It is everywhere, it is different every time. It smells good, looks good, tastes good, and without it we’d be up the crick without a paddle. Not to mention we’d not get around very easily for most of our history. It cycles around the globe, from earth to sky, salt to sweet. It is in, over, under, around, and through us. No water, no life as we know it. Sometimes it sits still somewhere for a second or 10,000 years or a million. But move it does. It flows, precipitates, evaporates, transpires, condensates, drips and fogs. It freezes, crystallizes, and sublimates. What else is so useful? It cleans the laundry, provides the fishes with something to live in so we can float on it and catch them, and is the one ingredient you can’t distill whiskey without. You can drink it, eat it, and walk on it.

Water is what makes us blue.

Only 2.5 percent of all the water on the planet is fresh. Including all those immense aquifers we’re pumping dry. Most people on the planet do not have plentiful access to good, clean water. Still, we waste it left and right. It is almost as if water is so basic that we can’t even imagine, in ways that count, that the supply might be finite. After all, those clouds above my head hold another 3% of the water, presumably fresh and not counted in the other 2.5. If that doesn’t feel like plenty, then what might?

So common and yet it makes me live deeply. One part of my happiness lies in nature’s profligate ways with water. It doesn’t usually just sit there, like a rock. (Don’t get me wrong, I like rocks a lot.) Instead, it is always going somewhere, moving along, changing, running away. It is tough to catch, but when you can it is fun to throw. And I? I keep sloshing, wading, and squishing around in it — today I was out crunching and tromping in and on it, admiring the way it glistens at 0 degrees Fahrenheit [the temperature at which the brine in the ocean and inside us stops moving around]. Trying, like every day, to photograph what it feels like in my heart. Today: ice. Ice that stills and encases and entraps motion.