My Pond

I hope that this place will be a Pond for Ponderings, because that is what I call my journals. Pond is the key word. It's not an ocean for whales and sharks. It's not a stream that has no time to stop and reflect. It's a simple place, with simple fish, and simple pleasures.


When you go fishing, you often catch small fish.  A blue gill with some striking stripes or maybe a larger bass with a couple of thwarted attempts at angling dangling from his lips, but few of us rarely dip our hooks in to yank out a sturgeon (even though legend has it known to happen in these waters).  The only way to get bigger fish is to toss a smaller one back now and again.  They need to swim, grow, mingle, and multiply.

This place is about catch and release.  The poems, prayers, pictures and ponderings you'll find here were caught in my soul.  We are all ponds in which these things are teeming, be they a line in a letter, a selection from our journals, or a loving word from a friend.  There is a serenity and exhiliaration in fishing, which is something we also find in the poetic and religious life; the peace in our stillness and the thrill of struggle and discovery.  Have the courage to throw your thoughts out, because, “as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he” (Prov 23:7).  Afterall, who knows what a simple thought or a simple man might grow into . . .