Setting aside friendship for a moment, the deeply profound experiences of my life have all had something to do with water. These range from long wilderness canoe trips to whitewater kayaking to painting with watercolor, which is a creative collaboration with water.

In paddling wild rivers, I learned that the power of the river is immense, and our power insignificant. Similarly, the Tao tells us that the energies of the universe, driven by the forces of yin and yang, are greater than we are. And much like the positive and negative energies of electricity, without both, without light and dark, female and male, neither could exist. To survive long term as a species, we must accommodate ourselves to those energy flows rather than fight them.

In paddling a rapid, we seek to move with its flow rather than against it, to execute our strokes at points of maximum impact, and to not use a hard stroke when a light one will do. And sometimes, when the water moves faster than we can think, to execute our strokes with intuition.

Chuang-tzu, a fourth-century B.C. Taoist sage, wrote of an old man who somehow survived a swim in a huge rapid. Upon asking the man how he survived, the man responded:

Plunging into the whirl, I come out with the swirl. I accommodate myself to the water, not the water to me. And so I am able to deal with it after this fashion...I was born upon the land...and accommodated myself to dry land. That was my original condition. Growing up with the water, I accommodate myself to the water.

Experiences with water led to my book Wild Waters And The Tao, (now out of print and generally unavailable), which combined ancient Chinese hermit poetry with my own writing and art. The solitude of Taoist monks, their lives in nature, lives of extreme simplicity and quiet, were the basis of their sparse, penetrating poetry. They tried to put into words that which can’t be put into words. They wrote about “soundless music.”

The settling of the mind, the letting go of the turmoil, is akin to the settling of muddy water.

Water is the source of creation, the ancestor of all living things. It's the bloodstream of the Earth.
- Kuan-Tzu (645 BC Prime Minister of the state of Chi'i)

Of all the elements, the sage should take water as the preceptor
Water is yielding but all-conquering.
Water extinguishes Fire, or finding itself likely to be defeated, escapes as steam and reforms.
Water washes away soft Earth, or when confronted with rocks, seeks a way around.
Water corrodes Iron till it crumbles to dust, it saturates the atmosphere so that Wind dies.
Water gives way to obstacles with deceptive humility, for no power can prevent it following its destined course to the sea.
Water conquers by yielding, it never attacks but always wins the last battle.
The sage who acts as water, is distinguished by humility, embraces passivity, acts from non-action, and conquers the world.
- Tao Cheng of Nan Yeo, 11th century Taoist scholar

We can alter the course and shape of water, but we can't alter its basic nature to descend, by means of which it overcomes the hardest and strongest things.
- Chu Ti-Huang (1885-1941) 

The nature of water is to stay low, to not struggle, and to take on the shape of its container. Thus, nothing is weaker. Yet despite such weakness it can bore through rocks. Rocks, however, cannot wear down water.
- Hsuan-Tsung (685-762, Chinese emperor, poet and calligrapher, Taoist and Zen scholar)

We can alter the course and shape of water, but we can't alter its basic nature to descend, by means of which it overcomes the hardest and strongest things.
- Chu Ti-Huang (1885-1941, Ch'ing Dynasty official and early revolutionary, student of Buddhism and philosophy)

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