The sights and sounds of a forest are delicious to senses at anytime of the day but especially during the morning. This is the time when, after a cold night, dew drops hang like tiny pearls on the green swards of grass. Fishing is best then for fish or thoughts. Each morning we are born anew to a new day. Each day we have a chance to make right that which we have done wrong.
     The forest is a place where we can remove ourselves from the correspondence with people which is sometimes, we must confess, wearisome. To those of a sensitive nature the forest is a place of refuge from an insensitive world. The denizen, flora and fauna, of the forest hold no malice toward anyone. They live out their lives according to rhythms established before the dawn of humankind. The forest is a place where we can correspond with our ancient selves. We are still hunter-gathers, but we are endowed with faculties to hunt after bigger game. Now we can hunt after questions such as where we came from. Scientists say we are a young species, going back a few million years.
     Compared to the field horse tail, which inhabited the primeval swamps, we are young. We have just recently thrown off our old hunter-gatherer lifestyle and acquired civilization. To get away from civilization and appreciate the flowers and birds of spring is like going home.
     The fragile eco-system of the forest is a place for us to find lost serenity. The common saying, "take time to smell the flowers", can be done literally in the forest. Children know the value of a forest. It is a place to swim in a creek, build a tree house, pick blackberries or taste honeysuckle.
     In Mississippi, as in the rest of the planet, much of the wilderness has been lost to urban sprawl. Now we have a smaller and therefore more valuable refuge from mechanized society. In the area I grew up in, Natchez, Mississippi, the Natchez Trace is a place where nature's spectacle is most uninterrupted by the world of concrete and steel. There, at the Cole's Creek picnic grounds, one can stand on a softly sloping cliff watching a silver stream stretching off in the distance between yellow sandy shores. When you holler from atop the cliff, the sound echoes across the bluffs.
     Swimming is forbidden there at Cole's Creek, but fishing is permitted, even though the angling isn't that good. Angling for sublime thoughts is very good there. One can catch a full load of these among pine trees towering heavenward and in the open picnic area where a soft breeze blows cooling one on a hot spring or summer day. The forest is a place to seek solitude. We can contemplate our lives from a place where we are not in the thick of things.
     The reason most people go fishing is primarily to find peace of mind. It is a way to escape a seemingly soulless concrete world fraught with anxiety in our pursuit of "Happiness". Happiness can be found quickly after a short jaunt in the open air. We are having a petroleum shortage, but this is not as serious as the shortage of fresh air. Many of our cities around the world are choked with smog. We can develop alternative sources of energy, but fresh forest air is only found among the trees and flowers.
     We have lost the star fields to harsh city lights whose unnatural glow blots out the constellations. Standing atop a fire tower during the winter the sky is a show that has been in the making for billions of years.
     Shooting stars are transitory red streaks in the distant velvet black. When the moon is up, we are reminded that not every planet is as lush with life, as our own verdant orb. We see distant stars and galaxies and wonder if elsewhere there are intelligences contemplating our own sun.
     These are days when real wilderness is a dwindling and precious resource. In Natchez, Mississippi there is the Grand Village of the Natchez Indians and its nature trails. There grassy mounds are all that remains of a world which has vanished like the wind. Below the mounds lies the creek where in the Pre-Columbian morning the Natchez Indians bathed. The tan bluffs looming above the creek take on a reddish hue in the late afternoon and are reminiscent of a western canyon where solitude is plentiful. Peaceful thoughts tend to flock like Robins in this Cathedral of clay and water. Here we can find ourselves, gazing at the shimmering water as it ripples across sand.
     During a quiet afternoon by St. Catherine's creek, one can clear one's mind of thoughts and worries. In quiet places such as a city park, or a forest, we find a sanctuary, however fleeting, where we look back in retrospect over our day and life, finding that may of our problems may not be as important as they seemed. Freed from the impinging world of cities and struggle we can allow our minds to become supple and flexible. The patterns of our life become visible, and we see through the crystal looking glass of mind into the heart of mystery. Our hungers, fears, and ambitions fade for a time. When we return to the world of struggle, we can see more clearly what is truly important. Let us go to the forest to be anglers sinking our line into the flowing spring from whence mind is born.