Salmon lessons

Salmon know the pounding of rock

against their soft-scaled form

struggling upstream to spawn

Their innards bleed red

tinting pick their sweet flesh

thrashing and leaping, bearing life

This way and alone this way

are eggs shot forth, bearing life

for the next generation's birth

Their long-haul leaps end in death

nature rewarding them with a sweat repose

in a brown-bear's belly or a human's hearth

*Thoughts of Alan Jones:

  -Much in Christianity has been tamed and reduced to liberal or conservative theologies of adjustment.  Does the average believer want to pay the radical price of becoming more human and more free?

  -Is it possible to look, simply look, without prematurely interpreting what we see?  Could we do this without subjecting  ourselves to immediate self-definition and self-imaging?

  -"Be silent, wait and watch."

  -Are not all of our experiences distorted?

  -Experience..."is the satisfaction or dissatisfaction of our appetites...and the desire for truth becomes the desire to master reality rather than experience it."