"For the Beauty of the Earth"

Thanksgiving is never complete without my hearing the old hymn that begins with ”for the beauty of the earth.” I’ll play it on my tin whistle if I don’t hear it anywhere else.

For the beauty of the earth,

For the beauty of the skies,

For the love which from our birth

Over and around us lies.

While our Civil War was at its height of desolation and carnage in 1863, a young Englishman named Folliott Sandford Pierpoint walked to the top of a hill above his village and saw leaves turning color and wildflowers dotting the meadow between him and the town’s old buildings. In that idyllic setting he wrote of giving thanks to God while his cousins overseas were at war with each other.

For the wonder of each hour

of the day and of the night,

hill and vale and tree and flower,

sun and moon and stars of light…

Here in America, our skies were lit up with bombs and rockets. Our hills and vales were trampled to mud, stained with blood. The flowers that once grew on our fields of battle were probably the last things in the minds of the young soldiers, about Folliott Sandford Pierpoint’s age, who fought there.

For the joy of human love,

brother, sister, parent, child,

friends on earth, and friends above,

for all gentle thoughts and mild…

Human love, gentle thoughts and mild, no doubt pulled at the hearts of those young soldiers. When the war ended many found comfort in Lincoln’s words as he tried to heal the nation, “With malice for none, with charity for all…”

Today, after a bitter election cycle here at home and wars threatening to grow bigger abroad, we can use less malice, more charity; less suspicion, more trust; less division, more friendship and fellowship. And, I might add, an eye turned toward the Creation, human love and gentle thoughts the young Pierpont envisioned and made immortal during his quiet walk on an English hillside.

Here in the Bitterroot Valley I’m thankful that fall has revealed much of the earth’s beauty that was shrouded in smoke through the summer. We got to see the leaves turning color, experience the valley rains and the first dustings of mountain snows that finally washed the air clean.

I can be gratefully and humbly thankful for that, and I am.

Fly fishing is at the center of my connection to the beauty of this patch of earth that I call home. It opens the doors to much that I wouldn’t see and experience otherwise, deepens my understanding and appreciation of all of it.

It all fits together, and gives me a glimpse into a cosmic picture that overwhelms with its scope and grandeur; it’s something that leaves me awed and which I can scarcely comprehend.

Just a short while ago the leaves on the trees painted the valley with their wash of colors. It was as if they were saying, “Look at us! Do you see, really see?”

Now that the leaves are off the trees, some of them down by the river have washed into the water where they will decompose, feed the phytoplankton that feeds the aquatic insects that in turn feed the trout. I recall a favorite line: “The autumn leaf is emblazoned with spring’s belief.”

I’m thankful for all of it, and thankful that I’m equipped to see, and be awestruck as I try to comprehend such beauty.

I watch snowfall accumulate in terms of such history and wisdom as I can bring to it as I see familiar patterns develop. How much of this snow, in the way it is accumulating, will find its way into the aquifers that will charge the river through the summer? And how much of it will be swept away through runoff? And how much of it will I have to shovel off my driveway?

Most of this speculation, save for the shoveling part, I see in terms of the systems that support my fishing.

I cannot think of snowfall, and runoff, without thinking of fire, and the loss of watershed lodgepole pines that once held the snowpack under a shaded canopy to run off gradually through the course of the summer. That was before two decades of fires.

Looking at the ever-changing landscape off my back deck, now snowy, and soon to bud with the promise of new life in the spring, I see each present day as part of a longer set of cycles. The beautiful autumn leaves that decay in the streams and rivers will again nourish the chains of life that wait underneath the white snowfall as I return to the vise and tie a few more flies.

If it weren’t for my fly rod, and the flies I tie, and the urge to fish that draws me out there, I’d miss it.

And then there is, in the words of the hymnist, “the joy of human love, brother, sister, parent, child…friends on earth and gentle thoughts and mild…”

My dearest friends and close family, my wife, children, and grandchildren, all share with me the sense of beauty that we experience when we’re out in what we call the Creation, and they are an integral part of that.

For the beauty of the earth. For family, friends, gentle thoughts and love. Please join me this year, if only for a little while, to give thanks.