Reflections on my Pond

It is first thing in the morning, I have just made bread — I had run out. I am looking through the window realising something. It has rained hard in the night. I have a large pond in the garden — it teams with newts and frogs and dragonflies and all manner of other things unidentified. A week ago I took it upon myself to dig another — it would, I thought cure a boggy area nearby, and I rather like digging holes in the ground. It turned out well, but not as planned. It will not hold water at the level I thought, it has altered the drainage of the land (already confused by ground work), and it has disturbed the level of the other pond. I have banked up the edges of the other pond to try and remedy some of this. Now, after the overnight rain, the banking has held back water somewhere else and the garden is flooded where previously it was not. Then I remembered that I had done something similar at a previous house — digging, water levels, flooding. And I realised a number of things: one thing leads to another, something corrective often causes further or additional problems, hydraulics are difficult to come to terms with water, and although our lives change and we progress in some ways, in many ways we learn nothing and repeat things as though the repetition is in itself novel. How strange, I think that I have done this again. Why don't I learn anything? My mother used to say admonishingly, 'You will never learn!'. Then I realise that being fresh to the world, enjoying its novelty means doing things just like this. What is there to learn? There is no end product. There is no ‘wrapped up’ version. Life is so marvellously incomplete. Memory of things does not introduce a completeness, it only introduces a known catalogue, and that is fairly pointless. I went to the trouble a few months ago to learn Jimi Hendrix' 'Little Wing' on the guitar. Yesterday I thought I would try it out, only to find I had almost completely forgotten it. I was rather disturbed by this. I felt as though I could retain nothing, could build nothing into that ever growing picture of what I think ‘being me’ is all about. Today, after looking out of the window, and thinking about my pond, I feel more comfortable with my loss. Yes, today I will set to and 'learn' it again — at least until the next time.