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."