Living Water: Wells, Wisdom and the Long Days of Summer
There is a particular quality to light in July and August that we rarely notice until it is gone. The countryside seems to hold its breath. Verges turn gold, the dew burns off by mid-morning, and across the parish the talk among those who work the land turns, as it always does at this time of year, to water — whether there has been enough of it or too much of it.
It is easy to forget how much our corner of England is shaped by water, or by the lack of it. Long before mains pipes and reservoirs, every village grew up around a spring, a stream or a well. People settled where the water was. The names of our lanes and fields still carry this history. For farmers and growers, a dry summer or an overly wet one is not an abstraction; it is a season watched anxiously from the cab of a tractor, one eye always on the sky.
Water runs deep through the stories we have told ourselves for thousands of years, too. The very first pages of Genesis open with a spirit moving over the waters. Wells, in the old accounts, were never merely practical — they were meeting places, where strangers became neighbours and journeys took new turns. In John’s Gospel there is the well where Jesus, tired from the road, falls into conversation with a woman who has come to draw water, and an unlikely meeting changes everything for her. There is something telling in all of this. The place people went to draw what they needed to live was also the place they gathered, talked and looked one another in the eye.
We have largely lost the well. We turn a tap and think no more about it. Yet the instinct behind it — the sense that the things which sustain us are also the things which bring us together — has not gone anywhere. It has simply moved. These long summer weeks, when routines spread and the evenings stretch out, are when many of us rediscover our own version of the village well: the bench outside the shop, the churchyard gate, the cricket boundary, the queue at the shop. The places we pause.
And pausing matters more than we tend to admit. We live in a culture that prizes ‘busyness’ and treats an empty afternoon as something close to a failure. Summer offers a gentle corrective. The child who lies on her back watching clouds, the walker who stops at a stile simply because the view deserves it, the neighbour who lingers a moment longer than necessary at the gate — none of them is wasting time. They are drawing on something. Call it rest, call it attention, call it the spirit moving over still water. Whatever the name, we come away replenished, and a replenished person is a kinder, steadier neighbour to have.
This is not, of course, a season of pause for everyone. As the rest of us slow down, our farming families move into their most demanding stretch of the year. The cutting and carrying of harvest waits for no holiday and bends to no diary. There is a quiet irony in it: the abundance that lets the rest of us relax is bought by someone else’s long, exhausting days. It is worth holding that in mind when we grumble about a tractor on the lane or a combine working past dusk. Behind the dust and the diesel is a year of patience, weather-watching and hope, drawing at last to its conclusion.
Perhaps that is the real invitation of these months — not simply to rest, but to notice. To notice the water we take for granted, the work that feeds us, and the people who happen to be standing beside us. The old wisdom understood that a community is held together less by grand gestures than by the small, repeated business of meeting at the same places, drawing from the same sources, looking out for one another through dry spells and plenty alike.
So however you spend these long, light weeks — whether you find yourself at rest or flat out, at the coast or in the field, in a pew or simply leaning on a gate watching the swifts wheel overhead — may you find your own well this summer. A place to pause, to be refreshed, and to be reminded that none of us was ever meant to draw from the depths alone.
We wish you a peaceful and restorative summer.
The Asterby Group Ministry Team