The solution is right here. Right down here at the bottom of this tree. Well maybe right up here. Right up here on top the ground. Better yet - somewhere right in between.

As always, truth is often right smack in the middle. Paul Hawken, et.al., might have said it best. We need “a future that is neither so hopeful as to be unrealistic, nor so grim as to invite despair.”

I am sitting on rocks wet with spring water near my home in Nelson, B.C. I do not know the name of this river so I will call her Elizabeth Creek.

When I think about water my mind takes me to H2O: two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen. This label allows me to describe water and to tell you about it. But it does not tell me what water means? What does water mean? This is the more difficult question. It is the question that really matters.

D.H. Lawrence in his Poems put it this way:

“Water is H2O, hydrogen two parts, oxygen one
but there is also a third thing that makes it water
and nobody knows what that is.
The atom locks up two energies
But it is a third thing present which makes it an atom.”

What then is this third thing?

According to 13^th century Zen teacher Dogen Zenji:

“The river is neither strong nor weak, neither wet nor dry, neither moving nor still, neither cold nor hot, neither being nor non-being, neither delusion nor enlightenment.”

According to Dogen the river is none of these, but a third thing – the river seeing the river. This third thing is not me seeing the river, but the river seeing the river. “The river practices and verifies the river. Hence, there is a study of the river speaking river.”

When I am here at river’s edge, I practice and verify myself. This is the third thing. At the river’s edge mind and body drop off. This is what H2O does not capture. How could it?

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After seven days at sea Iceland appears on the horizon like a thin sliver of dark blue. I find it calming and I begin to relax. My mind immediately begins searching for words to explain the beauty of what I am seeing but each word is inadequate and I again settle back into the ageless rhythm of the sea. It is clear to me this scene, everything in fact, is unknowable to me. What I am experiencing is only the surface of some deeper reality and I somehow sense that if I refuse to let my mind name this experience, I will know it for what it is: pure and simple awe.

The winds have been favorable and we are now five days ahead of schedule. We make the decision to head for northern Iceland and make land in Husavik.

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Sitting in the plane waiting for take off from Copenhagen, Denmark I glanced out the window and noticed a little yellow daisy growing in a crack in the runway. What strength - what beauty. At some particular time in our 2.5 million year evolutionary history we turned our gaze to flowers and at that moment we awakened to beauty. It is this evolution in consciousness to which we must return time and again - returning until we get it right. Solutions to the environmental crisis of the 21st century will likely not be technological but aesthetic. Letting my attention drift to this flower is a real sign of hopefulness. Seek out a flower today and give yourself over to its beauty.

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