I pick up a pen and touch it to the paper, and a fish swims out. Mike loaned me some tools for making pottery. I picked up a wooden stylus and touched it to the leather hard surface of a pot. It had fish in it too!

I grasp the moving utensils, and find that there are fishes hiding everywhere.

They wriggle out and sometimes congregate, overlapping each other and swimming away, happy to be freed from the ink chamber or sculpting tool.

When I paint, I sometimes don’t know what is going to come out. At other times, the subject is clear and deliberate. It’s the same way when I write. Whatever I am digesting will come out when the time is right.

When the words flow out, surprising even me, it can be cathartic. The things I am the most hesitant to write are often the most rewarding.

I hook something unseen in the depths, and reel in an important memory or unresolved issue.

Those big fish are intimidating. They can be threatening, flopping around the way they do. Lashing out. Afraid of change. When they settle down, I examine them.

When I take the hook out of their mouth and release them, I actually take the hook out of myself.

The thing is just the thing, and I am no longer tethered to it.

Most recently, the subject of religion as been surfacing, and this has made me uncomfortable… and that makes me uncomfortable. I don’t want to censor myself. I want to say it all.

When I write something that I think is shocking or offensive, I read it to friends and they say it is beautiful. When I read it aloud, I get choked up, so I know it’s real. It’s coming from my soul.

I don’t think there is a problem with what I say. I think there is a problem with the old way of thinking.

I see it on a large scale now. Recognizing and naming white supremacy in our culture is threatening to those who are comfortable with it. I want to be comfortable opposing fascism and tyranny wherever I see it.

I read on social media that you can’t change your friends, but you can change your friends.

I can change myself.