From the Salmon

David James Duncan has a short meditation in the latest issue of Orion.

Here’s an excerpt:

On big Montana trout rivers, you often see fly fishers trying to do great things by fishing heroically, making great long casts out into the giant flow as if they’re thinking Operation Infinite Trout! But we can do no great things. So those of us who like to actually catch trout scarcely glance at the vast flow. Instead we parse the river, slicing off a tiny ribbon known as a feeding lane, where you target a single trout repeatedly rising. In huge western rivers, three or four hundred feet across, I’m talking about a ribbon six inches in width. Yet this ribbon, believe me, is where all the rising trout get hooked.

A fly-fisherly strategy for those who yearn to make a difference: Every morning, look for “ribbons.” One small thing you sense could be done with full-on attentiveness and love. And after you finish it, look for another. Ad infinitum.

I have no faith in any kind of political party, left, right, or centrist. I have boundless faith in love. In keeping with this faith, the only spiritually responsible way I know to be a citizen, artist, or activist is by giving little or no thought to things such as saving the planet, achieving world peace, or stopping neocon greed. Great things tend to be undoable things. Small things, lovingly done, are always within our reach.

Politics may be love’s opposite. Politics are about such great things that they somehow end up being about nothing. Politics, increasingly, are about winning elections at any cost, via the violent manipulation of human opinion. But no climate of mere opinion is earnest enough, or even embodied enough, to answer our biological and spiritual predicament from moment to moment in daily life.