The Thin Bear At The Holy Well

a parable

Photo by Eilis Garvey on Unsplash

Eyelids

There are a couple of tidy and poetic lies that I like to believe, even though I have no evidence that they’re true. One of my favorites that I heard somewhere and never bothered to challenge was that our eyelids have more Vitamin D receptors than most other places on our bodies. 

Now, after doing a little bit of googling for the sake of this parable, I can’t find anything that confirms that this is true. The closest thing I could find is that our eyes definitely are built to absorb Vitamin D, along with the rest of our skin. But the eyelid thing is probably just pleasant nonsense that someone made up, passed around like a game of Telephone until it finally came around the corner to me. (If any of my readers know more than I do about this, please feel free to correct me in the comments!)

Regardless, I like to believe it, because it feels true even if it isn’t. There’s nothing quite like the sensation of standing in the first strong rays of the earliest spring sunshine, bundled up against the chill, eyes closed and palms open, just soaking it all up like a leaf. It’s truly medicinal, and happens not a moment too soon for our depleted selves.

And I’ll confess: the end of winter does find me depleted. My mind and soul are thin, skin-and-bones like a bear fresh from hibernation, sleepy and dopey and empty and in need of the nourishment—the shot of inspiration—that only grows in the warm seasons.

Even though I know that by February the first afternoon of true sunshine is on its way, I’m always amazed when it shows up, and I have to stand in awe with my eyes closed, letting my lids work their dubious magic.  

Photo by Olli Kilpi on Unsplash

Walking Lunches

In honor of the subtle shift in weather, I’ve been trying to take more spontaneous walks further afield than our yard, taking Finn—our dog—out to some of his favorite spots along the rural roads around us. He’s very good at giving me “the look” around noon, when I’ve already been sitting at my desk for a few hours and I need a change of scenery. He always knows when I’m just about to start banging my head against the wall about whatever project I’ve got going on. And even though I hate to admit it, he’s always right. 

These “walking lunches” have been good for the heart and soul, of course, but also come with a fair amount of contemplation. While Finn sniffs at the best and choicest bushes along our route, chasing squirrels and listening to the barks of the neighborhood dogs echoing through the bare trees, I just think. 

I know it’s not considered de rigueur to talk too much about one’s journey as a writer, especially on Substack where there are too many tales to count, but I hope you’ll indulge me for a moment.

This has been a very, very strange, surreal, and humbling several months for me as a writer. The Wildroot Parables is coming up on its two year anniversary at the end of the month, and I can’t help but think about how I felt when I first started on Substack, the optimistic shrug of thinking, “Well…it can’t be any worse than any of my previous attempts to blog, now can it?”

I sometimes think that if I went back in time to the “me” of two years ago and told her everything we will have accomplished by this time, she would be more than a little skeptical. I spent all of the years before February 2022 writing in fits and starts, mostly in private, all of my public attempts dying after mere weeks (months, at best). Countless blogs. A failed Patreon that still makes me shudder with shame. So many novels and short stories and poems and plays littering my hard drive, unfinished, languishing. 

Substack is, by far, the most successful thing I have ever done as a writer, and I say this as someone quite aware that I am still very much a small fish in this pond, all things being equal. That said, I have a gracious readership, a growing portfolio of fiction and nonfiction work, and (if all goes well) first-ever longterm strategies for turning this into a career.

I am grateful.

I am also afraid.

The ghosts of my former neglected projects are always hovering just out of my line of sight, whispering, Just wait. You’ll give up on this, too. It’s what you do. Most of the time, these ghosts stay on the periphery. But sometimes, in seasons of depletion, they get bold. And these transition points in the year are like an open door for every spirit of malevolent mischief to emerge and point gnarled fingers.

The clouds of late winter are perfect cover for every insecurity I’ve ever gathered to climb out of their graves, mouths full of soil, and hunt me down. 

Photo by Conscious Design on Unsplash

The Holy Well

There is a place along our usual walking route that I like to call the Holy Well. 

In truth, it’s just a tucked-away place where a small stream gathers into a shallow, silty bowl before it flows under a gravel road through a culvert. It’s only fully present for half of the year, drying up in the summer and filled again with winter’s rain and melted snow. 

I find it a sacred spot—a “thin place”—for a number of reasons. One, because it’s so temporary yet cyclical. Two, because it’s always surrounded by lush greenery, nearly disappearing from view in the spring because of the salmonberry bushes and ferns that crowd around it. And three, because it represents a fascinating interconnectedness. 

This “well” is fed by a slim stream that starts way up at the top of our road, in one neighbor’s pond, where it filters down the neighborhood through various backyards. It stagnates for a while in the marsh on our property, before becoming the stream that fills the well. And then, after it passes through the culvert, it continues on to other ponds and other places. 

Where does it end? I don’t know. The sea, I like to think. 

During this season of depletion, the Holy Well has been drawing me more and more than usual. I stand in a liminal spot where the sun can shine through a gap in the trees, eyes closed, and I just soak. The stream sings below me, in the bowl before the culvert, and the ghosts of my past projects must scatter, silenced. 

I become the thin bear at the holy well, vulnerable and ready to receive what I cannot make for myself.

Because I’ve realized that the only cure for such anxieties, past shames, and still-tender scars, is to find a spot where you can be filled up by forces bigger than yourself, so full that nothing else can fit. The impossible sunshine of February. The cold, muttering stream on its way to the ocean. The ancestral song of birds, passed down from generation to generation. The eternal salmonberry. The immortal fern. 

The God of All Inspiration waits in these things, these nourishing things.  Inspire, a word which has its roots in being filled. In being breathed into.

These things lie in unexpected corners. You don’t need woods or marshes or a stream or an ocean in your backyard to find them.

Eternal things—things that renew—are everywhere, if you look. 

If you are depleted—you poet, you pilgrim, you thin bear only now waking up—then stand for a while with your eyes closed and palms open in a place where good and holy things circle around again and again.

You might be surprised at how quickly you fill back up.

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