The Wellspring

What if the mind that breaks was never the source of its own breaking?

What if depression, anxiety, the shattering we call psychosis—these are not malfunctions of individual brains but symptoms of something vaster, something we have forgotten how to name?

There is a field beneath the field.

Before you learned your name, before language carved the world into objects, you were held—not only by arms but by something invisible, ancestral, alive. A mother's gaze, yes. But also: the village that surrounded her. The stories that located her. The rituals that metabolized what no single nervous system could hold alone.

You came into being because you were witnessed into being.

And the witness was never one person. It was a field. A living coherence that caught each new consciousness as it emerged and said: You are real. You belong here. We see you.

What happens when that field fractures?

What happens when the witness is herself unwitnessed—fragmented by pace, by isolation, by the thousand extractions of modern attention? She holds the infant, but she is not held. Her gaze carries love and also absence. The field behind her eyes has dimmed.

The child reads not the doing but the being. The child feels whether ground exists beneath the one who holds them. The child metabolizes the state of the field before a single word is spoken.

We have named the downstream effects.

We have catalogued them, medicalized them, assigned them codes. We treat them one by one—this brain, this chemistry, this individual history of wound.

But the wound is not located where we are looking.

Imagine a wellspring.

Not a metaphor but a felt truth: a source from which consciousness draws what it needs to cohere. Meaning. Ground. The capacity to locate oneself in time, in story, in the arms of something larger.

The wellspring is not built by individuals. It is tended. It is fed by what flows into it—ritual, attention, presence, the slow work of composting grief into wisdom. It is protected from contamination. It is passed down through those who remember that it exists.

Now imagine depletion.

The tenders scattered. The rituals abandoned. The attention harvested and sold. The field polluted with unmetabolized trauma, acceleration, noise.

The wellspring does not announce its emptying. Those who draw from it simply find less. They reach for meaning and find vapor. They reach for ground and find nothing solid. They reach for connection and find only surfaces.

And then we call their withering a disease.

The contemplatives knew.

In every tradition, there were those who descended—not away from the world but toward the source. Their practice was not escape. It was tending. Filtering. Holding open the channel between surface and depth.

They were persecuted not because they withdrew but because they remembered what power requires us to forget: that there is a commons beneath the divisions, a shared water that does not respect the boundaries we have drawn.

What would it mean to tend the wellspring now?

Not another protocol. Not another diagnosis. Not another individual extracted from polluted water, treated, and returned to the same poison.

Something slower. Something that cannot be scaled or sold.

The recovery of attention as sacred substance. The rebuilding of witness at every level—parent to child, friend to friend, community to member, living to dead. The patient composting of what has accumulated unmetabolized. The remembering that we do not produce ourselves.

These are not answers. They are openings.

Sit with them. Let them trouble you. Let them rearrange something beneath the level of thought.

Because the healing we need cannot be administered. It can only be grown. In fields we must learn, again, to tend.

What do we draw from when we draw from each other?

What have we stopped feeding that once fed us?

Where are the tenders—and what would it mean to become one?