(Nimue)
Nothing lives without water. I've felt like a spring in a barren landscape, pouring out and pouring out under a relentless sky, with soil so parched that it never seems to change.
Surely in the desert, there are plants that grow whenever water appears? Perhaps they need more water than I can muster. Dig deeper, draw up more, give harder, pour and pour and hope.
All the water I can bring, and yet no flourishing, no life. Only a barren landscape under an uncaring sky.
Sometimes love looks like clouds, softening the day and bringing rain. It is easy to be a spring nourished by rainfall. The sky gives, the ground softens, and pouring is easy, giving from a place of always having more to give.
Sometimes love looks like planting and reforesting, like beaver dams that make lakes where life can flourish, managing the flow of water.
Love as an ecosystem, of living and sharing, giving and being replenished.
Love can have you set yourself up as a spring in a parched landscape. If the land is hard and dry enough, the water just runs off, taking precious topsoil with it. If there is a little softness, a little yield, then you can seep that love as water into everything, and watch life return.
I have been the arid land, and I have been the water. I have poured out and watched my wells run dry to no effect. I have felt myself nourished and restored, able to give with fewer limitations. I have seen dead plains inside me come alive with new growth and fecundity.
Inside each of us a landscape. And in each of us the means to bring or deny rain to others. To offer the bounty of our fertile plains, running like rivers down into places of need. It is in each of use to refuse to give, the dam the flow jealously rather than making generous beaver-like constructions. We can dry ourselves out so thoroughly that no water or love may reach into us. Unlike the physical land, we can choose to soften, choose to welcome in the water, the love that others care enough to pour.
Healing is a choice, to some degree. We have the means to refuse it. The cost of that refusal goes beyond the personal and into every other inner landscape we dry out with our desiccated states. Every watercourse we suck dry. Every well we drink from without acknowledging the need for rain.
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