Angler's Mind

This seems to be spirituality week at FTR. Not that I planned that, but it's worked out that way. "The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. " Maybe next week will be Pro Wrestlers Who Flyfish. Anyway...

My wife and I have been taking a meditation course at a local Zen temple, looking for ideas to revitalize our own practice. Going there brought to mind an article I read a few years ago in the Buddhist magazine Tricycle about Zen flies. Apparently, fly fishing had quite a following among some of the Beat poets, and they tied some flies inspired by the Zen Buddhism they were also exploring. There were pictures of some of these in the article, which I may try to find and upload at some point. I can't recall them well enough to give a good description, but at the time they did strike me as incredibly artful, in a spare and minimalist way. Some even caught fish, I think.

The article is no longer available online, but I did find one revealing quote from it:

In San Francisco during the early fifties fly fishing was an important part of the Beat scene. Widespread interest in Buddhism and nature naturally led to Zen Flies. It was admittedly a passing phenomenon - as one angler-poet later explained in City Lights Review: "It got to where the perfect cast meant no cast. Eventually we just went swimming."

If that's the case, I'll happily remain unenlightened for now. Anyway, I think Nirvana is a blink-and-you'll-miss-it town outside Baldwin. I zip though it on the way to the Pere Marquette river (and some people seek it their whole lives!). When the rock band of that name gained celebrity in the early 90s, the town's sign disappeared, snatched up, I'd guess, by some poor sap who'd stop at nothing to honor his doomed heroes. There may be a lesson there about life as a circle of desire and suffering.

Tags: Fishing; Zen