Rest In Between Two Notes: Finding Contentment While Fly Fishing In Between Time

While fly fishing there are those drifts you make when time seems to be suspended.  There is a ‘knowing’ that something is going to happen. You can almost feel it or sense it but even these words are inadequate to describe something that lies too deep for rational thought and discussions on fly fishing technique.

Most often when I try to pray (for lack of a better word), I am not in that place of quiet flow where I sense something is going to happen.  I am out of flow. Maybe I am too rushed or chatty or too cerebral or I just don’t feel comfortable being at a quiet depth for any length of time. .

“I am not this steeply sloping hour in which you see me hurrying, much stands behind me”, said the poet Rilke. I can relate. There is a place deep inside me that moves (or is still???) at a pace that is not a frantic rushing. Yet, most of the time, I rush anyway and away from that still point.  Most often I am not in a deep still place.  Most often I am not at a pace or ‘place’ that transcends time.  

Rilke goes on and says, “I am the rest in between two notes”. Deep down, perhaps when I feel most at peace with myself, it is when I am at rest in between two notes. Maybe that resting point is a more true indication of what my soul is all about and what I am really all about, instead of all my anxious rushing about in the, “steeply sloping hour”.  I notice I am most content during those “In-between” places and moments in time or what might be called ‘down time’. It is those moments when I am sitting alone in a coffee shop doing nothing or walking a river alone looking for fish.

No matter how much I am unable to be at peace, deep down I am aware of a still point where I perceive something can happen. Perhaps God is at that still point. Perhaps He is that rest. And that is where we meet.

While we are in that place and drifting our flies in between two points in time, the time interval after the cast and before the next one, it is in this flow, this ‘down time’, that the fish takes the fly. Out of this quiet place that lies to deep for explanation or words, something happens.