FONS

Every river starts somewhere small.

Follow any great river upstream, past the cities and the bridges and the wide slow bends, and eventually you reach a place where water simply comes out of the ground. A crack in a rock. A patch of moss that never dries. A pool no bigger than a table, clear enough to see every stone on the bottom.

The water in a spring has often made a long journey to get there. It fell as rain on hills, sometimes far away, sank into the soil and travelled through layers of rock for years, for centuries, in some places for many thousands of years. On the way the stone filtered it. By the time it rises into the light, it is some of the cleanest water on Earth.

The Romans built whole cities around springs. Their aqueducts carried spring water for dozens of kilometres, and the springs had a god of their own, Fons, honoured every October with garlands thrown into the water and hung around the wells.

Marcus Aurelius turned the image inward. Dig within, he wrote. Within is the spring of good, and it can always well up, if you keep digging. He was an emperor with every outward resource imaginable, and still he believed that what mattered most could only be found inside.

What you are looking for is often already under your feet. It only needs digging.

We spend a great deal of energy looking outside ourselves for whatever will make life feel clear: a new place, a new person, a new plan. Sometimes that helps. But the springs that keep flowing through a drought are the deep ones, fed from far below and independent of the weather.

That is why this album starts here. Before the waves, the tides and the deep sea, there is a small, clear place where water first comes up into the light, quietly and without any hurry.

FONS is the first track of AQUA, and the stillest. Everything that follows flows out of it.

— Marcus Aurelius, 121–180 AD