Sunday Sermon #3: The Fountain

How can you stand exactly where you are and let your circumstances nourish you?

Image via.

Sunday Surmons are short essays on spirituality, delivered to your inbox every first Sunday of the month.

It’s not fashionable to live the life you were given. To simply be where you are isn’t just trad in a 20th century way, it’s fully unconventional. Who among us goes for the mundanity of the Trainspotting speech: choose an average job, choose to eat three meals a day at normal times, choose relationships with the people directly around you. Where’s the Hero’s Journey arc in that shit?

Every day I’m conscious of the cultural pressure that hums at 666 Hz; it tells me to be fit, ageless, have an inner circle of millionaire geniuses, put castor oil in my belly button and orient myself towards large goals. So much was called brat this year (cigarettes, second day make-up, Kamala Harris) but I’m pretty sure that Charli XCX would say the overarching sentiment of brat is to strive for the top, even and especially when you’re at the bottom. Born without your permission into a convergence of circumstances that look and feel like a hellscape? Seriously, let me send you some videos about manifestation.

It’s in this dynamic/demented context that I’ve recently found myself nursing a desire to stand still. It began when I started to get lightly obsessed with the metaphor of a fountain. I’m in the shower: imagining I’m a fountain. I’m stressed at my desk: thinking about the fountain. I meditate: close my eyes and become that fountain.

I didn’t lift this metaphor from the Old Testament (the Fountain of Life, God-giving fountain of spiritual replenishment, etc) but from The Fountain by Dutch coach and researcher Els Van Steijn. I’m about to reduce a whole non-fiction book to a few paragraphs but stick with me.

The Fountain of Life, via Wellcome

Imagine your family system is like a giant tiered fountain. You are on one layer of the fountain and no matter how you feel about your family, you belong on your specific tier. Above you, are your parents. Above them are their parents, and so on. “Assume your place, and you’ll receive an invisible strength essential to feeling fulfilled and powerful,” Van Steijn writes.

Both good and bad (traits, patterns, fates) are passed down the fountain to you and the idea is to assume your place and receive it all. It’s a package deal.

The issue is, of course, that people with loving parents and simple childhoods are happy to stand in the fountain and access that strength. If you didn’t experience that then you want to escape your place, usually by putting invisible distance between you and your family.

This is where the concept of ascent and descent is introduced to the metaphor. More often than is healthy, parents will descend by assuming the position of their child’s friend. (How many times have you heard a mum call their son or daughter their best friend? Truly chilling.) Or by being overly needy, expecting their children to help them with their emotional problems. In those instances, a child (you) will always ascend from your place because you love your parent. You also ascend if you internally criticise and reject your parents and what they’ve subjected you to, thus thinking yourself above them somehow.

The writer’s solution is incredibly vague but its simplicity made psychic sense to me. Whether you want to remain estranged from your family or not, you must accept:

firstly, that you are your parents’ child,

secondly, them as parents,

and thirdly, what you inherited. Only then can you receive the strength that comes from being in your place in the fountain.

For readers with a difficult or traumatic family history, this might not land easily at first (there were many moments reading where I thought, wow, Twitter circa 2015 would’ve had fun with this woman). But I personally found it an incredibly empowering set of ideas.

Design for a table fountain — Hans Holbein, via.

After I finished this book, I started to see fountain logic everywhere. If I accepted the part of the city I’m in, could I pull strength from my surroundings? If I tackled the stage of life I’m at, might I find resources there? If I acknowledged my place in my friend groups, how could I acquire energy from my position? If I affirmed my place in the industries I work in, was there a robustness in that?

I’ve always sourced some twisted form of strength from the belief that things are better somewhere else and that “everything will be okay as long as this is not where I truly am.” By rejecting the reality of my kaleidoscope of ~situations for their flaws and weaknesses at any time, I’m sure I rejected the many positives to be taken.

This fountain logic was unnatural for me—uncomfortable—which typically makes me suspicious that something will be a worthy experiment. I don’t think it’s a practice that’s discordant with having goals or the want to better yourself.

But it does mean having to accept being mid and work toward the future at an aggressively normal pace. Suffice it to say, I’ve got so into this metaphor that it’s become the screensaver in my mind that plays when I’m stressed: the flow of water down from the tier above, and the run-off into the next.

I can hear it now: Choose your own tier. Choose descent. Choose letting the water flow. Choose just vibing where you’re at. Choose birds landing on you. Choose your circumstances. Choose the fountain.

Meditations:

What has been handed down to you in your fountain of origin?

Can you accept it all, the gifts and the curses?

Look at where you live, the communities you’re a part of, where your career is at: can you accept and live it all, as monumental and as full of disappointment as circumstances might be?

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My updates: I recently began work on a series of wellness pieces for Vogue, namely, this little feature about energetic tethers. My current tether is pretty pedestrian: it’s to this kitchen table that I want so I can invite three friends over at Christmas and have a proper meal together, without everyone having to sit on my sofa and the floor like they’re usually forced to. Sometimes, I have a tether to someone I’m jealous of or some woman I’m fascinated by, so this feels like an upgrade. (That will make no sense until you read the piece.)

I will have another newsletter coming out before Christmas but just in case I don’t say it then: I hope you have a great holiday season whatever you do, and can manage to enjoy your place in the fountain. I feel ridiculously Christmassy this year. All I wanna do is fuck myself up on biscuits and The Muppet Christmas Carol. Imagine me that way <3