Catch and Release

I remembered a time, when I was young, probably 10 or so, when I used to get up early in the morning and go fishing. In a rather cruel form of childhood recreation I used to catch and release blue gill. I guess I got to feel somehow powerful because I could bait these beautiful but hungry fish onto my hook. I never once, in my childhood, thought about what these fish might have been experiencing. That memory haunts me, as I recall being caught and released.

When I had the stroke I had no idea that life had just caught me. But, I would learn. I was drug out of the water of everything I had ever known. No matter how I wriggled I could not free myself, in fact the hook went deeper. I could have died, perhaps should have, maybe did die in some ways, but was ultimately thrown back in, to live another day in waters that have been forever changed by the hook, and the journey of being caught and released.

Life has become a more complex experience since that time. I no longer believe that what seems to be, really is. The darkness seems to be so deep, deep enough perhaps, to make the light really bright. The more I know that I don’t know anything, the closer to the truth I get. The waters, once they changed, keep changing, and I am lured and landed with each shift. I have a kind of post-traumatic memory. 

I am, because of the vividness of losing, still there, still caught — something hard, inscrutable, exists in me, a gut-wrenching recollection — and I am in the shock of re-birth, of being tossed back. There is nothing now that does not remind me that this moment is fleeting and that radical change is always here. I am caught, horrified from time to time, by the same perception that releases me. I am in the flow of Life but I am not that flow.

I have a hard time being around someone who is bored. I don’t get boredom in the midst  of a natural disaster, like the recent earthquake in Japan. I want to yell, “Wake up! Wake up to the near-death experience you are having.” That is how caught I sometimes am. I forget that I have also experienced release. I am disillusioned, and thereby freed of old limiting beliefs. I am diminished and thereby enlarged. I have had my life taken away from me, and thereby been reintroduced to this improbable miracle I experience as new life.

Being caught always, being released always, makes it hard for me to participate in the day-to-day life that goes on around me. Sometimes I feel crazy. How can anything matter so much? What am I doing here? What’s really going on here? I am caught in a world that is crazy-making, filled with so much pain, despair and hopelessness. I am simultaneously released into that same world and it is unimaginably beautiful, aware, and exquisitely alive. Frequently I am just confused, weepy and uncertain. I can’t even really explain it, to myself or to anyone.

I’ve tried to think about it. Is there anything I have brought back from the edge that I can give my fellow beings, my friends, my community, my kind? I was reduced to nothing, to helplessness and hopelessness (I had to be, in order to learn), I was suspended there for a long time (I had to be, to be rendered available), caught by who knows what, and I am being brought back to life (I’m learning to praise Creation).

You’d think I would have something. I do and I don’t. I know this isn’t the whole story, and I know it is a mixed, more complex story than most of us have been led to believe, and I guess now I know that not-knowing how to live in this mad-dash world is appropriate. I wish I could say something more solid, but there appears to me to be nothing solid about the world, or perhaps it’s just me.

I recall how banal was the cruelty of my childhood passion for catching and releasing fish. I remember that I read the Book of Job during my ordeal. I was looking for some way to make sense of the suffering imposed upon my life. I have never overcome the experience I had of the darkness of God, the inscrutability of the Void, the carelessness of evolution. Now I rest on this brink of time, alive with possibility, quivering, knowing that it is all passing so quickly, and deeply thankful, that despite everything, the years of hopeless longing, I have one more chance, that I exist, caught and released into this life.