Being or Seeking?

Came across a quote by Friedrich Schiller that seems relevant to this site and its concerns:

"Poets will either be nature or they will seek lost nature."

I'm not turning poet, but I think a lot of people come to follow one or the other of these ways in their daily life and occupation. Fisherpeople certainly do. Fishing, with most other outdoor activities, is seen as a means of "getting back to nature," freeing onself from artificial and corrupting routines of industrial society (albeit in most cases with the aid of mass produced and intensively marketed implements). I'll admit that I occasionally indulge those kind of sentiments, anticipating fishing trips as recoveries of a more authentic or more full mode of living, or at least as vantage points where I might glimpse the outline of such a life. On the other hand, fishing well sometimes gives the sense of "being nature": Thinking like a river predator, being attuned to the consequences of weather and light, distinguishing promising spots from sterile ones, reading the current in order to deliver a perfect presentation to a brown rising at the edge of an eddy.

Some people claim that fishing establishes a kind of order or rythmn that suffuses and balances their whole life. An academic who took up flyfishing in midlife told me that he became a better writer and teacher afterward. Maybe that's an example of "being nature," but I can't relate. When I get back from a weekend of fishing, it's hard for me to focus on my ordinary work for a couple of days. The poet Jim Harrison, who probably fits Schilling's first category as well as anyone, contends that life properly lived becomes like a river (quote inexact). It sounds appealing, but I'm not certain what that would look like. Most of the time, my life feels more like an impondment that's growing stagnant and may be irremediably contaminated.

Maybe the key word in Harrison's quote is "becoming." Perhaps "being nature" isn't something that arises from a flash of insight or determination to live a certain way, but an outcome from a long endeavor of mind and soul. Just as spectacular landscapes are the result of protracted geologic and climactic processes,and even of human inputs.

One thing I'm pretty sure of, though. "Seeking lost nature" is bound to be futile. You'll run in circles after something that never was. The illusory goal does seem attainable and near, though--we know what it will be and what it will do for us (we've been told so by thousands of books and TV commercials and travel brocures), which argues that there's something un-natural about it. Being nature probably begins with an openness to change. Where it ends is anybody's guess.

Just some cloudy thoughts befitting a cloudy Saturday.