We’re visiting a new fishing spot, Anglers of Fishing Clash, a serene location in Taiwan, where we’ll cast our lines to the river’s current in hope of a greater catch. In today’s read, we’ll continue exploring the themes of water, begun when first visiting Hokkaido and widened in our six lessons learned through the art of fishing. We’ll go deeper, as Anglers always do, but cast our attention elsewhere, into the depths of Taiwanese rivers and language itself, to find something that resonates with us all. After all, water is the grand unifier in the world we live in.

The rivers of Taiwan

While not as widely mythologized as the sea, rivers in Taiwan carry their own spiritual weight, especially within indigenous cultures. The island is home to more than a dozen officially recognized indigenous peoples, each with their own oral histories, cosmologies, and ancestral landscapes. For many of these groups, like the Atayal, Bunun, and Amis, rivers are not just geographic features. They are boundaries between worlds, veins of memory, homes of spirits, and routes of origin, they are ancestral archives. They remember. Some stories speak of origins by specific rivers, others of separation: the story of a people who crossed a river and became something new. In this way, rivers don’t just mark space. They mark transformation. And to cross a river can mean to enter a new self, a new phase of life, a new world entirely.

Among the Amis people, the concept of malataw, a word that describes walking or returning along river paths, carries spiritual weight. It’s not simply a movement through terrain but a return to roots, to language, to story. To walk along a river isn’t just an act of travel. It’s an act of remembering. This isn’t unique to Taiwan, of course, many indigenous cultures worldwide view rivers as carriers of memory, but in a place so compact and vertical, the metaphor feels especially tactile. You can follow the same river from a glacial source in the central mountains all the way down to a mangrove-lined delta. You can walk from silence into song.

Rivers, too, are often gendered in indigenous Taiwanese cosmology – not in the binary sense of male and female, but as expressions of energy. Some are described as elder brothers, guiding the way but flowing with assertiveness; others as mothering presences, offering nourishment and calm. In some Bunun villages, elders speak of rivers as beings with preferences: some like noise, others quiet. Some accept bathing, others only observation. These are subtle, relational perspectives, built not on dominion over nature but on coexistence with its personality.

The fluidity of language

Water, however, does more than fill our oceans and rivers. It fills our speech. Our breath. Our stories. Even our bodies are composed of it, shaped by it, flowing with it. We are, quite literally, beings of water – born in it, moved by it, sustained by it. And our language, across time and tongue, reflects that profound intimacy. We speak of people as “deep” or “shallow,” of thoughts that must “settle,” of emotions that “well up,” of “waves” of grief or “floods” of joy. We are “drenched” in sorrow, “soaked” in love, “washed” in relief. An idea might “ebb and flow.” A relationship might “drift apart.” The past can “pool” in memory. Hope can “trickle in.” Trauma can become a “dam,” blocking the current of our becoming. These aren’t just some accidents of speech. They’re ancient echoes of wisdom, seeping through language.

Water, unlike earth or stone, always moves. And in its movement, it resembles experience. Thoughts pass. Feelings rise. Everything inside us, no matter how heavy or light, behaves like water: changing state, shifting form, seeking shape, often overflowing the container of words itself. So we reach for metaphor, and the metaphor is almost always wet. Even the most elusive human qualities, those that resist measure or pinning down, often find their voice in the language of flow. Time, for example, becomes a river. In Greek, Chronos marches forward, but Kairos, the opportune moment, bubbles up like a spring. In English, we say “time flows.” We “lose time,” as though it spilled. We are “carried away” by the hours. In this, we reveal something true: that we don’t merely exist in time, we feel it, like a current tugging at our ankles.

Consciousness, too, is watery. William James famously described the mind as a “stream of consciousness.” Not a stack of thoughts. Not a tower. A stream. Unfolding, turning, continuous. Neuroscience might scan the brain in terms of synapses and circuits, but the lived experience of awareness is much closer to drift than to structure. We don’t think in steps; we flow. Even healing, that quiet, internal transformation, is often imagined as a thawing, a release, a cleansing. Tears are perhaps our most intimate proof: sorrow and relief, grief and joy, all emerge in water. To weep is to let something go that words can’t hold. And when we comfort each other, we often speak as rivers do: gently, slowly, with rhythm. We soothe. We don’t carve like chisels, we erode, slowly softening what was once rigid.

This is the wisdom of water: it doesn’t resist hardness, it wears it down. Not with force, but with presence.

Language knows this. Myth knows this. And deep down, we know it, too.

In Zen, the image of the stream appears again and again. A monk watches a leaf float down the river and finds enlightenment. A student is told to “be like water” – not clinging, not striving, simply present. In Taoist thought, water is the highest good, precisely because it takes the lowest places, because it yields, because it flows around obstacles rather than through them. “Nothing in the world is as soft and yielding as water,” says the Tao Te Ching, “yet for dissolving the hard and inflexible, nothing can surpass it.”

Even in resistance, water teaches. A flood may come not to destroy, but to cleanse. To wash away the sediment of old beliefs. To force us to rebuild with better foundations. And in silence, too, water speaks. A still lake mirrors the world. It shows us what is. It reflects back, but does not impose. It asks only that we look. And perhaps this is why so many people, across history, have gone to sit by rivers or lakes when they need to remember something vital. Something lost in noise. Water offers stillness not as absence, but as depth.
There’s something quietly radical in that.

In a world that urges us to be solid, defined, productive, upright, water reminds us of a different form of power. To flow. To bend. To seep in through the cracks. To nourish invisibly. To carry memory not in shelves, but in movement. To live not as a monument, but as a current. So when language turns liquid, it’s not a flourish. It’s a homecoming.

Our final drop

Thus, as we cast our lines into Taiwan’s flowing river, we’re invited into something greater. We enter a living conversation – with landscape, with memory, with the quiet wisdom that water carries across cultures and time. These rivers do not merely run through mountains, they run through us. They remind us that to fish is to feel, to wait is to listen, and to follow the current is to remember we are already part of something vast. In every ripple, we meet the ancient truth: that to flow is to be alive. And in this shared flow, we are never alone.