I totally agree with your hypothesis. But cannot prove it. One of my favourite spots as a little kid was the walk twixt Stevington church and the neighbouring River Ouse. The church sits on a rocky outcrop. Water issues from a spring - it's called a holy well, but is a spring, just to confuse - at the base of the outcrop. Although the surrounding wall to which this spring is 'let into' has been repaired a time or two, the thing still has the 'very old, pre - Christian' vibe to me. It is, I think, up on TMP. I'd like it to be on TMA. Personal affection, yup...maybe deserves TMA nonetheless. Good topic, in its own right and as a Change? subtopic. Totally with you - and others - on this one, Sir.
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Well my favourite well is St.keyne's in Cornwall. The well has all that beautiful mossy greenness, ferns clinging vertically, lichen lined stones that speaks of that dampness of water. It is not too far from Duloe stone circle, (about a mile?) quartz crystal stones like a crown upon the land. St.Keyne's is also on TMP, and has it saint's story which of course could have trickled down from much earlier times, considering her time of 5th century date.
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spencer wrote:
I totally agree with your hypothesis. But cannot prove it.
Not always necessary to prove everything spencer.We’ll probably never prove that the Buddha actually achieved enlightenment and entered Nirvana, nor if Jesus ascended to take his seat at the right hand of God. Nor whether Krishna really did counsel Arjuna on the Field of Dharma... but you take my point :-) The point is that those concepts, those ever evolving interpretations of ‘reality’ as we perceive it, have not stopped millions of people from believing in them nor, perhaps more importantly, from creating some of mankind’s greatest art, architecture, music and poetry in their name.
That aside, a few days after starting this thread, I realised how much Richard Jefferies had (subconsciously) influenced my opening post. Jefferies, Rabindranath Tagore, Walt Whitman and thousands of other poets, humanists, gurus, mystics and visionaries have been the guiding light for so many – past and present, East and West. Perhaps it’s Jefferies however, more than any other, who touches the souls of those here who would ‘drink at the spring’. Here’s what Jefferies writes in his book, The Old House at Coate, about (spring) water -
"I went to drink at the spring: the clear, cool, and sweet water tempted me in the summer. Stooping in the rocky cell, I lifted the water in the hollow of my hand, carefully else the sand might be disturbed. The sunlight gleamed on it as it slipped through my fingers; thus I had the sun, too, in my palm. Alone, under the roots of the trees and the step stone; alone, with the sunlight and the pure water, there was a sense of something more than these; the water was more to me than water; and the sun than sun - as if I had something in common with them and could feel with them. The gleaming ray on the liquid in my palm held me in its possession for the moment: the touch of the water gave me something from itself; it dropped from my fingers and was gone; the gleam disappeared, but I had had them. Beside the physical water and the physical light, my soul had received from them their beauty."