By Rev. Daniel Cooperrider
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.
To read the full article, click here
Photo by Samantha Deleo on Unsplash
By Rev. Daniel Cooperrider
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.
To read the full article, click here
Photo by Samantha Deleo on Unsplash