Timeline - Waterpolo 3, by Mario Arroyave, 2013. © Mario Arroyave, courtesy the artist and Artemisa Contemporary Latin American Art, New York.

Water

Volume XI, Number 3 | summer 2018

Miscellany

Thirteenth-century Japanese Buddhist Mugai Nyodai, the world’s first Zen abbess, struggled to achieve enlightenment until, one night during her training, the bottom fell out of an old bamboo-bound pail she was using to carry water. The spill freed her. “No more water in the pail!” she wrote in a poem commemorating the experience. “No more moon in the water!”

The United States has virtually set up an empire on impounded and redistributed water.

—Charles P. Berkey, 1946