They come there empty. The construction worker in his rusty pick-up, he comes with a used Gatorade bottle. The business woman on her lunch break brings a 5-gallon jug for the water cooler. The little ones and I watch from a picnic table made out of recycled milk jugs, same containers a white-haired couple have looped on their fingers.

It happened a hundred years ago, the discovery of our little artesian well. The locals poked around in the soil looking for fuel and up came this water spout.

When you’ve been found, you burst up from the ground. You’re a rock that gives water, a hidden aquifer bubbling good stuff into open air. The unseen becomes seen.

It’s slower now than it once was, gone from sixty gallons per minute to fifteen over the course of a century. The kids and I come near and splash our hands under cool water and pat our faces.

I start to do the math on when it will run down to a trickle. Come a line of people on lunch break, it flows. Come dark of night, when the city folk are on to dinner and bedtime, it flows.

When we follow dragonflies to the dirt path along the creek, I take another look behind. If only there were a knob we could spin to to stop the water while its not in demand, some way to save it.

But around the corner, I see where my thoughts are taking me. There lies the quietest pond. Lily pads are glued in place. Only insects crowd around. When you stop the flow and hoard the drink for another day, it goes stagnant.

We writers have to be the flowing well, to have a heart of readiness to share the good stuff hidden deep under the surface, to keep it flowing even when the rate slows, even when the crowds aren’t coming.

     And if you give yourself to the hungry
     And satisfy the desire of the afflicted,
     Then your light will rise in darkness
     And your gloom will become like midday.
     And the Lord will continually guide you,
     And satisfy your desire in scorched places,
     And give strength to your bones;
     And you will be like a watered garden,
     And like a spring of water whose waters do not fail.

                                                        ~Isaiah 58:10-11

When we think we are wordless, when we are thirsty for our craft, when we have the dreaded writer’s block, still we write.

We have to be like the widow of Zarapheth who gave up the crumbs from her cabinet and then found her jars overflowing, to be like the nursing mother who finds that the more she gives, the more she produces.

When we write we flow fresh even when we’re not in demand…and when the time comes and the people gather, we can trust they’ll come away refreshed and so will we.

{What has been your experience with writing through the silence or writer’s block? How do you feel about pouring out words as a remedy for wordlessness?}

I so much enjoyed my time away at the amazing Influence Conference this weekend where I had the chance to meet and learn alongside so many lovely writers. But I’m happy to be back at my keyboard carrying on with Day 7 of my series 31 Days ~ Preserve Your Story, linking up with The Nester’s annual 31 Days of Change.

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