The Land of Wells: A Parable

The hollow is not the wound. The hollow is the well.The Land of Wells is a contemplative parable for readers who have lived long enough to recognise the wells in themselves. On a dry plain stand hundreds of wells, each busy filling its rim with possessions, opinions, and the newest of the new, each holding down the small echo of a hollow it cannot name. Then one well grows quiet and begins to listen down, past the dryness, to the water that has been there all along.Patrik Somers received the seed of this parable in 1988, in Valdivia, Chile, and carried it for almost forty years before it asked to become this book. What follows the parable is a series of eight companions, gentle reflections for those who wish to sit longer at the well, drawing on the Sufi, Christian, and wider contemplative traditions without belonging to any one of them.This is a book about presence, about setting down what no longer fits, and about the shared current that runs beneath every separate life. It is short enough to read in an evening and deep enough to live with for years. It asks to be lived with, not read through.