If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water. Once in a lifetime, perhaps, one escapes the actual confines of the flesh. Once in a lifetime, if one is lucky, one so merges with the sunlight and air and running water that whole eons, the eons that mountains and deserts know, might pass in a single afternoon without discomfort. The mind has sunk away into its beginnings among old roots and the obscure tricklings and movings that stir inanimate things. Like the charmed fairy circle into which man once stepped, and upon emergence learned that a whole century had passed in a single night, one can never quite define this secret; but it has something to do, I am quite sure, with common water. Its substance reaches everywhere; it touches past and present and future; it moves under the polls and wanders thinly in the heights of air. It can assume forms of exquisite perfection in a snowflake.”

~ Loren C. Eiseley, “The Flow of the River.”