Onions and Catfish

I grew up in the rural South. The kind of place where a cane pole and hook were the way to dinner.  It took a bit of work, you’d have to dig worms, handle the slimey of putting a worm, livers, or cheese puffs on a hook and then figure out how to carefully keep the fish on the pole until you backed up to pull it on the shore or risk popping the line as you tried to lift it out.  Many a lesson was learned on what not to try to pull out of the water by your strength instead of the less gallant way of backing the fish out of the water onto shore where you could take it home.

Catfish are a little tricky to get off the line. It seems if you don’t handle them well they can fin you with a venom that hurts.  Treating a catfish with kid gloves is never a bad idea, for it can pack a wallop in one simple flick of a fin.  Back at the house, you’ve got more to endure, for the best catfish dinners involve fillets and that means peeling a catfish of its skin.  Transition is much the same way. We have to learn to allow painful processes to achieve the grand meal of change.  When I was small, we often had catfish fries at my grandparents pond.  My eyes would burn from peeling the onions for the hushpuppies and the deep slices for onion rings and purple vidallia onions for spice that many country folks ate raw with their fried catfish.  Peeling onions is a tearful thing if you haven’t done it in a while. the smells permeate your hands and burn your eyes if you don’t put a matchstick in your lips.  Sounds silly doesn’t it but it works every time.

This season has been a catfish cleaning and onions period of my life.  In my Year of Allowing I am determined to prepare for the banquet each day. That means that often I am learning and engaging new ways of handling what I might normal have just powered through and endured. I am learning to take time to back up to land the harder things , fewer broken lines, and lost over busy days in order to more often achieve the catch: a mind at peace, restful nights, and pleasant living.  You’d think I have peeled an onion as I have had revealed to myself that in fact my own actions perhaps are the most painful in my life.  How’s that for revealing fresh flesh…think about it, we determine how we feel, we determine how our choices are made and how we respond to others choices….how many layers of dead onion skin have you let lay between that and whatever cover story that’s simply not fresh in your life any more?

I believe in owning my life and making it mine. To me that means that I look for “what is” not “what I’d like it to be”….and change what needs to be and to work on cultivating a life that I want to live this day, not some day.  As we renovate our new little country home, I am daily aware of how old things become new again with care, sometimes with removal of layers and layers of no longer functioning wraps.  Have you wrapped something around your heart or mind that no longer protects or empowers you? Is it time for you to re think your own catfish and onions methods and work on landing the life you want to live? I promise, when the sweet banquet begins, you’ll not mind that you weep a thousand tears as you tore that stuff off that was no longer serving you.

Isn’t it good to know we have a choice? That we do not have to keep living in ways that are not lining up with whatever we define as a life we wish to live?  I know I am and despite the onion layers I am shedding in my life, I am loving the spicey-ness fresh flavors of living that are being revealed in my life.