This website is called FISH.CLIMB.BRANCH... This entry is the first of four brief narrative essays to explain why in the hell that is.

My other half Simon taught me to fly fish when I was 20 years old. Back then, Simon said I casted the way Indiana Jones cracks a bullwhip, meaning with force but not necessarily with finesse. I like to think I've grown in my fishing life since, but that might just be something that I like to think. Either way, I enjoy that fly fishing challenges me to strive to achieve the fine balance of being simultaneously powerful and graceful.

Fly fishing calls me to explore new places. It forces me to turn up rocks. To look for entomological clues and otherwise observe minute details of light, shadow and sound. Fly fishing humbles and teaches me, over and again, that the reward of the catch is actually the reward of engaging in the process of trying to catch. The process of daring to, as Norman Maclean said, "hope that a fish will rise." In that process, fly fishing forces my attention towards what's in front of me and of most essential importance.

If I am so fortunate to have my fly mistaken for authentic nature, to strike at the right moment, and to guide the fish into my net, I cradle my catch gently as I unhook it and stand transfixed in the stunning glory of the fish's patterns and colors. It's sheer primordiality and my own. Revelry washes over me as I release a fish back into the meticulously evolved environment in which it belongs.

My traditional religious education was entirely neglected in my youth. Instead, my parents imparted that we went to "The Church of the Great Outdoors" as we rambled through the woods together. In striving to define my spiritual identity as an adult, I've often reflected on a parallel image. For those who sit every Sunday in a church pew, the back-lit biblical images in a high-reaching stained glass window may be their link to god. But for me, the translucence of light through the deep aqua and fuchsia spots on the dorsal fin of an endangered Arctic Grayling is my widest window to a higher power.

Which is all to say that to fly fish is so much more than to go fly fishing. To me, to fly fish is to continuously hone towards grace one's own way of interacting with the world, to explore, to hope, to be present, to practice gratitude, to wonder and to gain grand perspective on one's own rich but microscopic existence in the immense spaces and mysteries of this world.