Song of the Source

What soul has not been strengthened by the sound of a babbling brook?

This impeccable October afternoon atop the braes, I find myself in a desert of heather and strange greywacke rocks. The view across the valley is sweeping: I can see Tinto thirty miles away to the south-east and the shadowy adumbration of Ailsa Craig some fifty miles to the south-west. I can also see the ocean to the west  and the tops of the highland range to the north. But none of these primal giants embrace me as warmly as the trickling stream I have just plonked myself down beside. This is the source of some of the burns and streams you will see down there in Dalmuir and Kilpatrick before they run into the great Ganges that is Glasgow's River Clyde. And it is this source that trickles so gently but so evocatively that has now got my undivided attention. It is the complete opposite of a tap running. What is this sound then that holds me in such admiration? It is the absence of the man-made and the artificial. The absence too of the industrial and the enclosed. Here, we have water flowing not falling, and trickling across and through mineral and vegetable in the open. This water is thus 'convivial' as in accommodating other life within it. It is not industrial as in banishing life from it. This is why this stream sounds the way it does - because of its 'aboriginal conviviality' - and does not sound like a tap that has been turned on. What's more, because of its unenclosed nature, the mountains, the ocean, the clouds and the river, are all present here within this source and thus lend their 'flourishes' to this overall trickle. Which is why, if you listen to the stream carefully, your soul will be strengthened, for you too, along with the mountains, the ocean, the clouds and the river, will be accommodated within its song.