The more experience a person has, the more simplicity is profound.
- Keith Jarrett, pianist

I come to this work from a varied background — forest firefighter in Canada’s subarctic, living in the bush with Dene and Cree, long wilderness canoe trips. As far as earning a living, I’ve been a commercial real estate salesman, stock broker, renovator of old houses, investigator for corporate acquirers on Wall Street, and now, for thirty years, a book author and artist.

Living in a cabin back in the woods, and on long wilderness trips, I’ve found a deep peace and harmony. It is difficult to describe in words other than the past doesn’t mean much, and the future less — you submerge into the present and the sense of being at one with the wilderness that surrounds. Those experiences, and my years as a whitewater kayaker, led me to the ancient Taoist poems and their authors — the Taoist hermits of the mountains of China and the Zen monks of Japan.

From my 2015 book, Wild Waters and the Tao (sold out, new edition underway):

In paddling wild rivers, we quickly learn 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. We must accommodate ourselves to the energy flows rather than fight them.

In rapids, we seek to move with the current rather than against it, to execute our strokes at points of maximum impact, to never use a hard stroke when a light one will do. And sometimes, when the water moves faster than we can think, to execute strokes intuitively.

Chuang-tzu, a fourth-century B.C. Taoist sage, wrote of an old man who fell into a huge rapid and survived. He described the experience this way:

"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.”