Wellspring
I miss the open spaces of my childhood but I’m caught in a bind. The city is where I’ve lived most of my life but it’s the smell of the country that makes me feel alive again, the smell of open space and it’s reminder of a different kind of days work that makes sleeping at night a cinch.
Country people have that all over city people for sure. Don’t get me wrong, country people have their fair share of worries too and they’re not immune to the kind of pressures (Banks foreclosing on loans) that have seen a rise in suicide among its own. The harshness of those realities have taken their toll on many farmers in recent years.
Country people also have at their core a toughness that’s designed to see them through droughts and floods, heavy stock or crop losses that would make any respectable person cry. Are they super human? No! But they have a capacity for self belief and survival that never fails to astound me.
When push comes to shove drawing from an inward strength is that defiant ferocity we are all capable of to want to keep our heads above the water. It’s in-built. In the city we can get complacent and allow the pudgy fingers of middle-age indolent spread to wrap themselves around our resolve. In short, we can get soft around the belly!
We’ve become too used to ‘convenient’ this or ‘convenient’ that. We can end up with callouses where we’ve held a yard broom too tightly and get to thinking life’s tough. To be fair, the city has its own self-inflicted social wounds but that’s another story.
I wonder sometimes where the origins of the original well-spring of inner strength begins, I’d like to know that more than where you can find the fountain of youth. The latter is a distractive form of self-flattery I don’t much care for. What’s wrong with life lines? But knowing the source of the well-spring, now that would be very very cool.
