The Flyfish Journal - The Flyfish Journal 14.4
ON LIGHT
Words: Jason Rolfe 2023-06-16 10:10:27
A view from the bow of a Bahamian skiff, leader in hand, fly line waving in the wind. Keep your eyesight sharp, communication skills tuned and always be ready to cast—bonefish could be coming at you at any moment. Photo: Copi Vojta
On the best days, a flat is all light. Where shadow exists—in the mirage-like shimmer of eel grass, behind a coral head, below a passing cloud—it seems more a function of light than a result of negative space, which in the end may amount to the same thing. That light invites us into a liminal space, full of potential, a sort of threshold beyond which lies everything.
Part of this is the nowness of it all. In meditation, one method for situating oneself in the present is to observe light and shadow. You find light, and bring your awareness to the fact that the light is of that moment and that moment alone. You find shadow and observe the same. A glass of water sitting on a table exists in the past and, unless one picks it up and drinks from it, in the future as well. The shadow thrown by that glass, and the light refracting through the liquid, are transitory things. They change from one moment to the next. Heraclitus said we can’t stand in the same river twice—neither can we stand in the same sunlight. To be aware of the light and the shadow is to be aware of the present moment.
There’s a loneliness to the time spent standing on the bow of a skiff, but it’s a delicious sort of thing. No matter that there is a guide, sun-shirted, maybe smoking, extolling in hushed tones six or seven feet sternward, calmly poling in a circle around a key the size of a grocery store. Even with a fishing partner sitting on the cooler in front of the console, one is still so singularly by oneself. This is not an implication of absence or a derogation. Perhaps loneliness isn’t quite the right word for it. Aloneness seems more apt.
The best lessons come without our realizing we’re tutees. Life doesn’t usually leave much time for contemplating how to breathe, how to stand, how to sit, how to walk, how to hold our head, how to see. But with all that light, the world expanding and collapsing in the space taken up by a little fly, you realize the flats have been teaching you a thing or two all along. Some of the best breaths you’ll ever take rise and fall between one push of the pole and the next. Siddhartha would have been one hell of a permit angler.
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ON LIGHT
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