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Lao-tzu
and the Taoists often use water as an analogy for spirit. "Water is fluid,
soft, and yielding. But water will wear away rock, which is rigid and
cannot yield. As a rule, whatever is fluid, soft, and yielding will
overcome whatever is rigid and hard. This is another paradox: what is soft
is strong." Water, like spirit, is also beautiful, essential, cleansing,
creative and destructive. Water, like spirit, can purify, reflect,
nourish, restore and renew. Water, like spirit, can change form, can be
solid or liquid, can stream or stream or evaporate or freeze or pool up or
flow freely.
The beauty of water as a source of spirit is that it's available to all of
us, whether we connect with it as it falls in the form of rain, or as we
visit it embodied in a river, lake, ocean, sea or stream, or as we drink
it down into our bodies or surround ourselves with it in our baths.
Regardless of its form, we can recognize with Loren Eisley, "If there is
magic on the planet, it is contained in the water." |
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The essence and preserver of life, the primordial fluid on which birth and
growth depend, water has always been recognized as sacral. It has long
been used to purify, to energize, to heal, and to consecrate.
--Peg Streep
The many waters I've known as part of my own personal world--rivers,
streams, and lakes--have taught me, shaped me, and given me a sense of
values. They have extended the process of transformation that began the
day I was baptized, when a trickle of water flowed over the crown of my
head and down its side, initiating me out of sheer physical existence into
a life of alchemical, elemental, and religious change. Religion knows
something of the mystery by which we become more human through our
acquaintance with water.
--Thomas Moore
If you gave me several million years, there would be nothing that did not
grow in beauty if it were surrounded by water.
--Jan Erik Vold
Water, thou hast no taste, no color, no odor; canst not be defined, art
relished while ever mysterious. Not necessary to life, but rather life
itself, thou fillest us with a gratification that exceeds the delight of
the senses.
--Antoine de Saint-Exupery
When time comes for us to again rejoin the infinite stream of water
flowing to and from the great timeless ocean, our little droplet of
soulful water will once again flow with the endless stream.
--William E. Marks
Water is the driver of Nature.
--Leonardo da Vinci
Everywhere water is a thing of beauty gleaming in the dewdrop, singing in
the summer rain.
--John Ballantine Gough
Water sustains all.
--Thales of Miletus
By means of water, we give life to everything.
--The Koran, 21:30
Water is the formless potential out of which creation emerged. It is the
ocean of unconsciousness enveloping the islands of consciousness. Water
bathes us at birth and again at death, and in between it washes away sin.
It is by turns the elixir of life or the renewing rain or the devastating
flood.
--Scott Russell Sanders
We call upon the waters that rim the earth,
horizon to horizon, that flow in our rivers and streams,
that fall upon our gardens and fields,
and we ask that they teach us
and show us the way.
--Chinook Indian Blessing
We forget that the water cycle and the life cycle are one.
--Jacques Cousteau
When you put your hand in a flowing stream, you touch the last that has
gone before and the first of what is still to come.
--Leonardo da Vinci
Water is also one of the four elements, the most beautiful of God's
creations. It is both wet and cold, heavy, and with a tendency to descend,
and flows with great readiness. It is this the Holy Scripture has in view
when it says, "And the darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the
Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters." Water, then, is the most
beautiful element and rich in usefulness, and purifies from all filth, and
not only from the filth of the body but from that of the soul, if it
should have received the grace of the Spirit.
--John of Damascus
A man of wisdom delights in water.
--Confucius
Here are your waters and your watering place. Drink and be whole again
beyond confusion.
--Robert Frost
RAIN
How beautiful is the rain!
After the dust and the heat,
In the broad and fiery street,
In the narrow lane,
How beautiful is the rain!
--Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Living creatures are nourished by food, and food is nourished by rain;
rain itself is the water of life, which comes from selfless worship and
service.
--Bhagavad Gita
Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth; without rain,
there would be no life.
--John Updike
Every dewdrop and raindrop had a whole heaven within it.
--Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Let the rain kiss you.
Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops.
Let the rain sing you a lullaby.
--Langston Hughes
I loved the rain as a child. I loved the sound of it on the leaves of
trees and roofs and
windowpanes and umbrellas and the feel of it on my face and bare legs. I
loved the hiss of rubber tires on rainy streets and the flip-flop of
windshield wipers. I loved the smell of wet grass and raincoats and shaggy
coats of dogs. A rainy day was a special day for me in a sense that no
other kind of day was-a day when the ordinariness of things was suspended
with ragged skies drifting to the color of pearl and dark streets turning
to dark rivers of reflected light and even people transformed somehow as
the rain drew them closer by giving them something to think about
together, to take common shelter from, to complain of and joke about in
ways that made them more like friends than it seemed to me they were on
ordinary sunny days. But more than anything, I think, I loved rain for the
power it had to make indoors seem snugger and safer and a place to find
refuge in from everything outdoors that was un-home, unsafe. I loved rain
for making home seem home more deeply...
--Frederick Buechner
RIVERS
There's no music like a little river's ... It takes the mind out of doors
... and... sir, it quiets a man down like saying his prayers.
--Robert Louis Stevenson
We let a river shower its banks with a spirit that invades the people
living there, and we protect that river, knowing that without its
blessings the people have no source of soul.
--Thomas Moore
To trace the history of a river, or a raindrop, as John Muir would have
done, is also to trace the history of the soul, the history of the mind
descending and arising in the body.
In both we constantly seek and stumble on divinity, which, like the
cornice feeding the lake and the spring becoming a waterfall, feeds,
spills, falls, and feeds itself over and over again.
--Gretel Ehrlich
A river seems a magic thing. A magic, moving, living part of the very
earth itself.
--Laura Gilpin
I have never seen a river that I could not love. Moving water…has a
fascinating vitality. It has power and grace and associations. It has a
thousand colors and a thousand shapes, yet it follows laws so definite
that the tiniest streamlet is an exact replica of a great river.
--Roderick Haig-Brown
To live by a large river is to be kept in the heart of things.
--John Haines
I've known rivers; I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than
the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the
rivers.
--Langston Hughes
To put your hands in a river is to feel the chords that bind the earth
together.
--Barry Lopez
Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The
river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over from the basement
of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops -- under the rocks
are the words and some of the words are theirs.
--Norman Maclean
Many a time have I merely closed my eyes at the end of yet another
troublesome day and soaked my bruised psyche in wild water, rivers
remembered and rivers imagined. Rivers course through my dreams, rivers
cold and fast, rivers well-known and rivers nameless, rivers that seem
like ribbons of blue water twisting through wide valleys, narrow rivers
folded in layers of darkening shadows, rivers that have eroded down deep
into a mountain's belly, sculpted the land. Peeled back the planet's
history exposing the texture of time itself.
--Harry Middleton
Rivers are magnets for the imagination, for conscious pondering and
subconscious dreams, thrills and fears. People stare into the moving
water, captivated, as they are when gazing into a fire. What is it that
draws and holds us? The rivers' reflections of our lives and experiences
are endless. The water calls up our own ambitions of flowing with ease, of
navigating the unknown. Streams represent constant rebirth. The waters
flow in, forever new, yet forever the same; they complete a journey from
beginning to end, and then they embark on the journey again.
--Tim Palmer
The rivers are our brothers. They quench our thirst. They carry our canoes
and feed our children. You must give to the rivers the kindness you would
give to any brother.
--Chief Seattle
OCEAN AND SEA
The oceans are the planet's last great living wilderness, man's only
remaining frontier on earth, and perhaps his last chance to produce
himself a rational species.
--John L. Cullney
He that will learn to pray, let him go to sea.
--George Herbert
To me the sea is a continual miracle;
The fishes that swim--the rocks--the motion of the
waves--the ships, with men in them,
What stranger miracles are there?
--Walt Whitman
To me, the sea is like a person--like a child that I've known a long time.
It sounds crazy, I know, but when I swim in the sea I talk to it. I never
feel alone when I'm out there.
--Gertrude Ederle
The Greeks and others who imagined the ocean as divine were not beneath us
in sophistication, but ahead of us. If anything, we have lost the one
thing that would sustain our intimacy with nature--a religious sensitivity
to the sacredness of all forms in nature. The oceans are not only a
bountiful source of fish, transformation, and recreation; they are also
one of the supreme sources on the planet for contemplation and other
aspects of the spiritual life, but we could know this only if we were
deeply schooled in the n necessary virtue of reverence.
--Thomas Moore
My soul is full of longing
For the secret of the Sea,
And the heart of the great ocean
Sends a thrilling pulse through me.
--Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I
deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about
the sea and leave out the poetry.
--Rachel Carson
Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him,
at some time or other crazy to go to sea? Why upon your first voyage as a
passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first
told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land? Why did the old
Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity,
and own brother of Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning. And still
deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not
grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it
and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and
oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is
the key to it all.
--Herman Melville
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