Spring-Piper
Give from the brim, love. The day you dip below the stone, everyone you love drinks mud.
Who they are
The keeper of the spring-head — young, turquoise-and-silver, garlanded in water-lily, his wings the blue-orange flash of the kingfisher you half-see at clean water. He pipes the water up: a reed-pipe dripping bright drops, played over the fern grotto where the spring rises to feed the clootie well below. The old country was severe about spring-heads. A holy well fouled — boots washed in it, the source insulted — was said to dry up in the night, or lift itself entire and rise again in a kinder field. The source protects itself, or it dies. He is the clan's clearest lesson, whistled instead of preached: a spring gives forever because it gives only what rises past the stone.
Drawn upright — the teaching
You're a clear source — of energy, comfort, healing. People find you and drink; that's real, and it's good, and given from the overflow it never runs dry. The law is only about where you give from. The overflow renews itself. The spring-head, once drained, feeds no one — including you.
The working
Give only from the water that rises over the top of the spring, never from the spring-head itself. In a human life that means: know what fills you — the sleep, the solitude, the hour that is only yours — and fill first; give after, from what stands over the brim. Each morning, one honest reading: full, or filling? If filling, today you tend, you don't pour. At a real spring or well, keep the old courtesy — drink before you draw for others, lay a flower or a small coin on the water for the keeper, and bless, never thank: "Blessings on the source and the stone." Give from the top, not the bottom, and the source holds: them fed, you whole.
Drawn reversed — the shadow
You've poured yourself out until there's nothing left but mud — everyone got their drink, and you're the one gone dry. And be honest about the pride in it: being the well for everybody felt like being loved. It was thirst wearing a crown.
The undoing
Cap the spring for a season. Say it plainly to the ones who drink from you: "The well is closed for mending." Then let the water rise back to the stone — sleep, quiet, the filling things, daily, without apology — and give nothing until it does. Not a trickle; a trickle keeps the crack open. Even a spring can bleed empty — protect the source or there's water for no one. The ones who love you will wait at the stone. The ones who only loved the water will wander off, and that, too, is information.
Its tree · the ogham
Saille — the willow. The healer's tree — its bark was the old medicine for pain, and it gives that bark by the strip and heals over. But ring the trunk — strip it all the way round — and the tree dies. Willow's rule is his: give from what regrows. Never from the ring that keeps you alive.
Sit with this
Who taught you that running empty was proof you loved them? And what actually fills your spring — and when did you last do it?