“Water is versatile. It can be big and powerful, it can quench thirst, it can be healing, it can drown us. It finds its own level, always. That is, water is always seeking balance and has a place it has to go. It can be scarce, it is necessary. We’re utterly, devastatingly dependent on it. It’s beautiful and tragic and it feeds us sometimes. When w

Rivers,” Publilius Syrus reminds us with an epigram, “are easiest to cross at their source.” That’s what Seneca means too. The raging waters and deadly currents of bad habits, ill discipline, chaos, and dysfunction—somewhere they began as no more than just a slight trickle. Somewhere they are a placid lake or pond, even a bubbling underground sprin

Since all change is violent she will be violent. But the marvelous quality of Nature-violence, unlike ego-violence, is that it does not spring from intolerance and self-hatred. So there is no anger in the rainstorm that carries everything before it, or the fish that devour their young in obedience to ecological laws we know not, or body cells when

Rivers,” Publilius Syrus reminds us with an epigram, “are easiest to cross at their source.”

Life is a stream: an ongoing conversation of nature with itself, contradictory and opinionated and dangerous. And the stream is made up of births and deaths, of things that come into existence and pass away. But there is always life, and things feeding on life.