A Spring Does Not Ask Who Is Thirsty

You did the hard part already, though nobody applauded: you stopped performing your thirst and told the truth about it, and you went low enough that the water could reach you. Then one morning the low place is full — not because you earned it, but because water always goes where it is welcome — and you discover that fullness is not an ending. It is a fork in the road. A pool that stays sealed goes stagnant. But a full place that opens becomes a spring, and a spring does not ask who is thirsty before it runs.

Sit with that, because everything the old fear taught you argues with it. The spring does not check names at the mouth of the pool. It does not weigh who has been good, who has been grateful, who has earned a drink this morning. The wheat gets water and the weed gets water, and no record is kept of which seed said thank you. That is not carelessness — it is nature. Rain has never been rationed by merit. The sun does not rise for the righteous and sulk behind clouds for everybody else. Everything that gives life gives the way springs give: entirely, without interviewing the thirsty.

Your old fear had one question it loved to ask: do they deserve it? Notice what that question actually does. It does not protect the water — it stops it. A pool that demands worthiness before it flows is not a spring; it is a dam with a grudge, and everything behind it goes stale while everything beyond it stays brown. You were not made to be a dam. The hoarded thing is the ruined thing; water kept too long sours in exactly the proportion it was kept. That is the teaching nobody wants: keeping is how you lose it, and giving is how you keep it.

Here is the part that flips you upside down: the spring does not run out by running. It is fed while it pours. The same channel that carries the water away is the channel that draws the water up — the flow in and the flow out are one motion, and dam either one and both stop. What fills you is not for you alone. It runs through you, and the running-through is the filling. You have been treating love like something with a bottom, rationing it drop by drop, afraid that a generous day is a day closer to empty — and the whole time the source was never a reservoir but a current.

And look at what the current does downstream. It does not hover at your edge asking permission. It greens everything it touches — the field you will never see, the walker you will never meet, the ground that was barren back when you were still sealed. You were never the destination. You were the passage. The low place was never a place to arrive; it was a place for water to pass through on its way to turning everything green. That was the purpose all along, and it was never once about you — which is the only kind of purpose that can never run out.

So open the mouth of the pool. Give the way the rain gives: no accounting, no interviews, no memory of who said thank you and who did not. Somebody downstream is dry right now, and the water has been waiting on your permission — and the permission was never theirs to ask for, and never yours to withhold. Let it run. Then watch the valley, because everything downstream turns green, and the green will tell you what holding never could: the water was never yours, and that was always the good news.

— Pharaoh (Kiwann Williams)