I live next to flowing water. Tannery Brook is a small and temperamental tributary that channels what most would consider an insignificant contribution into the Great Lakes watershed. All water arises from its source of greatness, the ocean. To honor that is to understand one of the mysterious forces that is continuously at work in the world and the life of the world.

A Transcendent Force of Change and Renewal

Water ascends as a direct expression of our own desire for transcendence, to go forth and bring forth into the world something only water can — a life force. I observe, listen, and remember while this sliver of memory meanders as if energized by time and will alone, moving toward something that is both greater than itself and yet of itself. Water's intention is water's action, moving in, around, through, and throughout all it comes in contact with.

It's this mystery that holds an unseen wisdom. Every moment instructs and every object becomes our instructor, for wisdom is infused into all the forms water knows. We intuitively know the value of it and have tried to control what our ancestors understood as one of the four fundamental forces of creation. Water is a substance of cycle and destiny, moving on the wind as rivers of cloud cover and rain. Traveling over the earth and through the earth in the same way it moves throughout the body and the history of life on Earth. Water percolates in, bringing something and replacing something, and water diffuses out, leaving something and taking something, before moving on to other fateful rendezvous better left to faith than reason.