Spring "Giga"
Loin opened the gate with the air of a man releasing not me, but his own conscience. His gaze mingled mild disapproval of my constant haste and philosophical sadness about the vanity of all things. It was an hour's leisurely walk to the Giga Spring, but an hour is an unaffordable luxury for a soul languishing in anticipation of a miracle.
I decide to run. I trot , then almost gallop, like a proud beast fleeing a pack of imaginary problems. Twenty minutes uphill—a result I'm not satisfied with. What is twenty minutes to someone who dreams of greatness? A drop in the ocean of ambition, a speck of dust on the scales of fate. My inner critic whispers about my lost form, but I brush it aside like a pesky fly from childhood.
There it is before me—our famous spring. The water trickles over the rocks, sparkling with liquid light, and there's something mesmerizing about this spectacle, something that stops time. "Giga" is no accident. Here, mountain water, clear as a tear, mixes with the sap of the amazing "Giga" tree, transforming into something more than just liquid. It's philosophy in liquid form, wisdom poured by nature into the jars of the world.
I lean toward the spring, and the cold water burns my palms with a blessed chill. Its taste is the bitterness of tree bark and the sweetness of mountain herbs, the memory of rains and the mystery of roots that have drank from the earth's veins for centuries. Every sip is like a return home, to a time when the world was simpler and miracles required no explanation.
I fill the buckets one by one, listening to the water sing its eternal song of patience. Each bucket grows heavier in my hands, but my soul also becomes lighter—as if with each movement I wash away something superfluous, unnecessary. There's a meditation in this simple work: bend, scoop, straighten, pour. The rhythm is ancient, like the breath of the earth.
The spring is in no hurry. It flows as it has for centuries, indifferent to my boyish ambitions and adult worries. This indifference is not coldness, but wisdom. The water knows: everything will pass, everything will flow away, everything will find its way to the sea. And in this fluidity lies a great lesson in patience, which I am only just beginning to understand.
The return journey with a full cart is a true test. Sixteen full buckets transform the journey into a test of not only muscle but also character. The wheels creak louder, the ground resists more stubbornly, and every stone along the way feels like a personal challenge. There's a beauty to this labor —the beauty of overcoming, the beauty of a burden voluntarily assumed.
Sweat blinds my eyes, my hands are numb from the strain, but my heart sings a song of victory. Not because I'm stronger than others, but because I didn't give up, I made it to the end, and I brought home more than they asked for. This small victory over myself contains the seed of all future victories, the very seed of that tree that will one day grow and provide shade for many travelers.
Thus, through the mundane routine of morning chores, I grasped the truth: great things are born from small ones, great achievements from daily efforts, where even exercise or a trip to fetch water become bricks in the wall of character. In the silence of a new day, between the sounds of the waking world and the warmth of my hearth, I took the first steps of my great journey—a journey toward myself.
It was a confession, not a chronology. A poetic recollection of a time when even the simplest rituals could become the beginning of a great journey. And laughing at myself, I understood: behind every action, no matter how mundane, lies a philosophy capable of changing a person—if they are ready to hear it.