Fishing Lessons

Monday, Tuesday and today, in the midst of internalizing this new dimension of death, I've been teaching Camilla how to fly fish.

Fly fishing really isn't as hard as most people assume. Of course it is hard to become a master, but it is not difficult to become competent. Of all my activities, though photography runs a close second, fly fishing makes me feel most alive - most aware of the raw present. Norman Maclean puts it this in A River Runs Through It:

"Poets talk about 'spots of time,' but it is really fishermen who experience eternity compressed into a moment. No one can tell what a spot of time is until suddenly the whole world is a fish and the fish is gone."

This is true.

And more than anything, this is why I fish. And it's more than just the lost or landed fish. Even when I catch nothing, every cast carries with it the anticipation of such a moment - a feeling for the imminence of eternity in a spot of time.

__________

The cast. Careful. Careful. The strike?

No.

The cast. Again. Careful. Let it drift.

No.

The cast. Careful.

Yes! There!

No. Gone. Missed it.

Is it still there?

The cast. Careful. Careful.

Yes! There! He's on!

__________

There is no past and no future in such an experience of reality. Each cast carries with it equal excitement, equal anticipation, equal opportunity for ecstasy or despair. Supported by art, skill, patience and discipline, fly fishing is the ultimate experience of the fabric of life.

Fly fishing is eudaimon.

Camilla is not quite ready for this, though. There is a rudimentary discipline that one has to establish first. A pattern. A habit. An effort. Then the grace comes in its fullness.

I watch her when she's practicing, though, and I think she senses it - senses the nearness of eternity even in her fumbling 20 foot casts. I can see it in her eye. And in the way she approaches a hole. I can see it in her finger on the line. I can see it when she forgets that it is me who is instructing her and thinks only of the instruction.

Two weeks from now she'll be there with the eternity in a moment. And perhaps that will be a source of healing - or at least of respite from her wounds.

She hasn't mentioned anything more about that Rilke poem, by the way, though we've had dinner together the last two evenings. I'm not sure what if anything I should say. Giving me the poem was clearly something. But was it an invitation to ask questions? Was it a confession? Was it an apologia? How would I ever know?

I think it's best when I don't try to know, or better yet, when I don't need to know.

But, like those 'spots of time' in fly fishing, such moments of contentment between two people, such comfort and delight in ignorance and pace, such willingness to allow one person to be the mystery that they are all come as grace - and a kind of grace for which I may not yet have disciplined myself.