River Hypnosis

The dharma bum posted a nice fly-fishing piece on his blog today. Just reading it left me with river hypnosis, that mild vertigo-like feeling that you get after you've stared at running water for too long. I first experienced it on the rum river in the 90's, skipping spinnerbaits under overhanging trees for smallies from a jonboat. More recently experienced these past two summers an streams in southern MN doing a lot of what the dharma bum described (Especially the part where he 'Indiana-Jonesed' an overhanging branch on a back cast).

His ending point, where he was at the end of his excursion, at the end of his fly fishing for the summer - that we cannot take it with us - Is a universal experience that I think all lovers of the outdoors can personally relate with. In the end, we are just visitors and eventually we have to go home. But the feeling is not unique to fishing - Everyone goes through the same thing at some level whenever they awaken from a particularly nice dream or a meaningful song comes to an end. Fisherman (& their partners) come and go with the seasons, but the land and the stream remain, and the fish that was released or spooked today will be back at his rock tomorrow and life will go on.

I choose to be encouraged by that thought rather than disappointed by it. Allthough that was not always the case.

In my younger years I foolishly considered any time spent on the water (or out in nature in general) to be my own personal experiences, with a beginning to be anticipated and an end to be dreaded. I never realized that my time was just a brief interval in a much larger experience, one that started eons before I was born and will end long after I am dead.

In the end, an "experience" may be the only way that we can rationally describe our finite interactions with things timeless and vast. It's no easy task to shift one's perspective of thinking of an experience as being anything more a minute unit of measurement, describing something that is still going on even now, minutes, days or years later. It's no easy task but it does make for interesting writing.

Music and dreams - Along with any other inspiration to the human spirit - flow like streams in our minds, just as surely as nature goes on around us with or without our participation. The rocks, the silt, the weeds and the fish are all still there, even when our lives take us elsewhere. That's what staring at moving water for hours at a time has taught me.

Bring on ice hole hypnosis!