—Plato

(click on image above for link to larger JPG — thanks Adrian)

—Hafiz (14th-century Persian mystic and poet)

(Thanks to Sherry Ducharme for the quotable).

—W.B. Yeats (1865-1939)

Zwolle, Netherlands

Redmer Hoekstra creates fanciful drawings of a strange world where nothing familiar is quite as it seems. See more of his morphed visions in pen and pencil here and here.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

Winnipeg, Canada

At Geez headquarters they’re once again dusting off the people’s pulpit with a contest of Biblical proportions.

Five years ago Geez called on readers to step up to the soapbox and deliver a sermon you’d never hear in church. Atheists, anarchists, students and farmers filled the pulpit, and their sermons were defiant, dysfunctional, ambiguous and insightful.

Now Geez is looking for the same and more… hoping to hear from closet agnostics and Bible school dropouts, uncertain intellectuals and open-minded evangelists, incendiary pacifists, unapologetic atheists and good old-fashioned preachers who have been holding back all these years.

“The Social Gospel needs a new voice, and the sermon as we know it has become cliché. So let the rappers and the ranters take the stage. Let the poets and the storytellers preach. Share your apocalyptic visions or soothe our weary souls. Teach us what scripture is really about, or why it doesn’t really matter at all. Defy our expectations, make us squirm or tell us what has been left unsaid for far too long.”

“This is the pulpit of determined impropriety, so cast out your assumptions, get up from your pew (if you haven’t left already) and lead the Geez congregation with a sermon of holy mischief in an age of fast faith.”

Deadline: September 1, 2013 | More contest details here. (Full disclosure: I’ve been an Advisor to Geez since the magazine’s formation in 2005).

—Pablo Picasso

Winnipeg Beach, Manitoba

So, yesterday evening Evelin and I were chatting, and we decided it would be a good time to go fishing (something neither of us has done for a few years). The local “Handi-Mart” sells fishing licenses and was still open, so within 20 minutes we were casting into the open waters of the harbor at Winnipeg Beach (strong winds had pushed lake-ice back against the western shores), so this was literally the only open water available. Well, the photos tell the rest of the story… Ev caught dinner, and we experienced a glorious spring evening in direct communion with our environment.

Photos: White Bass (yummy); happy Evelin-the-Angler; the iconic Winnipeg Beach water tower across the ice; and, a quartet of tuxedo’d Western Grebes that shared the patch of open water with us.