Water is H2O, hydrogen two parts, oxygen one, but there is also a third thing that makes water,
and nobody knows what that is.
–D. H. Lawrence
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Take almost any path you please, and ten to one
it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there
by a pool in the stream.
There is magic in it.
Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged
in his deepest reveries--stand that man on his legs,
set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you
to water, if water there be in all that region.
Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert,
try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied
with a metaphysical professor.
Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water
are wedded forever.
—Herman Melville
Moby Dick, 1851
.
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Have you also learned that secret from the river;
that there is no such thing as time?
That the river is everywhere at the same time,
at the source and at the mouth,
at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the current,
in the ocean and in the mountains,
everywhere
and that the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past nor the shadow of the future.
—Herman Hesse
from "Siddhartha
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There is a place you can go
where you are quiet,
a place of water and the light
on the water. Trees are there,
leaves, and the light
on leaves moved by air.
Birds, singing, move
among leaves, in leaf shadow.
After many years you have come
to no thought of these,
but they are themselves
your thoughts. There seems to be
little to say, less and less.
Here they are. Here you are.
Here as though gone.
None of us stays, but in the hush
where each leaf in the speech
of leaves is a sufficient syllable
the passing light finds out
surpassing freedom of its way.
—Wendell Berry
Sabbaths, VII, excerpt
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A story is like the water
you heat for your bath.
It takes messages between the fire
and your skin. It lets them meet,
and it cleans you!
Very few can sit down
in the middle of the fire itself
like a salamander or Abraham.
We need intermediaries.
A feeling of fullness comes,
but usually it takes some bread
to bring it.
Beauty surrounds us,
but usually we need to be walking
in a garden to know it.
The body itself is a screen
to shield and partially reveal
the light that's blazing
inside your presence.
Water, stories, the body,
all the things we do, are mediums
that hide and show what's hidden.
Study them,
and enjoy this being washed
with a secret we sometimes know,
and then not.
Rumi
Coleman Barks version
.
Nathan Bauman
.
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What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone,
in the forest, at night, cherished by this
wonderful, unintelligible,
perfectly innocent speech,
the most comforting speech in the world,
the talk that rain makes by itself all over the ridges,
and the talk of the watercourses everywhere in the hollows!
Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it.
It will talk as long as it wants, this rain.
As long as it talks I am going to listen.
—Thomas Merton
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