(The following was originally written in March of 2012. I’m not sure if I ever published it).

Wild rivers and lakes are places of beauty and mystery, arteries of life and life energy. To be on a wilderness river, to hear that piercing call of an osprey through the early morning fog, or to see a great blue heron take off, to paddle through rapids and then through quiet water, to submerge one’s psyche in the river world, is to experience a new dimension in life. To really get to know a truly wild river, is to enlarge one’s concept of what life has to offer. Letting a wild river into my heart has allowed me to see life with a greater sense of gratitude.

Where I live in the Adirondacks, wild rivers meander between waterfalls, rapids and quiet pools, along the base of mountains, by farms and through forests. The canoeist encounters rock, rain and bugs, and paddles, as have thousands before over the thousands of years of human habitation in this area. Wild rivers have a destination — the Great Waters beyond — but they are also about cycles and rhythms that slowly evolve over millenniums. Paddling a wild river, you sense that something is going on, but you can’t put it into words. If you relax and listen, an awareness of something important—and profoundly nonhuman—creeps in.

The sound of the waters is audible to every ear, but there is other music in these hills, by no means audible to all. To hear even a few notes of it you must first live here for a long time, and you must know the speech of hills and rivers. Then on a still night, when the campfire is low and the Pleiades have climbed over rimrocks, sit quietly and listen for a wolf to howl, and think hard of everything you have seen and tried to understand. Then you may hear it – a vast pulsing harmony – its score inscribed on a thousand hills, its notes the lives and deaths of plants and animals, its rhythms spanning the seconds and the centuries.
- Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

Water is a mysterious substance. All life depends on water. In search of the ocean, water flows over and around waterfalls and rocks. Our lives, too, are on a kind of search, or can be if we open ourselves up to the current that underlies. Connected to that current, our work, our life, has power. It is easy to lose touch with that current. When I am connected, my life has a flow and amazing things happen. Help comes my way, I meet “fellow travelers,” people whose energy supports mine, and we both are enhanced. Doors open. Bills get paid. In a good month, I spend about a third of my time in that state of synchronicity.

All paths have their risks and their costs, and life in connection with the current that underlies your life does as well. You are going to smash up against some rocks. To flow with the current, you must let it dictate the pace. You need to be very careful about rushing, about pushing. To get in touch with that current, you need to make time for silence. You need to take time to listen. To live in connection with the current, you need to avoid complexity, live simply and to try to serve the profound experiences life sometimes offers — the experiences of beauty and power.

On a wild river, the profound experiences seem to happen in slow motion. Once, at 5:30 in the morning on the Oxbow River in Grand Teton National Park, a large flock of Canada geese flew in front of my canoe in formation a foot or two above the surface of the water. In the predawn light, the entire scene was composed of shades of blue grey—the birds, the water, the trees, the morning sky. It was as quiet as quiet can be. It was as if someone had turned off the sound. Slowly, the sky brightened, the sun rose and the world gained color. I was working on Wall Street, and knew that morning that some important things in my life had to change.

They continue to change. I’ve spent much of my life as an adventurer and as a seeker of new ideas, new people, new facts, new experiences, new ways of being in the world. I tell myself that I live this way because I’m fascinated by life, and there is some truth to that, but there are also more uncomfortable truths.

I am a nomad, not a farmer. I am an adorer of the unfaithful, the changing, the fantastic. . . . Good luck to the farmer! Good luck to the man who owns this place, the man who works it, the faithful, the virtuous! I can love him, I can revere him, I can envy him. But I have wasted half my life trying to live his life. I wanted to be something that I was not. I even wanted to be a poet and a middle-class person at the same time. I wanted to be an artist and a man of fantasy, but I also wanted to be a good man, a man at home. It all went on for a long time, till I knew that a man cannot be both and have both, that I am a nomad and not a farmer, a man who searches and not a man who keeps. A long time I castigated myself before God and laws which were only idols for me. That was what I did wrong, my anguish, my complicity in the world’s pain. I increased the world’s guilt and anguish, by doing violence to myself, by not daring to walk toward my own salvation. The way to salvation leads neither to the left nor the right: it leads into your own heart, and there alone is God, and there alone is peace.
- Hermann Hesse, Wandering

 Often I tried the frightening way of “reality,”
Where things that count are profession, law, fashion, finance,
But disillusioned and freed I fled away alone
To the other side, the place of dreams and blessed folly.
- Hermann Hesse, Wandering

To the other side, the place of dreams and blessed folly. The place where we encounter our interior world, our make-believe reality, which can be our true reality if we have the courage to go with our life current. And the discipline. Being who we could be requires self-discipline. I’ve read that self-discipline comes from self-love, and I’ve come to see the connection.

The seeker goes on a journey and embraces change and risk in order to learn about life. The seeker wants to know what it feels like to be really alive. Mistakes get made, and lessons get learned. Many of the big lessons are learned more than once. The world is what it is. Life increasingly becomes one of major change for minor gain. The seeker begins to turn inward for the answers. The search becomes more of a search for inner power, inner resourcefulness. The seeker begins to explore his or her inner world and imagination. You find a place of silence that somehow resonates profoundly with you, that feeds you.

Did you ever
stand and shiver
just from lookin’
at a river?
- Ramblin’ Jack Elliott

You can get close to the river, but it is wild. You can kiss it, but not possess it. You can touch the river, drink its liquid cold, paddle it, sit by it, feel renewed by it, but it has its reality, and you have yours. If you let it into your heart, it will touch you with its beauty and peace. It will nourish your life. It won’t, though, bend to your will. You travel it according to its terms.

Chuang-tzu, a fourth-century B.C. Taoist sage, is recorded as having told the story of an old man who fell into a terrible rapid and emerged safely downstream. When asked to explain his survival, the man replied,

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.

My river, the Boquet, is about sixty miles long, forty of which can be paddled, at least when the water is high. I used to paddle it at least once a week. There are several waterfalls along its course and several miles of rapids. There is an art to paddling this river. I keep working on it.

Sometimes I’m nervous when I stand on the bank of the river looking downstream. No matter how many times I’ve paddled this river, I wonder if this time I will capsize. I look at the rocks and white water and imagine disaster. Then I tell myself that these strange thoughts have passed through my mind many times before and are ridiculous. I get in and push off. A few minutes later, I’m half a mile downstream and the black thoughts have passed. I’m making the turns I need to make; I’ve avoided rocks I need to avoid. I’ve found my power. I’m full to the brim with the river world.

Goodwill towards the river, goodwill towards my fellow human beings, goodwill towards all of nature and creation. Goodwill and love are the fundamental messages of all of the great spiritual leaders. Perhaps we know deep down that their message offers true salvation, transformation, and part of us—the best part of us—wants to incorporate that message into our lives. It is difficult to live though. Goodwill is the message of the institutions that survive. War, destruction, hatred, bigotry are the messages of the civilizations and human endeavors that fail and disappear from history. But goodwill is hard to live. An open heart and an open mind are so difficult. Despite my studying and meditation, my feelings of gratitude on the wild river, I still give in a lot to the temptation to express my unhappiness at the people who disappoint me. I give in to anger a lot.

The river is always changing: the seasons, the rain. Some­times it is very shallow and clear, and my excursions involve a lot of wading. I get out of the canoe and slosh through the water, get back in for a couple of minutes and then grind to a halt again. At other times, it is deep and muddy. The raging current erodes the bank and the sandy soil slides into the river. Trees are undercut and fall across the breadth of the river. Sometimes the current is so strong that the river changes course. A pond becomes part of the river, and what used to be river becomes pond. When the river water becomes mud brown, the birds that need clear water move on. Great blue herons seem not to mind though. Ospreys, well, ospreys come and go with no discernible pattern. I’ve never actually seen one fish in this river, but they must, because I see them sitting in trees watching it, or gliding along its course, gazing downwards.

I sometimes arrive at the river bank out of sorts, edgy, unhappy, or disappointed. When I do, I find that after an hour in the river world, once again I am full of gratitude. That is more or less unique in my life. There are not many places I can go, or people I can go to, that can break a mood of despondency like the river can. Gratitude expands a human life, expands one’s percep­tion of what life is and what life offers. Ingratitude shrinks one’s perception of life’s possibilities. Gratitude also expands one’s relationship with a creative work. I feel a deep sense of gratitude when I paddle the river. Whether it is raining or sunny, the river brings peace into my life. Birds seem always to be singing, and wildflowers blooming.

At one time, I was a Quaker. In some ways, I still am. Paddling the river that has become the target of my affection a few days ago and trying to put words to the feeling I was having, what first came to mind was the same sense of peace I used to feel at Quaker meetings. Ahead of me stretched a section of river with particularly large trees overhanging both banks. Birds were singing and a soft rain was falling. I had just paddled some moderately difficult rapids—rapids I hadn’t paddled in years—and now, ahead of me, was a long stretch of quiet water. Something, I guess, about the uncertainty con­nected with rocks and fast water, followed by calm water, contributed to my relief and sense of peace. A young heron rose from the side of the river, flew downriver for a couple of hundred yards or so, and then landed. As I approached, it did the same thing again, and then again.

Being alone also shaped my mood that morning. I’ve been single, unattached, relatively little in the last twenty-two years. All together, maybe two years. They’ve been times of discomfort and change, discovery and revelation. If I had a woman in my life right now, I probably would not be on this river. In fact, when I think about it, I’ve rarely paddled this river alone when I’ve had a woman in my life. I’ve paddled it with her, whoever “she” is, with my sons, with my buddy, John, but not alone. Why is that, I wonder?

The warm rain falls, I paddle. I go through life as a fairly happy person, but rarely am I as happy as I am this morning. The water is exceptionally muddy. The unusual amount of rain we’ve had this summer has eroded the river banks. The kingfishers, normally very visible on this river, have disappeared. They can’t see the little fish well enough to survive here right now, I suspect, and so they’ve moved on. The mergansers though are still around, swimming frantically through the water a hundred feet ahead of the canoe. Perhaps that’s because kingfishers sit on branches, and look down on their prey from several feet up above, while mergansers swim underwater where their prey is inches away.

What is it about being single that is leading me to develop this deep connection with this river right now? Maybe it is that my solitude lately has been calming. I find it deeply relaxing. I want to go deeper into that cocoon of peace and solace. For me, being on or around wild water has brought on a contemplative, meditative, plodding peace.

The challenge is to take that peace I find on wild rivers and bring it into the rest of my life, including my work. The challenge is to create art and writing that evolve out of a sense of peace. Even more difficult is to deal with other human beings with peace and goodwill, including the incompetent and dishonest. I often fail at that.

In 1978, Robert Muller authored Most of All They Taught Me Happiness (it was republished a couple of years ago), a memoir that included the following passage about serving as an executive assistant to U Thant, then Secretary-General of the United Nations.

When I worked for him, U Thant was for me not only the Secretary General of the United Nations but also a master in the art of living....I never heard him speak ill of another person....I never heard him complain. Nor did I ever see him impatient or irritated. His capacity to endure the shortcomings and errors of other people was boundless. At nine or ten o’clock in the evening, after seeing dozens of visitors at quarter-of-an-hour intervals and after being bombarded by a succession of insistent problems, he was as calm and controlled as when he arrived in the office in the morning. Kindness, love, and understanding for his fellow humans were his sole motivations. Discipline and self-control were his ways.

Often, in the evening, when I presented him with a problem on which he was asked to make a decision, he simply remained silent. This was especially the case when difficulties arose between two heads of departments at the United Nations. Their memoranda requesting resolution often remained unanswered. U Thant was looking at me patiently with his kind eyes, hoping that I would understand his philosophy. And I finally did when one day I found myself holding the following language to two high officials, each of whom was looking to the Secretary General for total support:

“Can’t you understand that U Thant will simply not make a decision in favor of either one of you? Your memoranda will be returned to you unanswered, no matter how often you raise the issue with him, unless you yourself take the initiative in proposing a common course of action. He feels that you know the answer to your problem much better than he does. You are well trained and highly skilled officials. You are expected to solve problems, not to create them. The UN is preaching understanding and accommodation among nations. This is the least that can be expected from its officers. U Thant wishes you to understand that the solution rests between the two of you.”

To my great surprise, the two officials agreed to a mutual solution within minutes. Both had thought of a common course, but it was to be tried only if neither could score a full victory over the other! 

During a very moving ceremony at the United Nations in December 1971, when he took a leave from the UN staff in the great General Assembly hall, U Thant suddenly put aside a prepared speech and said the following:

“As all of you must have been aware, I have certain priorities in regard to virtues and human values. As far as I am concerned, an ideal man or woman is one who is endowed with four attributes, four qualities: physical qualities, intellectual qualities, moral qualities, and spiritual qualities. Of course, it is very rare to find a human being who is endowed with all these qualities but, as far as priorities are concerned, I would attach greater importance to intellectual qualities over physical qualities. I would attach still greater importance to moral qualities over intellectual qualities but I am still trying to define my priorities. Moral qualities like love, compassion, understanding, tolerance, the philosophy of live and let live, the ability to understand the other man’s point of view are the key to all great religions. And above all, I would attach the greatest importance to spiritual values, faith in oneself, the purity of one’s inner self, which to me is the greatest virtue of all. With this approach, with this philosophy, with the concept alone, we will be able to fashion the kind of society we want, the kind of society which was envisaged by the founding fathers of the United Nations twenty-six years ago.”

 That way of being in the world is how I feel when I’m on the river. It is part of who I am. I’d like to make it more of who I am. Several times I’ve tried the route of just saying to myself, “Okay, starting today, that is who I am.” It lasts up until I make contact with the first supplier who didn’t follow through on a commitment.

I’m realizing that to actually live when I’m not on the river the way I feel when I am on the river, I need to have a step-by-step plan and follow it. I need to redesign my life with that goal in mind. The plan needs to be based on carefully thinking through what creates stress in my life and what creates peace, and gradually re-orienting my life away from one and towards another. I need to meditate more, even when I feel that I’m too busy to meditate. Meditation is boring, the psyche wants action to amuse itself, the ego wants a threat to focus on and think its way through. I need to pay more to deal with suppliers who think carefully through their commitments and the quality of their work. If inventory and debt cause stress, I need to get both down to a level that I’m comfortable with. In both my work and personal life, I need to avoid people who are way out of balance, who are unhappy and angry, who are disorganized and incompetent, who need drama constantly unfolding around them, at least until I can build a little more stability into my own peacefulness. My level of peace needs to be more impervious to the ups and downs of the real world. For me, it is all about relationships—relationships with people, with time, with quiet. 

To live in touch with the current that underlies my life, I need to abandon some things that have always interested me, at least casually, and put more energy into the things that will lead me and my work towards my real potential.

The boat I travel in is called Surrender. My two oars are instant forgiveness and gratitude—complete gratitude for the gift of life. I am thankful for the experience of this life, for the opportunity to dance. I get angry, I get mad, but as soon as I remind myself to put my oars in the water, I forgive.
I serve. I do the dance I must. I plant trees, but I am not the doer of this work. I am the facilitator, the instrument. I am one part of the symphony. I know there is an overall scheme to this symphony that I cannot understand. In some way, we are each playing our own part. It is not for me to judge or criticize the life or work of another. All I know is that this is my dance. I would plant trees today even if I knew for a certainty that the world would end tomorrow.
- Balbir Mathur, Planting Love One Tree At A Time (Issue 11, Heron Dance)

I make these changes and sacrifices to live more with those feelings of warmth, solace, love and spiritual connection that I feel when I’m on the river. In touch with that special energy, that current underlying my life, both my life and work have beauty and power. It is my potential and I’m willing to put more into it than I have in the past in order to live closer to it.

My favorite poets are the outcasts, the outlaws, the supreme indi­vidualists, the passionate singers, the loners, the lovers. Ikkyu, the great Japanese Zen poet, Walt Whitman, the solitary singer. There’s not much difference between a voodoo king and a blues poet. Both are looking for those secret energies in the universe. Externally, the poet is no different from anyone else. Internally, he is a revolutionary. Internally, he is a creator of new laws, his own laws. Internally, he is an outlaw. . .
- Tony Moffeit, from  Examining the Process of Creating,  an interview from The Lummox Journal, September 2000. (www.lummoxpress.com)

Art is the mirror, perhaps the only one, in which we can see our true collective force. We must honor its sacred function. We must let art help us.
- Alice Walker, The Same River Twice, Honoring The Difficult

Starting Heron Dance was an effort to rebuild my life around that secret energy of the universe—the energy I’ve lived in contact with sometimes in wild places. Those experiences all involved silence and slowness. Those experiences have proven worth rebuilding my life on, but they will take a person only so far. The next step, for me, involves coming to terms with myself so that I can bring that energy into my life in the human community. I need to confront my patterns of failure. For several years, I’ve made stumbling, sometimes half-hearted efforts to become a member of a certain community. I continue to try, to sometimes succeed and sometimes disappoint. Through that community, the river runs.

Getting to know one place intimately is a transition from lots of shallow experiences to one or a few deeper experiences. It comes from love, it comes from growing older. Building ties to a place and to a community requires settling down. Eventually you realize that there is nowhere as worthwhile to move on to, no better people, no more beautiful river.

I am an outsider trying to be an insider. My constant tendency, as I again bump up against a failure in my relations with others, is to say, “Okay, I don’t really need them.” But I do. I need them to become the person I could be. The people in that community accept each other despite their flaws and failings, and I need to do the same. I need to persist through that process. If I’m going to stick with that, I need to find the goodness within me and put aside my feelings of vulnerability. I tell myself to have courage and to believe in myself. People who don’t believe in themselves live half-lives. It is sometimes hard to believe in yourself.

All of this leads me to ask, does the seeker go on a journey to learn about the true nature of life, of the world out there, as I’ve always told myself, or does the seeker go on a journey to avoid confronting the darker areas of his or her own humanness?

I think often about something that Tom Jay said to me in a Heron Dance interview. Tom is a salmon sculptor and salmon restoration activist in Chimacum, Washington. I asked him about what he found most difficult in trying to live his values.

The hardest part is living your rhetoric—articulating your life in action. The words really don’t mean much unless they come out of a condition that has been established by an action. The action has to be based on a set of principles.

It is easy to say things, to pronounce, to express, but to actually enact is something entirely different. For me it has been a continual process of learning that I have do as well as say.

Trying to live in your truth involves a degree of uncertainty and confusion. More perceived mistakes. It is a lot more of a confessional life. You haven’t taken a program and lived it. The warts and the dust show up a lot more. That has certainly been the case in later life for me.

I was very willful as young man. Until quite late there was a strong current of selfish will. There is some remorse that I am having to attend to lately. And remedy by making amends to people. There are people I’ve had to contact and say “I was wrong”. If I don’t do that, there are parts of my life that are ignorant. I am in denial. Rather than be ignorant, I want to be emotionally alive. So I go into it and say, “This was really wrong and I am sorry.” And then listen to what gets said.

 …I watched my father die angry. He was afraid. He was afraid because he hadn’t gone to some of those places and said, “Oh yeah, this was a mistake, that was a mistake.” It wasn’t that he was a bad person. Most people don’t want to do that because it is too painful. The whole ethos of modern times is this subtle but pervasive self-righteousness about the individual. The individual knows what they want and what they are—that whole relativist thing—rather than honoring connections, acknowledging that what we do hurts or helps other people. Rather than be honest about all that stuff, there is a more defensive posture in the collective culture.

 To go to people and apologize is cutting back against the flow. It is embarrassing. Some of the people I have gone to make amends to are embarrassed. They don’t know what to do. Some do. Some are welcoming and they receive it and it is enlivening. It is not predictable.

Tom has passed on to the spirit realm, but he had more courage than I do. I don’t do what he did because, I tell myself, overall the things I’ve done to people are no better or worse than the things others have done to me. Forgive and forget.

Another interview I did in Washington State was of Jonathan White, author (Talking on the Water: Conversations about Nature and Creativity) and carpenter.

When I first moved up here, I thought “God, these people are crazy. They are all just weirdos. They left the city and they are all out of the closet. They’re just strange.” I’ve come to believe that it is not just them that are strange. We are all strange, but we don’t have a chance to be. It is not safe for us to come out with all our strangeness unless we are in an environment where we feel safe. And we know that people aren’t going to run away. Because they can’t. And we aren’t going to run away either. So you have confrontations with people, and then you see them the next day. And it is really different.

I moved up here six years ago and I was scared to death to leave the city. I have always lived in the city. I was scared that there wouldn’t be anything to do. That I would be bored, not enough contact. I have really thrived up here. I have totally surprised myself. I am just eating up the small community, rural lifestyle. It is a big part of my life up here. Being with people. Being known. Allowing myself to be known. It is a whole other way.

There are all kinds of lessons in it for me. One of them is that you don’t just walk away. It is like the environment—trashing places and moving away. It is the same in relationships. In an urban environment you don’t have to deal with the intimate issues you have to in a community. When you see people every day, when you celebrate with them or see them at a potluck or are in line at the grocery store with your accountant and your lawyer and the commissioner and the person you got in a fight with yesterday. They are in your face. It is a tremendous exercise in tolerance, in seeing yourself in others.

Wendell Berry, in his wonderful novel Jaber Crow, explores this theme with poetic language.

I had been the barber in Port William for fourteen years by then, and the grave digger and church janitor for six years. My mind had begun to sink into the place. This was a feeling. It had grown into me from what I had learned at my work and all I had heard from Mat Feltner and the others who were the community’s rememberers, and from what I remembered myself. The feeling was that I could not be extracted from Port William like a pit from a plum, and that it could not be extracted from me; even death could not set it and me apart.

History overflows time. Love overflows the allowance of the world. All the vessels overflow, and no end or limit stays put. Every shakable thing has got to be shaken. In a sense, nothing that was ever lost in Port William ever has been replaced. In another sense, nothing is ever lost, and we are compacted together forever, even by our failures, our regrets, and our longings. 

My vision of the gathered church that had come to me after I became the janitor had been replaced by a vision of the gathered community. What I saw now was the community imperfect and irresolute but held together by the frayed and always fraying, incomplete and yet ever-holding bonds of the various sorts of affection. There had maybe never been anybody who had not been loved by somebody, who had been loved by somebody else, and so on. If you could go back into the story of Uncle Ive and Verna Shoals, you would find, certainly before and maybe after, somebody who loved them both. It was a community always disappointed in itself, disappointing its members, always trying to contain its divisions and gentle its meanness, always failing and yet always preserving a sort of will toward goodwill. I knew that, in the midst of all the ignorance and error, this was a membership; it was the member­ship of Port William and of no other place on earth. My vision gathered the community as it never has been and never will be gathered in this world of time, for the community must always be marred by members who are indifferent to it or against it, who are nonetheless its members and maybe nonetheless essential to it. And yet I saw them all as somehow perfected, beyond time, by one another’s love, compassion, and forgiveness, as it is said we may be perfected by grace.

I want to be close to the community, but not too close. The group, the community, needs someone who cares about it, but has an outsider’s perspective. The outsider who cares about the community, but doesn’t care so much that he or she is willing to go to great ends to make the community feel good about itself, does have a role to play. The seeker who has gone out into the wilderness, and that can be a wilderness within, and who comes back and joins the community offers some­thing important, even though the group at first may reject it.

Small communities can become inbred, unhealthy, stagnant, inward looking, protective, small minded and intolerant. They sometimes make up their own convenient truths and then make rituals around those truths, which they will then go to extremes to defend. They think that by telling each other that the world is so, just so, they can make it so or that it will become so.

Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.
- Mignon McLaughlin

Groups often don’t like mystery; groups prefer black and white. Individuals are more capable of nuance than are groups. Without hard facts, groups will often make them up. Groups generally oppose truths that threaten them. Groups will give comfort to individuals who turn their back on what life has to offer if those individuals support the goals of the group.

For all of these reasons, art, too, cannot be created from a place of conformity. Art gives us perspective on things that are deeper and more important than the compromises the group enters into in order to make it feel better about itself. Art cuts through convention, cuts through compromise, to celebrate the mystery of life.

Art is something subversive. It is something that should not be free. Art and liberty, like the fire of Prometheus, are things one must steal, to be used against the established order. Once art becomes official and open to everyone, then it becomes the new academicism... If art is ever given the keys to the city, it will be because it’s been so watered down, rendered so impotent, that it’s not worth fighting for.

...every poet, every artist is an anti­social human being. He’s not that way because he wants to be; he can’t be any other way. Of course the state has the right to chase him away...and if he is really an artist it is in his nature not to want to be admitted, because if he is admitted it can only mean he is doing something which is understood, approved, and therefore old hat—worthless. Anything new, anything worth doing, can’t be recognized. People just don’t have that much vision. So this business about defending and freeing culture is absurd.

...the right to free expression is some­thing that one seizes, not something one is given. There is absolute opposition between the creator and the state. If the idea of society is to dominate the individual, the individual must perish. Furthermore, there wouldn’t be such a thing as a seer if there weren’t a state trying to suppress him. People reach the status of artist only after crossing the maximum number of barriers. So the arts should be discouraged, not encouraged.

There has to be a rule even if it’s a bad one because the evidence of art’s power is in breaking down the barriers. But to do away with the obstacles—that serves no purpose other than to make things completely wishy-washy, spineless, shape­less, meaningless—zero.
- Picasso

The most important thing a writer can have: the ability to live with constant loneliness and a strong sense of revulsion for the banalities of everyday socializing.
- Hunter Thompson

One’s art goes as far and as deep as one’s love goes, and there is no reason for painting but that.
- Andrew Wyeth

Rules for an icon painter: during work, pray in order to strengthen yourself physically and spiritually: avoid, above all, useless words, and keep silence.
- Jim Forest, Praying with Icons

I think you do it as a debt of honor –- if you’ve got that creative voice inside of you that has something to communicate, that just longs to tell its version of things or to entertain or to inspire or to try to be a part of the solution or just to be heard–you know, to stop being a person who is silenced –-then I think you have to honor that or you’re just doomed.
- Anne Lamott

The artist has something to communicate about his or her version of things. My art is about the river, the wild current that underlies my life. Maybe I ask too much of myself when I say that my life is also about building a deeper connection to the human community. Maybe I’m too sensitive for a deep connection with a human community. Maybe out of that sensitivity arise feelings of vulnerability that I overcompensate for with anger and impatience. These issues remain unresolved, but the first objective is to create a life, and work, based on a deeper peace, and a deeper connection to that wild current. One step at a time, I tell myself.

When I think of artful passages I’ve read in books on the subject of living in connection with a river, I come up with two. One is from Wendell Berry’s previously mentioned novel, Jaber Crow.

Of course, I know well what it is to be in a boat in a fog, and mainly I count it among the pleasures. In the early morning in the fog I can’t see the river from the porch. I go down the path, following it step by step as it is revealed, and then down the dug steps in the bank to the river’s edge. The boat takes shape at first as if it is floating in the air. And then, coming closer, I see its reflection in the water. I loosen the chain and toss it into the boat with a crash that seems more substantial than anything I can see. The fog drifts on a current of air, usually upstream. I step into the boat and feel its buoyancy. Ripples go out from it. I go to the middle seat, place the oars in the locks, and set the boat out onto the water, free of the shore. I row quietly, close along the bank. The river has only the one visible edge. It could be as wide as the ocean. I come to where the end of the trotline is tied to a stout root. I go to the bow seat then and catch the line and raise it. I work my way out along the line from one snooded hook to the next, taking off fish (if any). Now I can see neither shore. The line rises, dripping, out of the water ahead of me and disappears behind. If a fish is on it, I will feel it, something alive out in the fog, down in the dark. Sometimes, after being bent to my work for a while, I will straighten up and see that the fog has lifted and I am again in the known world.

Back at the house, with the river and its mood still in my mind, I fix breakfast and (if the weather is fine) eat out on the porch. And then I have my shave and set the place to rights. If the fog has cleared, the sunlight, glancing off the river, will be rippling and swaying on the walls and ceiling of my house, so that for a while I seem to be living within the element of living light.

The other is by Hermann Hesse.

I am only a ferryman, and it is my task to take people across this river. I have taken thousands of people across and to all of them my river has been nothing but a hindrance on their journey. They have traveled for money and business, to weddings and on pilgrimages; but the river has been in their way and the ferryman was there to take them quickly across the obstacle. However, amongst the thousands there have been a few, four or five, to whom the river was not an obstacle. They have heard its voice and listened to it, and the river has become holy to them, as it has to me....

Have you learned the secret from the river; that there is no such thing as time?...That the river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the current, in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere, and the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past, nor the shadow of the future?

This discovery had made him very happy. Was then not all sorrow in time, all self-torment and fear in time? Were not all difficulties and evil in the world conquered as soon as one conquered time, as soon as one dispelled time?
- Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha (edited)

There is no such thing as time. All sorrow, all self-torment, all fear are functions of our relationship to time. The river rolls on, Hesse says, unconcerned because it exists in a timeless reality. Enlightenment and wisdom exist in a timeless dimension, he suggests.

Thoreau asked us to ask ourselves who owns our time, our life.

Nothing can be more useful to a man than a determination not to be hurried.”

When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality.
- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

 The person who has acquired some wisdom in life, some perspective, walks slowly and lives slowly. By implication, the person always in a hurry was foolish. In art, too, time needs to move slowly.

I have many affairs to attend to, and feel hurried these days. Great works of art have endless leisure for a background, as the universe has space. Time stands still while they are created. The artist cannot be in [a] hurry. The earth moves round the sun with inconceivable rapidity, and yet the surface of the lake is not ruffled by it.
- Thoreau in his journal, Thoreau And The Art Of Life

Endless leisure for a background. An artist whose work has endless leisure for a background either has an independent source of funding or has carefully thought through his or her life. An artist without a trust fund whose work is created out of endless leisure knows the difference between the superfluous and the necessary.

No great work has ever been produced except after a long interval of still and musing meditation.
- Walter Bagehot

What would my work look like if it had endless leisure as a background? How much of the way I work, of how hard I work, is the result of perceived rather than real necessity? The nature of art is that you must often throw out what you’ve just spent hours or days working on and start again. A significant part of my best work was executed quickly, but after a period of thought, and sometimes after several quickly executed but failed attempts. If you work too slowly, you won’t get out into the woods or wherever it is that you go to make contact with the deep well of imagination and rejuvenation. Thoreau, like always, makes me think, but he doesn’t have all the answers. His answers read easy but live hard. He did try to live them though, at least for a while.

Part of living in this culture is figuring out what you are willing to hurry to accomplish and what you aren’t. To live a balanced life, one must figure out what he or she wants out of life, out of this culture around us, and then have the discipline to live it. If you don’t pick and choose, the culture owns you, enslaves you. Our culture enslaves those with visions of sugarplums.

I see and admire your manner of living…You can do almost what you choose. You whites possess the power of subduing almost every animal to your use. You are surrounded by slaves. Everything about you is in chains, and you are slaves yourselves. I fear that if I should exchange my pursuits for yours, I, too, should become a slave.
- Big Soldier, Osage chief, 1820

 We all erect our own prisons. Big Soldier, you were a slave, too. You were a slave to a life that was disappearing and would never come back. The ability to see the handwriting on the wall is difficult for all of us. Our biases, our wishes for the future, shape our perception of reality. The ability to see life for what it is, humans for what they are, is difficult for all of us, including me.

Self-loathing—the core of every addiction and the source of a healthy economy.
- K. J. Kramer

Our culture often sweeps us along. Its current flows in favor of possessions, money, TV, overconsumption, slavery to alluring but empty things. These things distract us from ourselves, from a dialogue with our inner being and a relationship with our true selves. The things that give deep soul satisfaction—nature, quiet, love, friendship, meaningful work—these require discipline. They take inner resourcefulness, a deep relationship with oneself. They take courage—a confrontation with one’s fears.

It takes courage to step into the unknown. The first enemy of a man of knowledge, a real pursuer after the truth, is fear. Fear confronts us all of the time. It never goes away. It always comes back. But you can’t begin to grow until you get over the fear. How do you get people to recognize that they are doing what they are doing because of a fear of the future, a fear of unpredictability?
- Chic Scott, mountain guide, author (Heron Dance interview).

We learn the most from our suffering and the changes and the challenges on these trips. You don’t learn much if everything goes great. Or if you are not scared shitless by bears. You don’t learn much on the groovy little trips you sign up with to see some nice scenery. You need to be challenged to see your character and soul. Some of your scarier and better parts.
      For me, the scariest places have always been when I have been by myself on long trips on the arctic sea ice. My learning grounds—the places where it’s just me and the polar bears. The scariest, suffering spots. We learn by our confusion. That fear of dying—trying to let go of that fear. The terror that this is such a scary place.
      - Don Gardner, arctic anthropologist, mountaineer (Heron Dance interview)

We lived out among the rivers and lakes, the animal migrations and the changing seasons, for well over a hundred thousand years. Sometimes, when paddling this river, I see in my mind’s eye the early peoples on their way to Lake Champlain. They would have grown up in canoes and been at home on this river. They handled rapids like we handle driving to work or to the corner store. They knew the river’s bird life, the significance of seeing one species instead of another, the habits of fish, squirrels and osprey. Their lives had an intimacy with the river that grew out of generations of close connection to it. Their technology did not allow them to dominate the land around them. The land to them was master, an entity over which they moved, that was an unpredictable host, a master, a god. Their experience included feast and famine. The river gave life, and sometimes the river took it away.

At the time of the arrival of the first Europeans, the Champlain Valley, through which this river flows, was uninhabited. The Iroquois, a confederacy of fierce, warlike Indian tribes who lived along the St. Lawrence River, used this area as a hunting ground. They were based out of large agricultural settlements and I’ve read that they took an estimated 60,000 deer a year out of the Adirondack woods. A primary means of access was travel by canoe down Lake Champlain and then up the rivers of that watershed, including the Boquet.

When they encountered other tribes here, battles often ensued. Those tribes—the interlopers—were Abenaki and other Algonquin speaking peoples from Vermont and points south. But that was at the time of European arrival. Prior to that—for thousands of years prior to that—this area was inhabited by a variety of different tribes and small bands. My sons and I have found their arrowheads over the years—arrowheads made hundreds or thousands of years ago. As their ability to work with stone improved, their arrowheads evolved. We’ve found arrowheads of widely different sophistication—crudely shaped quartz and granite points and finely chipped flint arrowheads.

I’d like to close with an excerpt from one of my favorite books, Sleeping Island by P.G. Downes. Downes was a teacher in Cambridge, Massachusetts who spent his summers (in the 1930s) roaming around Canada’s north in a canoe. His book is about freedom.

They climbed into the canoe. Lop-i-zun took the stern, then before him John, then Zah-bah-deese in the bow. I leaned down to each and made that sharp, embarrassed, brief handshake used in the North.

Like true Northern men, they never looked back. . .The same old feeling rushed over me. It was always the same: “See you somewhere, next year maybe. . .see some time...at Pelican, Brochet, Athabasca, Cree Lake, the Slave, the Grease, the Fond du Lac. . .lakes, lakes, rivers, rivers. . .the Barrens.”

It was the feeling I had experienced so many years before; the sun was shining then, too. Far away the buzzing of a plane came nearer. It was time to leave. Solomon, my Cree friend and companion, stood with me, shading his eyes to see the plane and he said more to himself than to me: “You will come back. . . maybe not nex’ year, maybe not year nex’. But you will come back, and then we make long trip. Then sometime we make a trip again. We stronger. We tough, and then, we make the long trip an’ never come back.”