The Pond in the Woods

 

Photo by Nicolas Solerieu on Unsplash

I stood by the pond in the woods. A silver circle of shimmering light that I visited often. All about me was constant change.

Newt eggs sealed in their leafy pitta bread cocoons, each leaf carefully folded by the female newt to safeguard the ovum from desiccation and the attention of predators.  Over time the larvae develop until hatched but even then, the change process continues with feathery gills providing the thin but extensive surface area through which oxygen is absorbed from the surrounding water. Lungs develop and eventually the juvenile newt can leave the pond to breathe air direct, no longer a prisoner within its benign watery gaol.

Many insects transform through the stages of egg, larva, pupa to adult. If only science can learn how to replicate the entire regeneration of organs and limbs, much human and animal suffering would be a thing of the past, but paradoxically more time money and effort are expended on finding new ways to kill and maim on genocidal scales.

But back at the pond in the clearing Selene’s light reflected on the water charts the changes from gibbous to new moon. As each lunar month waxes and wanes the trees mark time to this celestial dance. Stark branches in winter imperceptibly turn to buds of springtime green until they are fully clothed in their summer raiments. Then the kaleidoscope of carotenoids, flavonoids and anthocyanins usurp their vain sister chlorophyll who had hogged the stage all summer masking her siblings’ radiance.

And humans too experience their own metamorphosis from womb to tomb, with the 7 ages of humankind counting down the years from helplessness to helplessness. Nature’s true cruelty.

As I stand and admire the diamond studded heavens, I am struck with the knowledge that even the universe will not last forever. No eternal reverberations through time and space like the echoes of the big bang, full of the promise of things yet to come. Verdant forests pulsing with life, concepts of love and joy in the constructs of human consciousness, warm sunshine caressing one’s face on a mild October morning. These and may other wondrous things still in the embryonic form of stellar dust and gases as the universe unfolded.

But finally, inevitably, entropy and chaos will prevail as the final death rattle of the universe’s last gasp is choked off even as it is emitted at the moment when all existence is snuffed out.

 Steve Parnwell