”We asked our students to observe water as a way of understanding the power of surrendering. (See the water exercise later in this chapter.) One student described his experience in this way:

I begin to wonder what’s so captivating about water. I can sit for hours looking at the ocean, a creek, lake or fountain, and feel totally absorbed as well as soothed. I wonder why. A breeze comes up and fractures the lake’s placid surface into a wild pattern of dancing ripples. Several thoughts about water come to mind. Water is dynamic, always different and never the same; water is flexible with a fluid adaptability, yet it has a collective force that’s awesome; water is without color of its own - it reflects beautifully the color and lights of its surroundings; water is. Water is? Sure, it never pretends to be something else. This is the essence of its being, its natural intelligence.

Poets need to live where others don’t care to look, and they need to do this because if they don’t they can’t sing to us of all the secret and public domains of our lives. They need to be multiple witnesses around the central masquerades of reality in order to convey fully the unimaginable dimensions of the deity’s terrible and enchanting dance. The great tidal crowds of everyday events pour in one direction, sometimes the poet has to move in the other — often moving directly against them, at other times cutting tangentially across the morning waves of humanity. Poets seem to be set against the world because we need them to show us the falseness of our limitations, the true extent of our kingdom.

Laws do not bind our perceptions. There are as many worlds as there are lives. It is not those who have no imagination who are the problem, for we all possess imagination, few of us use it well. The problem is with those who are frightened of the rather limitless validity of the imagination, frightened of people who continually extend the boundaries of the possible, people who ceaselessly redream the world and reinvent existence; frontiers people of the unknown and the uncharted.

Newton’s Child

“Perhaps we should strive towards mythical resonances in our lives. Among many possible images, a human being can be seen as a tree: we should reach out for more light even as we reach deeper into reality for a more solid hold on the earth. We were not born with one eye, with only one thought in our heads, and with only one direction to travel. When we look out on the world with all its multiplicity of astonishing phenomena, do we see that only one philosophy can contain, explain, and absorb everything? I think not. The universe will always be greater than us. Our mind therefore should be like Keats’ thoroughfare, through which all thoughts can wander. It should also be a great cunning net that can catch the fishes of possibility.

It is easy to forget how mysterious and mighty stories are. They do their work in silence, invisibly. They work with all the internal materials of the mind and self. They become part of you while changing you. Beware the stories you read or tell: subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.