I am adding a gallery for my art work on the store section.

Prints and originals will be available for sale.

A lot of people have asked me to do this so I am doing it.

 

Late this afternoon I took a ride to show a friend Sean Ransom the Blackstone River.

He was impressed by the size of it and the access and the surroundings. He did not expect it to be so nice and to be in a country setting and have the feel of a country setting.

He just came back from fishing the Skeena In British Colombia for Steelhead and still he was impressed with the Blackstone. He did not compare it, he liked it in its own right.

 

We saw some trout, a few rises and there were Caddis hatching up and down the river for at least several miles. The trout were not feeding on the surface and the water was a bit high and slightly off color due to the recent rains.

Still, it was fishable and wadable if you used caution and perhaps a wading staff.

There were folks fishing in the main flows of the river. 

Met a friend and he told us that the fishing was hard today. Lots of caddis but no fish rising.  He had tried going under with various patterns but had no luck.

We headed up towards the Ashton Dam.   We walked a few hundred yards and took a short path into a cleaing that abuted the water.

There were caddis fly’s on the surface, many dead ones.

He asked me about mayflies. I told him I did not know much about the hatches but I had seen some myself from time to time but it is easy enough to find out and I will ask some of the people who know the river well.

 

We walked way downstream from there to a place where there is good access to the water because of a low bank leading into the river. The river is about 120 feet across here and wadable at normal height.

Pretty good flow and a nice surface for seeing a dry fly and rises..

The current is very nice for fishing wets and nymphs too.

Sean has been living in RI for a few years or more and he finally bought a fresh water license.

 

After we came back he stopped in my place and helped me with planning changes for the Web Site to make it user friendly, accessible for people to post pictures and for the boards to be moderated and cleared of spam and the whole site to be renovated and up dated to the state of the art.

Amazing talent… 

Then he asked me to go striper fishing with him for the night.

 

Only in Little Rhody can something like that invitation …

be considered ordinary.

 This blog is not about fishing but on something else which is important to me personally.

I just wanted to share it as a gesture of friendship not anything else.

It is not an argument I wish to defend.

 

 

 

On trust

This past winter I have been doing a lot of deep reflection and soul searching..

I have confronted many of the ideas that have shaped and formed my life and found then lacking substance and that they are stale. Old ideas good for the time they were formed in but no longer vibrant and relevant. Times change and so does the world we live in.

I grew up in the forties and fifties and learned the values of those times based on the way the world was then.

My family was my whole world my dad and mom my relatives their hopes and dreams and those of all the people I knew then affected me and told me what life was and what to expect.

 

It played out exactly as I was told.

I never questioned those values at some deep level but this past winter changed all that.

I found I did not want the rest of my life to play out as expected.  I did not like what my life like was all that much.

I wanted more a lot more.

So I decided that the only way I could have more in my life was to question every value I had been given to live by and tear them apart and see clearly what was real and valuable and what was mindless belief not based on what is real and lasting.

 

My beliefs I found had isolated me from truly knowing people around me.

Not that people were hard to know but that caution and a fundamental mistrust of people had been inherited from my family of origin.

Wise in its own way but incredibly limiting by default.

Everyone had to prove themselves as trustworthy to be trusted and why?

Fear.

 

A cultural fear of unknown dangers passed down in body language and in the doings of daily life from parents to children to school to work and proven to be true because of a isolating viewpoint in programming. 

A soft mistrust of anyone and everyone unknown.

A soft mistrust, soft like quicksand.

A deadly mistrust that permeated all relationships unless they were proven to be trustworthy.

Vigilance, red flags a slip of the tongue and a perceived hesitation.

Evidence of…

 

The root of all this cautionary insight was a soft mistrust.

Safety first was the only way.

As I looked at this I came to see something fundamental.

If all relationships are based on a soft mistrust then all relationships have to fail because mistrust is at their root.

Who is trustworthy?

Mistrust asks that question.

 

This past winter I asked another question to my self and it was this.

What is the point of trust.

Then I said, “What would my life be like if I based it on trust instead of finding trustworthy people to trust.”

 

I decided that I would find out by changing my belief system from that of soft mistrust to trust alone with no expectations of result.

I am just going to live with a trust that others are the same as me and that they are free to be as they are regardless of my expectations of them just like I free to be me as I am with them.

No proof of trustworthiness needed.

A choice that can be made.

 

I mean no one harm.

No one means me harm.

Allow people to be free to be themselves in my life from now on.

It is a much lighter way then being so intense and vigilant.

 

Is it dangerous?

 

I expect so but I prefer the wonder of trust to the ponderousness of mistrust and the heaviness that it brings to living with our brothers and sisters and our loved ones.

Mistrust destroys what is good it does not protect what is good.

 

I  want everyone in my life to be free of mistrust and I want to be free of all mistrust for the rest of my life.

I am not looking for trustworthy people any more to trust.

 

I never really knew how to mistrust correctly anyway.

It just wreaked havoc with me.

The hell with it.

 

I do not trust mistrust to protect my life any more,

I prefer to take my chances with trust guiding my heart from now on.

 

I want to see what life brings you when you live by trust.

 

Amen.

Thoughts on the 23rd Psalm

 

 

 

The Lord is my Sheppard

I shall not want

He leadith me beside still waters

He restorith my soul.

 

Even though I walk through shadows and

the valley of death

He is here

I shall not fear for

He is with me.

 

He leadith me to trout streams

And to rivers fresh and salt.

He dances with me

In the flights of birds

And in the swimming worms.

 

I feel His presence in the clouds and

He is in the wind.

He is in the Catskills and the Blackstone and

The Esopus too.

 

I see and feel him

Everywhere I go

And everywhere I have been

I smell him all around.

 

The Lord is my Sheppard

He restorith my Soul.

And

He doesn’t get in your face…