Photograph by Samantha Deleo via Unsplash

“I do not feel truly at ease on this earth unless there’s a river nearby.” – Olivia Laing, To the River

Once the spring foraging season starts winding down, my thoughts take a riparian turn, and rivers, and especially the spring-fed streams where trout live, call me to their tangled banks. Just before I make it streamside, visiting a local trout creek in the driftless area west of Madison, WI. I park in the grassy pull-off of the public fishing easement and step into a landscape layered with cadences of aliveness. Early-summer cumulus scroll with the northwest wind. The trees, the burr oaks in the prairie and the cottonwoods and willows along the stream, move with the wind in their rooted, swaying way, ten thousand shades of green whirling around a trunk centrifuge. I walk to the bridge to greet the river and its pace, a movement that seems steadier than the wind, telling in its rush the story of yesterday’s rain, and today’s sun, and the choir of praise that includes the subsurface and banked landscape features of gravel beds, fieldstones, river rocks, downed trees, sandy bends, ripple, eddy, and foam-seamed runs. Swallows zip under the bridge and overhead. Trout dagger under bank cover as my shadow falls on their flowing world. Song sparrows, red-winged blackbirds, yellow warblers, and cedar waxwings add the tempo of their wingbeats and the runs of their sky lyrics.

Why does God inspirit and incarnate such a beautiful world? One theory—I’ll call it the gospel of desire—holds that beauty attracts us in order to teach us. The world’s beauty is the great instructor, and our appreciation of beauty, and our readiness to become smitten with it, is the schooling of our lifetime. This has been my experience with rivers and with cultivating river practices generally, and especially with my engagement with fly fishing as a spiritual practice. Trout, for example, are not only beautiful, with their smooth, unscaled amphibian-like skin canvased with “rose-moles all in stipple” (as Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote in “Pied Beauty”), but they tend to live in beautiful landscapes as well. Beautiful, however, doesn’t always mean easy and idyllic, as trout fishing, and especially fly fishing, also teaches. With yesterday’s rain the stream is a bit tea-stained, meaning I’ll need to go with a subsurface option on my line, my go-to being a dry-dropper setup, which tends to work well for catching fish, but, with today’s wind, will fate me to a few bird’s nest wind-knots and impossible tangles. Untangling and re-tying are the fly-fishing equivalents of confession and repentance, and the chance to begin again with a freshly tied fly is the passing of the peace. “All good things,” as Norman Maclean in A River Runs Through It writes of his minister father’s theology of fly fishing and all other spiritual matters, “come by grace and grace comes by art and art does not come easy.”[i]

The bright sun today means my shadow and the shadow of my line will be quick to spook the fish. A bald eagle surveying the stream in the near-distance teaches me as much: that while we two-leggeds might struggle to apprehend the world under the water, the trout are exquisitely adept at reading the world and its happenings overhead, as the eagles are at reading beneath the surface. To get in position to make my first cast I’ll need to chart a course through the lush prairie. While the corn planted by farmers in the nearby fields is only ankle-high, the wild grass by the stream is already head-high, and cow-parsnip and purplestem angelica tower at a basketball hoop’s height above me. Stinging nettle lurks in the understory of goldenrod and milkweed, as does the heady smell of bergamot and wild mint muddled underfoot. Bumblebees, damselflies, and monarch butterflies wing their course from clover to lupine, wild iris to daisy. “Wherever the river goes,” as the prophet Ezekiel puts it in his vision of the river at the end of time, “every living creature that swarms will live” (Ezekiel 47:9). Entering, even briefly, into this fluvial community of beauty and bumbling desire teaches me that landscape is not a setting, but a geo-choreography of kinship and a consanguinity. Landscape is not the context or setting or even the place for the happening of life, but the happening of life itself through the sustained relationships, repeated dance moves, and momentary, impromptu encounters of life with life.

In calling me to place my steps through the prairie, and along the banks, and eventually wading into the stream itself, fly fishing as a spiritual practice calls me into a more ecstatically blended union with the river-world. Each step, each noticing, and each thought becomes a call-and-response between landscapes inner and outer, each fly tied on the end of the tippet is a wondering and a hypothesis, each cast is a quest and a question, each drift a hope that a fish might rise. The next bend beckons as a poem of particular place waiting and wanting to be read. Wading becomes a way of reading oneself into the river, and reading the river becomes a way of wading back into rapt presence to life, that stream of experience I most long to be living in. River opens and decants me into its all-confluencing flow. Muddled bergamot muddles me into the mix of all this fluvial, fluid, rippling sensuousness. 

Henry David Thoreau wrote on September 5, 1838, “For the first time it occurred to me this afternoon what a piece of wonder a river is – A huge volume of matter ceaselessly rolling through the fields and meadows of this substantial earth making haste from the high places…”

River is the breathing, mouth-like, gill-like spring at the oak-base of the hill. River is the washed-out gully that basins rain and ushers snowmelt down the mountainside. River is source and origin, the past and the deep past. River is estuary and delta, emptying into that which is greater than itself. River is future, and ultimate future, as the Bible intuits with “the river of the water of life” in Revelation’s vision of the end times (reflecting Ezekiel’s earlier vision). River is the small stream midway through its course where I step in it today to fish, with its tall grass and stippled trout. River is waterfall and rapids, oxbows and eddies. River is this step and this cast and this birdsong and this first sting of nettle. River is lake, as the Yahara River costumes itself as the Four Lakes, Teejop in the original Ho-Chunk naming, of Madison, WI where I live now. River is now, but a now, a present that is also a past and a future.

Edmund Husserl, one of the originary thinkers of the philosophical style or flavor of phenomenology, the study of that which appears, pointed to music to illuminate time and time’s flow. When we listen to music, we don’t hear a jumble of inchoate, unconnected sounds, such as they might appear abstractly on the page as notations. We hear melody. We hear mood and movement and at times, transcendence, lament, and ecstasy. So too we don’t encounter a random scattering of water molecules, but we step into a river. We never know a completely disconnected past, nor an absolutely impossible future, but we know time as a conversation of past, present, and future, and river is that conversation, that flow and unfolding, that churning and eddying of time, that continuous confluence of what St. Augustine described as time’s threefold, braided way of showing itself to us—as the past that is present, as the present that is present, and as the future that is present.

My almost four decades now of engaging fly fishing as a spiritual practice—including, in different seasons of life and of the year, other river practices such as canoeing, kayaking, what’s known in the UK as “wild swimming,” and reading/thinking/picnicking/meditating streamside—have taught me that river and cultivating relationality with river as a sacred locus of encounter is among the most potent ways I know of encountering flow state, and of experiencing blended merging with occurrence.

I think and feel as much as I move upstream today towards clearer waters, and fish with dry fly only, a generic stimulator as there is no discernible hatch happening today. But with just one fly on my tippet, and with incoming cloud cover, I have much more control over where and how my fly drops. It’s not more than a couple of bends before two 12-14″ brown trout are in my creel, dispatched as best as I know how, with a solid knock upon the head. Mine seems to be a contrarian position at the moment among fly-fishing persons who tend towards a catch-and-release ethic, but I fish to eat. I praise the river, and I honor the fish, by eating them. I don’t know any other way, if I am to enter their realm and disturb them in their glory. When I catch enough for my family’s dinner, I stop fishing, and I sit there, on the riverbank, and that is about as close as I come to being in my flow, and in my glory.

When I try to follow it as long as I can downstream, my schooling in river beauty and river wisdom leads me to this hope and prayer: let us then, like the salmon leaping against the current and over the ledge, leap finally beyond the metaphor and the simile when it comes to our embodied consciousness of nature. Let us elide the metaphor. Let us cross out the word “like” from our relationship with the world, as “like” and metaphor have for too long posed as steady, inevitable bridges separating the us of humans from the them of the natural world.

Time is not like a river. A river is not a metaphor for the journey of a life. Consciousness is not like a stream. River is time, and time is river. Time is a rivering, riverine thing. We, who are mostly water ourselves, are aqueous in our being and thinking, hydraulically seamed and synced to the river of this planet.

We are the landscape. The landscape is rivered. The river is us. The stream of consciousness is not just a metaphor for our particularly human-inflected style of sentience, but the material, organic, and actual condition of thinking and being.

The stream of consciousness is not how our minds work. It’s how life works. Consciousness streams because life streams.

Everything will live where the river goes.