Drain the Well

If a well on your land is filled with poison, mixing in with the drinking water, you don’t continue to sip from it – or subject others to its deadly affects. You either have to dam it up and make it impenetrable – or drain it and start over in another location. It’s hard to do – this has been a place of safety, of cool, refreshing liquid for years – sometimes centuries. But a few doses of poison, or even just one, can ruin the whole well. It becomes bitter and unrelenting. Barren of its purpose. Acrid. But sometimes it’s time to let go. You begin with the bricks – the walls around the hole that have held it in place over time. Walls you’ve sat on, dangled your feet over, leaned against while making wishes. Walls sometimes with initials carved into the stone or brick – some of the mortar cracking underneath the weight of the magnitude of the place. But you go, one at a time. Some bricks can be saved for new construction, while others have turned to powder or been crushed during the demolition. All of the mortar has to go. And piece by piece, little by little, the walls come down, and all you’re left with is a hole in the ground, not empty, but filled with a toxicity that is too dangerous to risk.

So you start to let it out. Slowly at first, a trickle from the first few cracks in the inner wall. Before long, it feels like a flood, the tainted water staining the earth like blood, churning mud under your feet that you don’t even want touching your boots. The once-pleasant sweetness has been corrupted, and it stinks, mixing with the dirty earth. You try to hold your breath, but can’t. Sometimes you just have to breathe and take it all in to realize the full measure of what’s been done, and what needs to be done about it. At the end…nothing. It feels empty now. A place that used to be full of so much hope, so much promise and so much life. Just a shell of itself, corrupted from its purpose, and left wanting. You begin to fill in the hole, shoveling dirt on what feels like an empty grave, and it is. Its the death of one thing. But sometimes life springs from death – no. Sometimes death is the necessity to facilitate new life and make it possible.

You go to the other side of the grounds, far away from the now-saturated earth and begin again. One shovel full at a time. Piece by piece. You dig a hole. You find water. You have it tested. You taste it. Still muddy, with flecks of dirt mixed in from surroundings, but no longer poisonous. There comes a time when you have to make a choice – to continue to grieve the loss of what was – or to embrace the open possibility of what’s to come, whether you know what that is, or not. So you shrug to yourself, nod to your helpers, and the work begins again. You mix new mortar. You build new bricks. Find new stones. Cut and shape them to a snug and clean fit. For remembrances, you mix in a few of the old, salvaged bricks from the old well to give it character, and to remind you of what can happen when you don’t expect it. But mostly, it’s new. Finally satisfied with the work, you return home – tired but accomplished.

There’s a hell of a storm overnight, rainwater pounding on your roof, making a tinny, empty sound like those last few drops from the old well. You take time to run the gambit of feelings, to let yourself feel, let yourself go, let yourself remember. And emotions pour from you like that poisoned water from the earth. At the end of it all, as the storm lifts and the sun begins to rise on the far horizon, you take a deep (if somewhat shaky) breath, and rise to greet the day.

For awhile you avoid the new well – afraid of its comparison to the old. Afraid it won’t somehow measure up. Afraid of the unknown. But finally, parched and sweating you approach it cautiously. You lower the bucket into the deep chasm and pull it up – heavy, full and overflowing. You pause, realizing the enormity of the moment, then finally put the cup to your lips and just have faith…

The truth is, nothing has ever tasted so sweet.

Sometimes the best way of moving on is to let go completely, drain the poison and believe that the water will be as clean and fresh as hoped – and better than ever. You’d never get there, without being emptied completely.