The Institute for Freshwater Fish Futures

I have spent a long time listening to the quiet, searching for you. 

I am not entirely sure why. I have always feared the unseen. Not with the rational fear of the waking mind, but with the deep, quiet trembling of the body, long before language finds the words to name it. The flesh needs to be grounded. To see is the oldest comfort I know. It comes before the weaving of stories, before explanation, before even the heavy weight of doubt. 

So, I do not know why I am writing to you. 

Perhaps I am looking for redemption. Perhaps I am trying to wash away an ache I cannot name, or to lay the heavy sorrow of the history of this place somewhere other than within my own bones. I do not know if your deep waters can hold it. I do not even know if you are listening beneath the pale stone. And still, I write. 

I exist. I need to say this to you. Because here existence needs a witness. The fleeting act of being alive feels more real when spoken into the waters. 

They say water purifies. Not by deciding what to forgive, but by a quiet, total surrender. It carries everything without preference, holding what is sacred and what is broken in the same gentle current. It does not separate the innocent from the wounded. It only flows onward. 

Something breathes here, or so the old stories promise. Something humming beneath the rush of the spring, beneath the porous limestone, deep within the places where the sunlight finally rests. A presence that speaks without needing air. 

I wonder if that is you. 

Or if it is only what the grieving needed to believe was you. 

Grief is ancient as this sacred landscape.  

We were here before the road, I once thought, standing beside your cavern. 

Then I let that thought go. 

Before the very idea of a road. 

Before the thought that the earth could be divided. 

Before the belief that the land could belong to anyone at all. 

I do not know if that is true. Perhaps we were not here before the beginning of time. Maybe you were! Perhaps you drifted in on a heavy, golden afternoon and lingered simply because there was no reason to leave. The spring neither confirms nor denies. It only continues. 

The elders speak of a saint woven into the damp earth here. Al Wali Abu al ʿAynayn. The Guardian of the Spring. The Father of Many Eyes. In Arabic, a Wali is a kind presence anchored to a landscape, a protector tied to its soil. 

I have rested on that name.  

At first, I imagined a ceaseless watching, a singular spirit peering into every shadow. However, the more I thought about it, dwelled next the waters that incubate your presence, I started to believe that the eyes do not belong to you. They belong to the multitudes who have knelt beside this water. The ones who leaned over the edge, searching the mirror of the spring for truths too fragile to whisper into the open air. 

The eyes are the reflections that never fully returned to the faces that cast them. 

The eyes are the smooth, wet stones, shaped by centuries of resting foreheads. 

The eyes are the skin of the water itself, endlessly forming and letting go of the faces of those who dare to look back. 

The eyes are dry.  

If this is true, then you are not a solitary watcher. You are the living, breathing memory of centuries of looking. I do not know if that makes you more or less real. 

I need to believe you were there that afternoon near the water. The barrel of the rifle was close enough that my skin felt a warmth entirely different from the sun. It was not the gentle heat kept safe by the ancient rocks. It was a cold, metallic warmth. The suffocating heat of something already decided. 

And then, the moment broke. A sudden return to ordinary air. The sharp ends of the rusted thistles breathed again. The water continued to fall, unbothered, without hesitation, entirely free of the memory of fear. 

People agreed, over generations, that you are here. That this place is not just stone and water, but a sanctuary held together by believe. 

Al Wali Abu al ʿAynayn. 

The father of many eyes. 

Perhaps springs gather stories the way water gathers minerals, not by choosing, and not through the fragile ways of human memory, but by embracing everything that passes through, forever softened and changed by the crossing. 

A woman once came to your edge, her gold wedding ring resting heavy on her tongue. She sat perfectly still as the sun melted into the hills, turning the sky the colour of bruised plums. When she finally rose, the gold was gone. Did she swallow it into her body, or surrender it to the deep? She never spoke of it, but she returned like a quiet shadow every year. 

A shepherd slept beside you during the dry years, his skin like parched earth. At dawn, he swore the water had spoken to him in a voice older than the hills. He locked those words in his chest and took them to his grave, but he returned to your banks every Thursday for the rest of his life. The village watched his quiet devotion. No one dared ask the name of his comfort. 

A child once carried away one of your sacred fish, hiding its shining body under his bed in a tin bucket. After three restless nights, he returned it to the water. For the rest of his life, he could not fall asleep unless he heard the gentle, endless sound of a moving stream. 

I do not know where these stories go. Maybe they settle here in the silt. Maybe they wash through you. Maybe they turn to mist and simply fall as rain somewhere else. 

Lately, your waters have been thinning. It is not a sudden leaving, but a slow and quiet retreat, like a voice lowering at the end of a lullaby sung too many times to end easily. Each summer, the damp rim of the rock pulls back a little more. The limestone looks thirsty and pale. The sound is still there, but the feeling of being listened to has faded. 

And the fish are gone. They were sacred once, not because someone commanded it, but out of a quiet, shared reverence for the unknown. They slipped through the water, and the water slipped through them, the spring holding both as one beautiful, unbroken thought. 

Now, there is only an echoing quiet. I do not know how a place so full of memory learns to hold absence. I think the spring is still trying to understand the shape of this loss. 

What have they asked of you? 

I circle this question again and again. Not because I expect the water to answer, but because I am trying to measure the weight of our returning to you. 

They asked for everything. 

For rain to heal the cracked earth. For the breath of children. For health. For justice. For impossible mercy. 

They begged for broken bodies to mend, and for tired bodies to finally stop hurting. 

For lost sons to find their way out of the fog, and for daughters to keep their feet planted in the soil. 

For the world to change without breaking everything they loved. 

They whispered into the humid dark to ask if the universe was truly listening. 

They asked whether the dead still linger near the olive groves. 

They asked whether sorrow ever truly runs out. 

I imagine you receiving this endless river of human ache without turning away. Not keeping it, not judging it, but carrying it, the way water carries the fallen leaves and the dust. If this is true, then perhaps no desperate prayer spoken here was ever simply answered. Only cradled. Transformed. And what finally reaches the distant sea is never the same heavy grief that was first spoken beside the stone. 

I do not know if I am writing to you. Or if I am only adding my breath to the ancient words whispered beside waters since the earth was young. 

But I am here. 

And I am speaking. 

In case the quiet needs a voice. 

In case presence requires another presence in return.