The theme of this newsletter parallels the theme of ‘Castalian Spring’ along with my Three Sundays in January broadcast and my upcoming Asilomar conference on the shores of Monterey Bay in California; that is: finding a way to ‘Drink from a Deeper Well’. Intuitively, each of us knows what that phrase means, we all secretly or not so secretly long to find a way to be nourished more fully: by our daily life, by a relationship or marriage, by our art or our music or by the physical expression of our lives through a given discipline or sport. Contemporary life is a constant invitation to skate along on the surface, to refuse the deeper dive that takes time, focus and concentrated presence; whether we are distracted through the only half-realized emotions of texting, the general addiction to our screens or the inability to take our insights and sense of presence to a deeper level.

As a schoolboy in the North of England subject to the last gasp of a classical education; I learned, under the guise of Greek and Latin, the wild doings of a crowd of ancient Greek Gods: where they lived, where they descended from, physically and familiarly, and the havoc they almost always caused when they appeared in our world. (To accidentally come across a Greek God on a mountainside was never, ever, a good thing.)

Mount Parnassus at various times was the home of Dionysus, Orpheus, the Nine Muses and most important of all, the great god of poetry: Apollo. Any of these mythic beings would be enough to cause trouble in any human life should they come down to meet you. One of the ways the overwhelming powers of inspiration and electric presence represented by these figures could be stepped down to our human level, was through the natural rain that fell and flowed both over and under the slopes of Parnassus, emerging at the bottom in a most concentrated way in a famous source called the Castalian Spring. This spring is said to have carried the inspiration of Apollo, Orpheus and the Nine Muses to anyone who drank from it, and above all, to give them the powers of poetry and articulation in which to carry that gift to others.

This last October I visited, beneath Parnassus, a deserted early morning Delphi in the quiet company of my wife, and was shocked to find myself suddenly coming upon that Castalian Spring. I had no idea it still took the form of a real and present physical source, burbling not far from the road that passed it on the mountainside. My first inner encounter, standing before it, was with my reluctance to take it seriously. I remembered the reputation of its mythic powers, but only in the way they had long ago been drowned by my schoolboy, intellectual irony, and only in the way I had avoided any abstraction of poetry that stole from it what I always saw as the everyday sacredness of ordinary speech. Luckily, over the years, I have given myself a little training in letting go of names, prejudices and all those excuses for reluctance we make in order to keep the raw powers of the world at bay. Gathering myself, I stood in silence for a good while, looking at the spring as if it might indeed carry everything the ancient myths had promised and then stooped to the cool water with my cupped hands, drinking with no little thirst from our walk in the hot morning sun rising over Parnassus. The harvest of that moment of presence was the following poem, begun in note form on my iPhone beside the very spring, and worked on, little by little, ever since until this latest version, completed here this morning, in far away Costa Rica.