From Fly Fusion Magazine
The Meaning of Water
The Ancient Mayan hieroglyph for ‘conjure’ is a symbol of a hand grasping a fish. It is a figurative manifestation of how even today, as a fly fisher peering into a deep, impenetrable pool, I look for meaning. Any sign, that I, with my magical 4-weight wand, slim leader and tippet, with bits of fur and feather, can raise a trout.
As fly fishers, the attraction to various incarnations of water is the reason we fish in the first place. Sure deceiving a trout with an artificial fly is pretty satisfying too but the physical contact with a rushing stream, the cool amorphous tug on your soul, its sounds, smells and very fluidity is profoundly affecting.
To fish it effectively, a fly fisher must learn its whims and nuances, cryptic dialect, and subtle tones, not only to enhance their chances of catching more fish but to perhaps come one step closer to grasping the ungraspable phantom of life, the meaning of water.
In every culture throughout history water and its many forms has been infused with mystery both benign and malevolent. It manifests itself in the destructive form of floods, deluges, and storms of rain, snow, sleet and hail not to mention icebergs, avalanches, treacherous slopes, and the many and varied effective mediums of torture.
Yet it is also the life giving, restorative, and precious commodity required for survival. For some, water in its holiest form washes away well-earned sins ensuring a fly fisher’s final cast will land him or her on a paradisiacal stream in the hereafter.
The earliest Greek philosophers recognized water as the life force that sustains all things. Thales of Miletus said that the world was like a log floating on an endless river and water - the element that connects all life. Anaximander theorized that people evolved from fish which presumably lived in water, a theory I would prefer to Darwin’s ape and would explain why I still have a hard time dispatching one of my piscatorial brethren for the dinner table.
Water is both simple and complex, a great paradox. Looking at it in a glass, it is, in its purest form, clear, odorless, two parts hydrogen to one part oxygen. But translated onto a vast landscape flowing from some distant mountain lake or glacier, water takes on life and supports a myriad of complex organisms from the frailest micro-organism to the largest mammal, not to mention the numerous, often elusive trout we constantly try to conjure.
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