Perhaps There Remains

In looking back over 40 plus years of fly fishing I have tried to draw parallels between the spiritual life and fly fishing. Looking for spiritual meaning in our lives and the activities we find ourselves engaged in is a difficult task and “tricky”. One must wade in these waters carefully.

I have no intention of writing about lofty, divine, spiritual experiences while fly fishing. I have not been so fortunate to be able to make any such claims. Nor do I easily experience the beauty of God’s creation while fly fishing. But I have experienced “something” that perhaps we could call spiritual and I will try to communicate this experience.  

I look to the existential poet Rainer Maria Rilke for help in understanding this experience. In his most significant work, a set of poems called the Duino Elegies, Rilke opens the series of poems with the question; “Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angel’s hierarchies”?  In these poems, Rilke asks the tough questions about life. Are we alone? Why is life so fleeting? Where do we belong?   Rilke poetically tries to answer these deep questions but in a way that may surprise us.

Rilke’s poems suggest that he finds some spiritual comfort to these big questions, as I have, in performing some simple task over and over in a familiar place. He writes, “Oh gently, gently, performing with love some confident daily task,”  and,  “Perhaps there remains for us some tree on a hillside, which every day we take into our vision; there remains for us yesterdays street and the loyalty of a habit so much at ease that when it entered in it never left.” In some sense I almost have to laugh at Rilke’s “revelation”. Is this it? Some tree on a hillside? Some familiar street?  Is this your answer to the great existential questions of life?  What spiritual comfort can be derived from this?

Yet, while fly fishing, I find some truth in Rilke’s prose.  I realize that the most significant aspect of my own fly fishing experience (that I might dare call divine) is to be found in the simple tasks and places that every day, while I fished, I took into my vision.  And those experiences remain with me. These are the images that will never leave me. They comfort me.  There is the memory of a street I walked over and over as a young boy to get to a little pond where I taught myself to first fly fish. It was there casting rhythmically for hours, days, years, that I learned the art of fly casting.  Those memories as well as countless other images of specific places on the South Platte River I have internalized and will stay with me for ever.

For Norman Maclean in “A River Runs Through It” , the depth of his  fly fishing experience also  seems to have been developed from being in  a specific place accomplishing a simple task over and over. These were the memories that never left him. As an old man in the end of his novel, he is casting alone in the Blackfoot River and he writes, “Then in the arctic half light of the canyon all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four count Rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise”. It is here in “his” river that he has fished for decades all alone, where he experiences the Logos, the ‘Word’ that sustains all things, is the basis of all things, and is under everything. He ‘hears’ from listening so carefully his whole life that, “under the rocks (and under everything) are the words”.  

Perhaps for us there also can be something divine about fly fishing the same places over and over.  The repetition of familiar simple rhythms in familiar places become “loyal habits” that keep us, “at ease” and when they enter in us, they never leave us.  Perhaps, in time, we too, when we lay quiet our anxieties, begin to hear the ‘word’ that sustains us and will never leave.

I find it is a bit of a paradox that something so powerful can be almost hidden,so non-dramatic and yet  found in such simple things.  But, then I remember that Jesus spoke of the kingdom of God being like treasure that is hidden in a field. Perhaps, the kingdom of God remains hidden in the simple places and tasks such as to be found in certain rivers while fly fishing.  Perhaps.