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My Story as Told by Water: Confessions, Druidic Rants, Reflections, Bird-Watchings, Fish-Stalkings, Visions, Songs and Prayers Refracting Light, from Living Rivers, in the Age of the Industrial Dark
In this remarkable collection of essays, David James Duncan, award-winning author of The River Why, braids his contemplative, activist, and rhapsodic voices together into a potently distinctive whole, speaking with power and urgency about the vital connections between our water-filled bodies and this water-covered planet. The twenty-two essays in this collection swirl and eddy around the author's early-forged bond with the rivers of the Pacific Northwest and their endangered native salmon. With a bracing blend of story, logic, science, and humor, Duncan relates mystical, life-changing fishing adventures; draws incisive portraits of the humans and wild creatures who shaped his destiny; attacks the corporate greed and political folly that have brought whole ecosystems to ruin; and meditates on the spiritual and practical necessity of acknowledging our dependence on water in its primal state.… (meer)
This book was way better than I was expecting. As with many river writers I've run across, Duncan is definitely "male" in his metaphors, and if that bothers you you'll miss out on a good book. Sometimes his raving-to-the-point-people-stop-listening activist gets going, but you can skim past it. This book is a non-religiously affiliated (although aware of many religions) meditation on the tension between being a contemplative and an activist. Duncan tells stories of rivers losing, winning, and still at risk, in the fight against industrialism. He tells of the spiritual and human joy of fishing. And it just randomly gives you idea after idea to think about. Thought-provoking, meditative, at times horrifying, quite often beautiful. ( )
Esssays on the environment, in particular the trout streams of Montana and the Pacific Northwest. What makes this book memorable is the incandescent, extraordinarily moving prose -- the best writing I've encountered in a long time.
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Our eyes, it has been said, are the windows of our souls. Since the soul is not a literal object but a spiritual one, eyes cannot be the soul's literal windows. But they are, literally, openings into and out of living human beings. When our eyes are open, they become not one of our many walls but one of our very few doors. The mouth is another such door. Through it we inhale air that is not ownable, air that we share with every being on Earth. And out of our mouths we send words - our personal reshaping of that same communal air. Seeing, I have come to feel, is the same kind of process as speaking. Through our eyes we inhale light and images we cannot own - light and images shared with every being on earth. And out of our eyes we exhale a light or a darkness that is the spirit in which we perceive. This visual exhalation, this personal energizing and aiming of perception, is the eyes' speech. It is a shaping, it is something we make, as surely as words are a shaping of air. I feel responsible for my vision. My eyespeech changes the world. p 46
... as a child you eat, drink, and breathe a place in so deeply it becomes part of you for life...Anything that fills your heart the way a loved world does doesn't leave the heart ready for a quick refill. True home places are like true loves. I imagine a lucky individual could experience three or four such places. But the usual karmic dose, per lifetime, seems to be one, maybe two... a place .. is a somewhere that isn't going anywhere. So an experience of place can befall us only when we do the same. p 50
In relation to Earth's spectacular annual ticktock upon her axis, it is the so-called 'migratory' mammals and birds that travel thousands of miles north and south who maintain their true solar place, and every geological and biological form that fails to respond to Tilt - every mountain, for instance, and we who remain in them - that does the traveling. That the entire sedentary landscape migrates was never more clear to me than during my first Montana winter. p 58
I still remember Correct Answers of that era, long after having forgotten their corresponding questions: 'Coffee, bananas, hemp, cacao.' 'The Bill of Rights.' 'Be Am I Are Was Were Been.' I now refer to this kind of thing as Answerizing - an activity that stands in relationship to truly answering a question as the ability to memorize the phone book stands in relationship to the ability to love every preposterous flesh-and-blood concoction whose name the phone book happens to contain. Questions that tap into our mortality, our pain, our selfishness, our basic needs, questions that arise from the immeasurable darkness, light, or mystery of our lives, require more than Answerization. They require our suffering, steadfastness, silent yearning, and deepest faith. p 67
For all my love of rivers, "our nation's rivers" have not moved me once. The rivers that move me are those I've fished, canoed, slept beside, lived on , nearly drowned in, dreamed about, sipped tea and wine by, taught my kids to swim in, pulled a thousand fish from, fought and fought to defend. I've come to suspect, for this reason, that it is only the personal geography - the one experienced in daily depth - that can in fact be in-habited, and only the personal geography that has that Yeatsian ability to connect us, root to root, to people or places we've never met. pp 72-73
Wonder is like grace, in that it's not a condition we grasp; it grasps us... Unless wonder descends, unlocks us, turns us as slack-jawed as plastic shepherds, truth is unable to enter...wonder is unknowing, experienced as pleasure.... Punctuationally speaking, wonder is a period at the end of a sentence we've long taken for granted, suddenly looking up and seeing the sinuous curve of a tall black hat on its head, and realizing it was a question mark all along... Wonder is not curiousity. Wonder is to curiousity what ecstasy is to mere pleasure. Wonder is not astonishment, either. Astonishment it too brief. The only limit to the duration of wonder is the limit of our ability to remain open. pp 88-89
The Makuna maintain that humans, animals, plants, all of nature, are part of a great oneness. Our ancestors, they say, were magical fish who came ashore along the rivers and turned two-legged. As these first land beings began to conduct their lives, and to sing about it, everything in the world began to be created from their songs: hills and forests; animal and bird people; insect and fish people. But - the twist I love - this creation process is ongoing. The making of the world is no past-tense event, as Christian fundamentalists would have it. The world, say the Makuna, is still being created: our words, actions, and songs still determine the nature of the hills and forests, and still help create, sustain, or destroy the animal, fish, and bird people. p 105
So. What is 'spirit food' for us industrial/indigenous half-breeds? What is a modern-day spirit offering? I'd say that now, as ever, it is anything we truly value. Our energy, our focus, the hours of our days. Anything we respect so much that, as we pour it out on the finned, feathered, and four-legged peoples' behalf, we kind of hate to see it go... Prayers and mantras from the mystics. Money, time, and trouble from the capitalists and activists. Unflinching accuracy, no matter the political climate, from the scientists. Stories from people like me. The big blockade to change is lack of passion. And the birth-house of passion is the heart. a spirit offering, then, is anything we can offer with a whole heart - any song, dance, phone call, plea, letter, insight, gift, or prayer that helps determine the way we, and other humans, continue to create our world, rivers, hills, and forests. p 107
The people who work for, invest in, and rely upon multinational corporations (nearly all of us) try to maintain that corporations are 'just people.' But this is just not so. By dictionary definition and under authority of law, a corporation has 'a continuous existence independent of the existences of its [human] members, ' and possesses 'powers distinct from those of its members.' This existence is real, this power vast. yet the legal owner of the power does not eat, drink or breathe, hence has no particular allegiance to pure food, clean water, clean air. It possesses no beating heart or soul, hence fears no God and suffers no karmic consequences for its actions in any kind of Hearafter....Far from being influenced by the humanity of its employees the typical corporation prevents employees from expressing their full humanity, their long-term vision, their thrift, their compassion, their respect for the natural world - except as required by law, which the corporation of course sculpts relentlessly to serve its own inhuman needs. pp 170-171
strategic withdrawal: any act you can devise, any psycho-spiritual act at all, that embodies a willingness to wait for the world to disclose itself to you, rather than to disclose yourself, your altruism, your creativity, skills, energy, ideas and (let's face it) agenda, myopia, preconceptions, delusions, addictions, and inappropriate trajectories to this world. p 223
[on the concept of fishing guides] We are a nation plagued with self-appointed experts, pundits, middlepersons. Away with them! Dare to be the bumbling hero of your very own fish story! Chop your psyche in half, make a guru/disciple relationship out of it, seat your humble self at the feet of your sagacious self. Read like a fiend; practice like a fool; find the best possible river on the best possible map; read about it; explore it; stick your body in it; cast into it. If you fall in, get out, If you hook yourself, unhook yourself. Make mistakes! It doesn't matter! Make a half-drowned, half-thrashed rat of yourself. Forgive yourself. Regroup. Do it all over again. And at the end of the day, pay yourself. Charge and arm and a leg. Leave yourself huge tips. p 236
In this remarkable collection of essays, David James Duncan, award-winning author of The River Why, braids his contemplative, activist, and rhapsodic voices together into a potently distinctive whole, speaking with power and urgency about the vital connections between our water-filled bodies and this water-covered planet. The twenty-two essays in this collection swirl and eddy around the author's early-forged bond with the rivers of the Pacific Northwest and their endangered native salmon. With a bracing blend of story, logic, science, and humor, Duncan relates mystical, life-changing fishing adventures; draws incisive portraits of the humans and wild creatures who shaped his destiny; attacks the corporate greed and political folly that have brought whole ecosystems to ruin; and meditates on the spiritual and practical necessity of acknowledging our dependence on water in its primal state.
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