. I got the fire hot and the pan put on top and then opened the bacon that was waiting in my cool pack. The parka was at home in the environment, the air was full of pine and dead wet leaves and bacon was what won out after all as the aroma filled the forest.

Bluebirds erupted from a nearby shrub ushering praises to the pig. The fat sputtered and shot fiery from the pan. He threw it into his mouth as hot as he could stand it. He left it on to get crunchy much farther than most, but loved how most of it at that point just melted in your mouth.

I did fried eggs over easy.

The wind picked up and became more steady. Flashes of sunlight gave way to longer periods of shadow and looming cloud cover.

I lit a candle and read inside the tent when rains returned.

I gave myself a back rub against the stony ground just beneath my sleeping bag.

I took a nap after a knip of brunch-time bourbon, forgetting about how Zoe was doing on her second retreat, forgetting about what I still wanted to add to my thoughts on the life of prayer…

About how sure one could be of the reality of God's hiddeness.… The felt sense of being unable to locate God's presence throughout a situation, is human as human can get… So the divine participates as well in a sort of shared disorientation and it has always been part of the cycle of communion and withdrawal between the divine from the mortal from the very beginning.

At least it would seem to me. I dipped my bacon in syrup I brought for pancakes that I still was saving for one more morning…

We outpour until empty. We wait and hold and carry until full. We outpour until empty.

I took a nap… I took a nap forgetting about all of this.

Nevertheless all of the words were out and real, as real as they were spoken.

I lick the syrup from my lip and crunch down the salty fried fat.

The smile could not be wiped from my face, ever.