Stillness 8-14. When I was young, I used to pour out my enthusiasms, marvellings, and insights with passion and abandon. I was a copious, gushing letter-writer, a burbling story-teller, a perpetual dream-recorder. Poetry surged through my magical fountain pens that seemed to flow eternally with fresh indigo ink. I flooded my poems, songs, and journals with colorful pictures, using watercolors, shells, pinecones, sparkles, onion skins, nuts I gathered from the forest, pebbles from the stream, flowers I’d dried … I sprayed my hungry feelings, my longings, my delights into the world and decorated them with lavish pleasure and quiet, but inwardly exuberant, pride and happiness.
All that riotous creativity narrowed in my twenties and thirties, as I channeled my career as a novelist. But my beloved stories gradually became harder to pump out and by my late fifties they had become a trickle. I also poured myself into being a mother, but children grow up and stream into their own lives. All that creative energy parenting requires instead tumbles into memories, worry, hopefulness, confidence, and letting go. So then my creativity spilled into a re-discovered passion for metaphysics, and I poured myself into showing people ways to navigate the shoals and ebbs and tides of their own lives. My days teemed with new friends. Tarot images cascaded through my mind. The changing energies of the starry night skies became my lush backdrop. My entire universe expanded in ways I’d never imagined. I thought I’d found the source of who I am and that now—finally—I’d be at peace. But strange, unsettling things just seem to go on happening—like pandemics, for instance. So now where can all that energy flow?
It’s a funny thing about the fountain of life. We may all flow from one Source, but in this human experience of time and space there seem to be various spouts we can pour life through. It’s not that our energy turns to trickle as we course through life–actually, there are more places that become unsealed. If we do the fountain thing right, isn’t it possible to feel ourselves flowing even more freely as the years go by? Not in a gushing focus of accomplishment and success, or creating a livelihood, or trying to sustain an idealized relationship, or building a foundation for a potential future, but instead maybe what we’re doing is unsealing aspects of our fountain that allow our innate harmony, joy, courage, gratitude, and love to flow in ways we never dreamed.
Imagine yourself as a fountain sparkling in the sunshine. The water comes from the mountain at your back, and flows perpetually into the pipes that feed your fountain. All through the night the drops shimmer in the starlight. At dawn birds dip and splash. At noon, passersby pause to take a drink. You are a source of refreshment, beauty, and peace.
Now is not the time to become a trickle. Pour yourself into the world, into what you love, into greeting your friends and the strangers who pass by with cheerfulness and encouragement. Let your spirit surge with hope, confidence, and letting go. Your source—of love and light and laughter—is always replenished. You become simply a magnificent fountain through which life pours.