The Earth Is Enough: Growing Up in a World of Flyfishing, Trout & Old Men (The Pruett Series)

by Harry Middleton

Passion and soul, the dual sources of everything valuable and meaningful, are not very hot commodities in our largely puritanical, calvinistic, money-driven republic.

Here’s whatever god or gods there are. In attendance here, now. Of the earth.” And so it seemed. Earth as God; God as earth, its bones, flesh, stone, wind, and water. Here was God’s aim writ large. Life. One way or the other.

Man is matter. That is fact. He is a collection of minerals. That is fact. Reduced to his elements, though, the life went out of him. His calcium did not cry; his zinc did not love; his iron did not appreciate a good joke. Apart, something was missing, that spark of life, the electricity of the actual world, foreboding, nonsensical, haunting. Before and after the body, only ripeness, what some call spirit, the great mystery, remains alive in the grass, moving with the wind, swimming in all moving water.