Moving Water

The other week on Speaking of Faith, Krista Tippett had an interview with author and artist James Prosek who has been interested in trout and fishing for years. In one segment they discussed standing in a stream while fishing. What I heard and where it took me was interesting.

Moving water- rivers, creeks, and streams- are in many ways alive. They move. They are definitely not static. You stand; the water moves. In essence you become a place in the stream, but not a part of the stream. It has its own life and movement.

The water- the eternity- moves around you and on its own way. Yes, chaos theory would say that you will have an impact on what the water does somewhere downstream. That butterfly in China changing the weather in Minnesota applies to you in the stream. We don't see what it is, of course. A few extra molecules of water entering the atmosphere where you are, an eddy or wave beginning to move around you are far beneath our ability to see or understand. That is the mystery and magic of moving water.

Like so much of the magic and mystery around us it remains out of sight and out of mind. One of the dangers of too much analysis or too much skepticism is to lose sight of mystery. When mystery has left our world, we will not long survive.

Naturally I don't mean mystery that can be explained or measured or observed. That is not mystery. Mystery lies behind those observations. Magic is what may bring them about in the first place. The origins of the universe remain locked behind mystery. Even when we can posit something like a Big Bang, there is still that prior moment- BB minus one nanosecond. As anti-spiritual as some have come to see the Big Bang, when it was first developed, it was seen as too mystical by many.

Let us be careful then not to lose the awareness of mystery. It gives us the unanswerable, the unseen, the uncertainty and allows us to enjoy its presence.

Just like that water in the stream tickling between my toes.