What this photo does not show you:
A blue-tailed dragonfly with whirring wings, hovering, darting
– actually, there are two dragonflies, one chasing the other one in flight
together, making curlicues and rapid ascents into the sky. Sometimes one lone dragonfly
rests so very lightly on the tip of a thin green blade and that blade arcs yet ever
so slightly closer to the surface of the water.
The soft summer breeze itself has just barely enough breath to
move those very thin blades of the green bending plant growing up from the muck
on the bottom of my pond. And the surface of the water itself is not quite
still.
There are water spiders skating and then resting on nearly
invisible outstretched legs. Each leg bends the surface of the water into a
tiny circle.
And then as I sit quietly watching the pond, I feel the
lightest whispers of a variable wind against my own skin.
And there’s more. I see wasps – blue-blackish - brown and
yellowish – wasps here and there on the limestone rocks edging the small pond.
The wasps with their flickering wings seem to appear and disappear like magic.
And I in the clear water, I can see goldfish. Very orange. Shining
orange. Glittering like scaly, fish-shaped oranges swimming slowly in the pond.
They too come and they go. They hover in the water like dragonflies in the
summer air. Except that the fish are not really like dragonflies at all. They’re
fish. With just a wave of a tail, one or another goldfish simply slips from my
sight beneath the lily pads floating on the surface of the water. Who could even
tell which fish is which except perhaps another fish?
And if you look carefully again at the photo, you might perhaps
see two pale yellow water lily blossoms. You might see those pale yellow petals
so very carefully arrayed on each blossom. And then you might wish to lean over
the edge of the pond for a closer look. I have declared to you that the water
lilies were a pale yellow, but those are merely words - hardly the very true colors
of the water lily petals, after all. But for now, ‘pale yellow’ will have to
do.
And in the next moment a single white butterfly flutters by,
settling for a moment on a tiny white flower with an even tinier yellow center.
It is only a miniscule blossom poking barely a half inch or so above the water
- an itty bitty bloom arising from a curling strand of anacharis, an underwater
plant that tangles in profusion beneath the surface of the pond. Perhaps you might
even see, if you would look again at the photo that I took, a small portion of
anacharis strand along the surface of
the pond near where the thin green blades arc. But I would like to encourage
you to scoop up a dripping handful of those anacharis strands from the riotous
tangle of this slithering, slimy underwater water plant so that you might gain
more complete sense of a picture that only shows a much simpler surface of
things.
And then I would ask you to look still closer, over at one side
of the pond. There’s a spider’s web, woven from the finest spider’s silk and strung
between some of those thin green blades of the bending plant and the limestone rocks
that line the edge of the small garden pond. I have sometimes seen a
long-legged spider waiting near her web - but not on this day.
And there might be a yellow swallowtail over by the border
phlox. And perhaps a monarch sailing by somewhere beyond the corner of the
frame of the picture and then dropping down over the fence into the neighbor’s
yard. And perhaps I should at least
mention, that on a not so very long ago summer morning, as I sat on my patio in
the summer shade, I heard a mourning dove calling.
Who could ever see and hear and touch it all?
But now and finally we come to where all of these wandering
words that I have written for this post began:
It was the reflections of the thin green blades –
the curving
crossing
sometimes nearly straight
thin dark lines
against the reflected white-blue sky –
the blackness of blades that I noticed as I looked into my
pond,
truly insubstantial lines
that I could never, ever touch,
real and unreal lines
living within a nether world immeasurably beyond my grasp.
And so from where I sat near my pond on a particular summer
day, I thought I might try to take a photo of those curving, crossing,
sometimes nearly straight thin dark lines. Of course it would be no more than a
picture of a kind of illusion. An image only of thin dark lines wavering somehow,
somewhere between me and the far side of the known world.
And then, on that summer morning not so long ago, I leaned
back in my patio chair to look for what else I might have missed seeing around
me. And I realized that I had missed seeing nearly everything. I couldn’t see
everything. Or in truth, I could only begin to see everything.
And then I thought to try to tell you something about it.
And so this post is to remind myself and also to remind you
of a simple reality: for so very, very much
less time than it took for me just to write these many words that you are now reading
– in those few seconds as I sat watching the world by my little garden pond, I
saw what I saw and then for a moment I imagined that I saw it all. The world
not of many parts, but whole.
And then, just as suddenly, in the very next moment, with the
splish-splash of my bare foot splashing into the water, everything vanished – all of it - everything. And then, there I was once again, just sitting by my
garden pond. The world was before me as it had always been.
Dragonflies rested on thin green blades over the water.
And the water reflected everything.
