Category Archives: Earthing

The nature of truth (1 of 3)

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Following on from the last post a letter to the dust 19/4/26 I have been rereading the Howatch novels and which has prompted these three posts.

The air in a cathedral  is never quite still. It carries the scent of damp stone, ancient dust, and the faint, lingering ghost of incense or candle. To stand in the nave of a great cathedral for me can help me feel anchored to something immutable a “Truth” carved in granite. Yet, as the sun shifts through the windows, the light always transforms the space. What was solid becomes ethereal; what was in shadow becomes gold.

For years, I stood in such spaces feeling a profound disconnect. I came to faith late in lay teens and attended an evangelical church rooted  on the “stone” of the absolute, propositional truths of the faith, but I lived in the “light”, a world where everything felt relative, shifting, and subjective. It wasn’t until I stumbled upon the Starbridge novels of Susan Howatch that I began to understand this wasn’t just my private struggle, but possibly something very Anglican.

Historically, Christian theology treated Truth as a static monument. It was Adaequatio rei et intellectus, ie Truth is basically the “perfect match” between the thoughts in your head and the reality of the world around you and could be distilled to an objective reality. In this framework, Truth was a deposit to be defended. It stands outside of time, solid, absolute and unchangeable.

Its where Thomas Aquinas meets Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates,  the world of the Sentences of Peter Lombard and the Summa of Aquinas. But for me, reading Howatch’s portrayal of the mid-20th-century Church of England, I realised that this “absolute” truth often manifested as a rigid moralism. In the character of Neville Aysgarth, we see a man who mastered the “Practical” side of the Church, the administration, the legalism, the outward appearance of Truth, while his inner life remained a fractured landscape. He reflected the “Practical” faith of the establishment: structured, but often calcified.

The Enlightenment moved the seat of Truth from the objective to the subjective. Suddenly, the light was no longer just on the stone; the stone was defined by how the eye saw the light.

As I navigated these waters, Howatch’s novels served as a map for something wider. Faith at its best, refuses to choose between the cold stone of fundamentalism and the vaporous mist of pure subjectivism. It seeks a via media the middle way. However, this middle way is often a place of intense tension and as previously blogged about can be to easily confused or corrupted by power. .

By the 1960s, this reached a breaking point. When John Robinson published Honest to God in 1963, he argued that the “God out there”, the absolute, objective monarch, was no longer a viable category. For many, this was a betrayal. But for me, reading Robinson alongside Howatch’s Mystical Paths, it felt like a permission slip. I realized that my struggle with “Absolute Truth” wasn’t a lack of faith, but a call to look deeper, to find the “Ground of Our Being” rather than a distant deity.

In Howatch’s world, the tension is personified by the “Practical” Aysgarths and the “Mystical” Darrows. The Practical side demands a Truth that is clear, legalistic, and useful for social order. The Mystical side, represented by the visionary Jon Darrow, seeks a Truth that is experiential, haunting, and often dangerous.

I found myself caught between them. I came to faith in the “stone” of the evangelical  tradition, but I craved the “light” of a mystical encounter. The novels helped me name this: I was looking for a faith that could hold the evangelical-liberal tension without snapping. It was through these stories that I first realized I couldn’t navigate this tension alone. I saw in the characters’ lives the desperate, recurring need for a “Father Abbot” figure, a realisation that eventually led me to seek my first spiritual director.

The historical tension leaves us with a challenge: if Absolute Truth feels like a tomb, and Relative Truth feels like a mist, where do we stand? The answer, is found in those moments where the transcendent breaks through the mundane.

In my next post, we will step out of the cathedral and into the “Third Spaces” of the 1990s Emerging Church, exploring how a new generation, and my own younger self, attempted to re-read the Truth in a postmodern world, guided by the wisdom of the “pioneer.” Where I first saw those glimpses of transcendence breaking out of mundane: the flower forcing itself through the pavement that I wrote about when living on an estate and seeking to be present and the words that Jonny Baker put into a song “I have seen the hills a thousand times before but it took someone to point them out to me”

Circling prayer beach 2/4

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I   circle myself with the voice of the tide,
with the knowing that I am shaped by the same pull.

I place my restlessness into the rhythm of the sea,
my longing out to the horizon that will not close.

I relinquish my need to master this moment,
letting each wave undo my certainties.
I ask the waters, not to soothe me,
but to show me what they carry and release.

I listen for the response in the sand between my toes,
in the salt that settles on my skin,
in the ache that rises and falls like the tide,
reminding me I am part to this movement.

Circle me, O Presence,
in the great exchange of coming and going.
Teach me to enter the dialogue of ebb and flow,
until I no longer cling, but simply flow.

A letter to the dust

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Dear friends on the way,

I have been rummaging through the digital equivalent of my attic lately, and I found something that stung. Sixteen years ago, I sat down to write out of a sense of profound frustration at the limitations of my own and our ecclesiastical vocabulary. (see HERE) Looking back at that post now, I recognise the voice of someone sensing a widening chasm between the language we were speaking and the life we were actually inhabiting.

We spoke then, as we still do now, with a polished, professional confidence. We talked then and now of mission, renewal, strategy, and “participation in the missio Dei.” Yet, beneath the surface there is the low hum of a quiet, desperate anxiety. We feared then and now that if we stop talking long enough to truly listen, the entire edifice would reveal itself to be less secure than we had imagined.

But as I read my own words from 2010, I realise I was hiding and complict. I was critiquing the “Church” while exempting myself. I was using sophisticated theology to mask a simple, ugly truth: I, too, am seduced by power. I am addicted to the feeling of being “right,” of having a “strategy,” and of belonging to an institution that still matters.

This post has sat in my drafts for months. I needed the blunt, prophetic nudges of two amazing women pioneers one Anglican from the south, one Methodist from the north, to finally pull this into the light. Our conversations about the nature of power forced me to write not just about my own complicity but to call for light to be cast more fully on all our complicity in the fallacy that we are in control.

What I could only dimly perceive sixteen years ago, I can now see with the terrifying clarity of an ending. The unease was apocalyptic in the truest sense: an unveiling. The walls we trusted, our social standing, our institutional weight, our assumed right to be heard, were already beginning to crumble. This became a recurring theme and even a category of posts (walls to dust) and 16 years on have we really changed.

The category arose not because God had abandoned the Church, but because God refuses to be contained by the structures we mistake for faithfulness. But for sixteen years, I have watched us (and I include myself in this “us”) try to reinforce those walls. We have drafted vision documents, commissioned reviews, and rebranded decline as “strategic repositioning.” We have spent a fortune on scaffolding while the foundations were returning to dust.

Consequently, we have failed to ask the most vital question: Is the Spirit actually the one reducing these walls to powder? And if so, why are we so desperate to rebuild them?

There is a profound difference between reform and relinquishment. Reform assumes the architecture is sound but needs a new boiler. Relinquishment recognises that some structures were provisional all along, and instead of taking these temporary cultural accommodations we baptised them as though they were the Gospel itself.

In Susan Howatch’s Starbridge novels, we see this played out in the clerical ego. Whether it’s the “Practical” ambition of Neville Aysgarth or the “Mystical” pride of Jon Darrow, the temptation is always the same: to use God to secure one’s own place in the world. After 10 years serving the Diocese of Carlisle, I have to face the fact that the “middle way” has often been more a “a way of retaining power”, a way of maintaining a seat at the table of the establishment under the guise of “influence.”

Now, as the cultural conditions that sustained that influence dissolve, we oscillate between nostalgia and panic. We act as though the erosion of our social privilege is equivalent to the erosion of God. It is not. What is being exposed is not the weakness of the Gospel, but the fragility of our frameworks and the depth of our own vanity.

For too long, we have operated with industrial metaphors that have shaped our very souls. We speak of “pipelines” of discipleship and “measurable outputs” of growth, as though the Kingdom of God were a production line and the Church its managerial arm. We have trained leaders to optimise systems rather than to discern seasons.

In doing so, we have absorbed a mechanistic imagination that is fundamentally at odds with the organic, interdependent, and cruciform life revealed in Christ. This is not just a strategic error; it is an ecological disaster of the spirit. We have lost the sense that the Church exists within a living, breathing web of relationships, with culture, with place, and with the “more-than-human” creation.

Ecosystems do not survive through self-perpetuation. They survive through mutuality, adaptation, decay, and regeneration. They survive because nothing lives unto itself. If we want to live, we have to learn how to die.

“Remember that you are dust” is not just an Ash Wednesday sentiment; it is a reorientation of the will. It reminds us that we are creatures, not curators of eternity; participants, not proprietors.

The ecological crisis of our planet has made this painfully visible, yet we often respond as though the “environment” were a peripheral ethical concern rather than a theological revelation. The groaning of creation is the drama of redemption. To persist with a spirituality that floats above the soil, detached from the material conditions of life, is to preach a diminished and false gospel.

For the Church, and for me, to undergo an “ecological conversion” means relinquishing the fantasy of control. It means accepting that some of our cherished institutions must die. Not because they were evil, but because their season is over. We must trust that in the ecology of God, nothing offered in faith is wasted, but becomes the compost for future growth.

The future Church will not be secured by better branding or more sophisticated leadership pipelines. It will emerge, if at all, from communities willing to be small, local, porous, and attentive to pain. It will be led by women and men who understand that authority in the Kingdom is inseparable from surrender. It will be a Church that measures fruit not in numbers, but in reconciliation, in ecological responsibility, and in justice enacted from the ground up, certainly not merely proclaimed from the House of Lords.

Sixteen years on, I am less convinced that the Church needs “rescuing” and more convinced that we need releasing form our addition to power and control and so be

  • Released from the burden of pretending the church or we are the centre of gravity.

  • Released from the anxiety that equates contraction with failure.

  • Released from the toxic need to be “useful” to the state.

What is required of us is not more frantic activity, and alignment of the existing active with the true nature of servanthood and courageous relinquishment. If the walls fall to dust, let them fall. The God who formed humanity from dust has never required masonry to accomplish divine purposes. Our task is not to preserve every structure we have inherited, but to discern what the Spirit is animating in this season and to align ourselves with that movement, however unsettling it may be for our careers or our egos. The question is not whether we can rebuild what has been lost, but whether we are willing to be re-formed by the One who makes all things new. Starting with me.

Grace and peace on the journey,

Richard

Circling prayers forest 1/4

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As I seek to develop the eco thinking of the last few posts around, I’ve been playing with rewriting some circling prayers that try to pick-up the themes I’ve been exploring.

Forest Circling Prayer

I circle myself with the remembering of the forest,
with the truth that I am not separate from this green breath.
I place my body among the bodies of trees,
my breath among the shared air of leaf and lung.

I relinquish my monologue at the edge of the canopy,
letting my noise fall like deadwood to the floor.
I ask not with words alone but with attention
what have you seen, O ancient ones?

I listen for the reply in the slowing of my pulse,
in the quiet recognition rising from my bones,
that I too am ringed with memory,
that something in me remembers how to belong.

Circle me, O Presence,
not above me but within this living conversation.
Teach me to stand here as kin, not observer,
until deep calls to deep and we re known.

What I’m learning from the rocks

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On the day the day the rock was rolled away here’s what I’m learning from the stones. In the previous post, on the universal suffrage of creation and us. I explored the idea that our ache for the wild isn’t just an aesthetic preference, it’s a memory and deeply inbuilt into our being. We are not separate from the soil, stone and the stars; we are a part of a living whole, and our restlessness and desire for the wild is the symptom of a severed communion.

But if we are to move towards “participation” as a way of being, we have to change the way we speak, be, and listen shifting our approach to enter into dialogue. When we stand before an ancient oak or a rock, we are standing before witnesses. They operate within a different kind of time, and a different kind of memory written in rings that differentiate years of drought, seasons of fire, the slow, patient accumulation of carbon. Rocks remembers the weather of a centuries or more, a deeper stillness that predates our languages and our empires. These trees, rocks and soil is not a backdrop for a play we watch like an audience but something more, something deeper and something connected. If we want to find our way back to the integration Pascal hinted at, we have to stop treating these beings as scenery and instead enter into dialogue that may start with words but a dialogue that also moves beyond where deep calls to deep.

My experiences with Mountain Pilgrims and hanging out with people seeking a deeper connection have led me to tentatively experiment with different ways to connect. Trying to describe this dialogue with a non-human world sounds like madness, pantheism or like I have lost the plot. But what Ive been reaching for in this dialogue is essentially an exchange of presence and I’m starting to find the words to share what I’m discovering. Here’s what I’ve found to be important so far:

  1. Relinquishing the Monologue: Most of our “nature walks” are actually monologues. We carry our podcasts, our internal to-do lists, and our human-centric anxieties into the woods. To be in dialogue, we must first connect. We have to let all that recede, recognise we are made of soil and share the air so real connected presence can emerge.
  2. Asking the Questions of the Land: Instead of asking, “What can this place do for my mental health today?” we might ask, “What has this tree seen?” or “What is this rock holding?” This isn’t about literal voices in our heads; it’s about a shift in attention. It is a holy curiosity that acknowledges the “otherness” of creation.
  3. The Response in the Body: Because our bodies are made of the same materials as the earth, we need to be open to the big book of creation speaking to us through sensation and connections.
  4. Deep to Deep: The way your breath slows under a canopy, the “knowing” that comes when you sit still long enough for the birds to forget you are there, these are the responses. Going deep enough so the memory of the trees begins to resonate with the memory in your own cells.

In the “Universal Suffrage of Creation,” every leaf and stone has a vote. They are petitioning for our return, not as masters, but as kin.

When we engage in dialogue with a specific tree or a familiar outcrop of rock, we begin to “thicken” the world. The concrete and the digital screens that thin out our reality start to lose their grip. We begin to see that we are surrounded by a cloud of witnesses that have been waiting for us to stop talking and start participating.

The way back to the Creator is not a disembodied leap into the heavens. It is a slow, grounding conversation with the things the Beloved has made.

The Universal Suffrage of Creation and Us

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There is something embarrassing about our obsession with happiness. We chase it like desperate of addicts but with the optimism of gamblers. We rename it wellbeing,  flourishing, fulfilment, but maybe it’s the same. The saying goes “happiness is fleeting” and the weird thing is not that happiness is fleeting but that we continue to search for it as if we could readily achieve it.

Blaise Pascal suggested that this longing is not foolish our search is rooted in something deeper than the memory of fleeting times of happiness. We search for happiness because we once experienced it. Not in fragments or weekend bursts as a whole way of being, an atmosphere pat of our origin story. In his Pensées, he proposes that the human heart carries the trace of a joy it can no longer access. We are not inventing desire. We are remembering it.

But if happiness is so fleeting now why should we continue the search? Why not conclude that happiness is simply a neurological trick, a temporary spike in dopamine that evolution wired into us to keep the species moving?

Pascal refuses that reduction. He says that the very persistence of the search is evidence of something far bigger. We would not hunger for what had never nourished us. We would not ache for a fullness we had never tasted. The restlessness is a clue, and the craving is an echo from the deep.

In trying to make sense of my growing sense nd desire for nature connection I wonder what if Pascal was right about happiness but also what if that explains the desire for creation.  What if the search for happiness was not just rooted in an abstract idea about our need to return to the creator where we experienced true happiness but also to return to the place we experienced it the creation. The fracture we feel is not just vertical but horizontal it’s as much heavenward as earthward?

Because our longing is not only for transcendence. It is for soil, sea air, trees older than our politics and rocks that stood the test of time. Like well-being we speak too casually about “getting into nature” as if it were a hobby, but the relief we feel is rooted in something deep inside us unfurl when we stand under a warm sun?

It is too easy to sentimentalise this and perhaps we do this as a kind of coping mechanism because if we really sat with it we would have to confront something far deeper. The ache to be in creation is not merely aesthetic preference. It is visceral because runs deep in our souls beneath our consciousness whether we recognise it or not. Even those who rarely step beyond concrete still carry it, surfacing as restlessness, as low-grade anxiety, with the suspicion that life is thinner than it should be.

We are longing not just for creation out there. We are longing for something that is deeply within us, because we are not separate from it. Our bodies are made of what the earth is made of. Our breath is shared air. The iron in our blood was forged in stars. The boundary between “us” and “environment” is far more porous than our philosophies admit. So perhaps when we long for forests and oceans and mountains, we are not craving escape. We are craving integration. We are sensing that we once knew ourselves as part of a living whole. That happiness, the deep, steady, unfractured kind was not a feeling but participation.

If Pascal is right that we search for happiness because we experienced it once as part of communion with God, then perhaps that communion was never disembodied. Perhaps the joy of origin was not a private mystical glow but a harmony, Creator, created and creature in right relation. A real belonging, severed but with the possibility of a way back by being saturated in nature and confronting our loss honestly.

We have become the species that can refuse its own embeddedness. We can pave, extract, dominate, and still imagine ourselves autonomous. We have convinced ourselves that we stand over creation rather than within it. But time and time again our bodies betray us, we burn out we feel the need to numb ourselves. We seek stimulation because we have lost saturation in nature.

In older language, suffrage did not mean ballots and polling stations. It meant prayer. Petition. Intercession. A cry rising on behalf of another. I suspect, a universal suffrage is taking place. Creation itself is petitioning for wholeness. The groaning of forests stripped bare, the warming seas, the displaced creatures, these are not only data points. They are lament. But the suffrage is not one-sided our bodies are petitioning too. But we are looking in the wrong places, endless scrolling, compulsive productivity, hunger for experiences, these are distorted prayers.

The tragedy is not that happiness is fleeting. The tragedy is that we have mistaken the flickers for the fire. The brief highs for the home we lost. And so we keep searching, because somewhere beneath our cynicism we know the search is justified.

The universal suffrage of creation and us is a shared petition and we need to wake up to the fact that just earth strains toward renewal so do we.

The environmental crisis is not merely a technical problem it’s also a theological one. Our exploitation of the earth mirrors our exploitation of ourselves. We treat land as resource, and we treat our souls the same way. We optimise, mine, leverage the land and sea because we are too afraid to to sit, to confront the reality of our longing and so we are destroying the thing that could save us.

To find the happiness we once knew is not to escape from creation but through a perfect immersion in it, held within its love and the love of its Maker.

Competition, Can Rivalries Spark Renewal

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The fourth in the series recognises that Competition is a difficult word for the church. In the wild, animals compete for food and territory, and this tension drives adaptation. But in the church, competition often feels like a zero-sum game, who’s in charge, who gets the most members, who has the best worship, more often fuelled by anxiety than faith. That anxiety can choke creativity, turning vibrant missions into mini turf wars.
Most leadership and systems theory tell us that a little healthy tension can actually sharpen identity and purpose. When churches see competition as a sign they’re uniquely called to a specific community rather than a threat, it becomes a motivator for innovation. Differentiation becomes a deliberate act of mission, each expression carving out its niche while still remaining connected to the larger body.

“Healthy organizations are understood not by their sameness but by their capacity to differentiate and adapt.”—Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline.
A good example is church communities that focus on specific demographics, one for families, another for artists, another for students, each pursuing its calling without envy or encroachment. Leaders who nurture this healthy diversity, rather than fear it, foster resilience and growth. It’s about creating a culture where competition spurs mutual encouragement, not jealousy or conflict.

The challenge lies in maintaining clarity amidst tension. Leaders must set clear boundaries of mission, respect differences, and celebrate each community’s unique contribution. And they must do it with humility, acknowledging that competition is a signal to sharpen the focus, not a reason to divide. In the end, competition when set alongside the other ecological discussed in the previous post, can be a crucible for innovation, clarity and sustainability. It reminds us that the church’s strength isn’t uniformity but a diversity of callings that, when held well, strengthen the whole.

Five Ecological Lessons for a Mixed Ecology Church

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Church life often longs for order and predictability. Yet the garden outside my window or better still the fells a short drive away are wild and tangled, and reveal another truth. Life flourishes in relationships that are messy, uneven, and interconnected. In reality the mixed ecology church, a community where inherited forms of church exist alongside new, experimental expressions will be similarly messy. But how do these different expressions relate without stifling one another? What patterns might help them grow together, not apart?

Nature offers us five such relational patterns that guide growth and resilience: mutualism, commensalism, parasitism, competition, and cooperation. Each reveals different ways life flourishes through connection, sometimes in surprising and challenging ways. Over the next few weeks, I’ll explore each relationship, drawing from ecology, not just for metaphor’s sake, but as a living guide. Along the way, I’ll try to offer some leadership insights and systems thinking, because growing a mixed ecology church inevitably is also about patterns and structures as well as people.

The five patterns explored will begin with mutualism, where both partners give and receive, flourishing together through reciprocity. Next, commensalism invites us to practice quiet hospitality a kind of support without burden. Parasitism teaches the necessity of boundaries that protect the life of the whole. Competition, uncomfortable as it feels, can spur creativity and clarity. And finally, cooperation invites us into pragmatic alliances that bind us around shared purpose.

What if the church took these relationships seriously and rather than simply sitting with the metaphor of the mixed ecology we started to embody it and see what we can learn from our non human counterparts.

The death of ideas

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Walking the dog a while back I was taken with the amazing seed heads around and make me think about the scripture “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” (John 12:24). It caught me not just as a verse of hope, but as a pattern that runs deep in how ideas grow.
Since Wallas, described a four-stage model of creativity in his 1926 book The Art of Thought, when we talk about ideas, there are stages that repeat. I particularly like Shannon Hopkins idea of “junk the brain” get all the ideas out fast and furiously to make space for some real out of the box thinking.

One pattern could read along the lines of First is the spark, that flash when the idea is born. Second comes the shaping, when we test and sketch, throw things out to see what sticks, gathering others to work it up. But I think the third stage is stranger, harder and looks suspiciously like death, either in terms of Shannon’s junking all the other ideas or as the third stage of ideation, when the idea no longer belongs to you. When you stop clutching it tightly as your possession and allow it to be buried, entrusted to soil that something new grows. The grain of wheat image is not about efficiency or productivity, it’s about release. It suggests that if we refuse to let go either of the initial ideas or if we insulate and protect our bright spark from change, criticism, or collaboration, it remains alone in its own sterility.

But when we release it, even bury it, something else happens. It may disintegrate in its original form, but in that decomposition potential multiplies. Fruit emerges. The community reshapes it, God breathes on it, and what was once “mine” becomes “ours.” What was a single thought or series dies and seeds a space where movements emerge that belongs to something bigger than we imagined.
In organisational innovation, this feels risky. It is tempting to hold to control structures, to keep ownership, to patent and protect. But ideation as faith practice teaches a different rhythm: hold lightly and let the seed fall. Trust the soil of community and Spirit. The third stage is less about control more about surrender.

I wonder if this is why so many pioneering ideas falter, they never move beyond the hand of the founder. We tend to want the harvest without the letting-go. Yet John’s image is uncompromising: the fruit only comes after the seed dies to its own form.
So perhaps the invitation today is simple but costly. What idea are you still clutching in your hand, afraid to plant? What seed needs releasing into the ground of community, risking loss in order to multiply life? Ideation is not complete until we dare to embrace the third stage, trusting death as the doorway to a new future.

The Catch Limit: Casting Positivity and hope onto the water

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I’m after a new hobby that has space and an outcome, so I found myself musing about fishing as a possibility. As an activist, a lover of river banks, piers, beaches and sea, it felt like a good fit. As someone who’s spent more hours wrestling with books than bait, there I was, speaking with a mate about the possibility of giving fishing a go. His response has lingered: “If I was to guess your next hobby, fishing would never have even made the list.” And I could see his point. Yet what really struck me was the gentle admiration he voiced, not so much for my angling nous, but for my optimism that I might catch more than the permitted two salmon per season.

Two salmon. It’s a paltry number, really. Yet, for me, my instinct and reflex, is to look for the glimmers of possibility where others might see scarcity. I wonder why is it I approach things like this, glass brimming with hope, an assumption of success even when the river is running thin?

Somewhere beneath this buoyant surface is the quiet undertow of whats gone before. The ripples of old stories, the clatter of childhood. I’m no stranger to the terrain of adversity, that stretch of years in my childhood where hardship edged the seasons, and the river of life often flowed murky. The textbooks label these sorts of things “adverse childhood experiences,” and the narratives attach warnings of gloom, fragility, risk. But that reality, that living, breathing, evolving gives me a wonderfully subversive logic.

I’ve come to see that within the chapters marked ‘difficulty’ there can be a strange kind of resource. Resilience as muscle memory for hope. When challenges came and physical flight was not an option, it taught me to scan the horizon not for loss, but for what might yet come into view. The fisherman’s prayer, “Maybe this cast,” echoes something deeper, a conviction that each attempt carries the possibility of a different outcome, even when the books and the bylaws would say otherwise.

It’s not always conscious, this tendency to override the limits and reach for the next best outcome. Sometimes it’s just stubborn curiosity, or an overinflated sense of self, often it’s a refusal to let the story be written in advance. Other times, it’s a conscious act of rebellion against the predisposition of pessimism. Where others see the posted sign, two salmon, part of me assumes success and wonders, “Yes, but what if?” There’s a joy in that question, a wild grace in believing the river may yield something more than it’s supposed to.

My friend’s remark that he admired my positivity was meant kindly, and I think it was recognition of something we don’t always name: hope isn’t just naivety, nor is it denial. Sometimes it’s born from the long, gradual work of braving the years where things were sparse and the nets came up empty. Fishing, then, becomes less about the catch than the casting, a test of faith, a hope for life to surface.

There’s an old saying on rivers: one fishes not for fish, but for restoration but for the me outcome, the catch remains important, so I’m not sure if it will make the new hobby list, but I do like the idea that it might be a way to keep practicing that muscle, stretching hope beyond the limits set by authorities and old stories. Because after all, two salmon is the rule. But possibility and hope like water, can never be wholly contained.