My First Pond

Today for some reason I was thinking back to the time several years ago when I built my first pond. I didn’t really know what I was doing and I didn’t have much money to put into it. I bought a cheap swimming pool liner, dug a hole and filled it with water. I knew nothing about pumps and pond plants that keep the water clean. I went out and bought some 12 cent goldfish and presto!! I had a pond. It was fall at the time and soon it got cold and the water in the pond froze over. I had noticed that the 14 fish I had originally bought had dwindled to two even before the pond froze. It was a particularly cold winter and the water stayed frozen in the pond all winter long. When it started to get a little warmer, about February or March, I had a dream that I went out to the pond and that there were goldfish in it and that they were alive. So when the pond finally thawed out, I went out to check it out. Sure enough, two goldfish had survived. By this time the water was mucky and green and it took a great deal of effort to even notice the two goldfish, swimming around in the stale green water. After doing my homework and realizing that there was a lot of work and money involved in fixing the green, stale, mucky pond into something worthwhile, I decided to fill in the hole with dirt and plant a bush instead. However, I immediately went out and bought a fish bowl and some fish food and chlorine remover and went about to rescue the goldfish from their unpleasant living conditions. I filled the bowl full of water, added the chlorine remover and placed the surviving goldfish into a brand new bowl with spanking clean water. However, to my dismay, when I went back in to check on them less than an hour later, both fish were dead. I was astonished and heartbroken!! How did these fish survive a frozen pond all winter long, a filthy, dirt and algae filled hole in the ground only to die as soon as I rescued them from their stench?

The next morning when I went in to work, I was telling a coworker about my tragedy who happened to have a huge pond of his own. He immediately proclaimed, Joy, you shocked them to death. They were used to the green water. You should have filled the bowl up with the green water and slowly replaced it with clean, little by little, so they could get used to their new environment.

Wow!! What a lesson!! I remember at the time thinking, isn’t that profound. How many times do we see ourselves in the muck of life and immediately go about to remove ourselves from it only to find the shock of it too great to bear. Or how many times do we see someone in need and go about to rescue them from the stench of their environment, only to find them either dead in the water or right back in the stench of the pond they came out of? We all have noticed that many times we seem to repeat our same mistakes over and over. We end one relationship only to find the next one remarkably similar. Or we quit one job and end up facing the same issues in the next one and the next one.

Maybe it is time to take it a little easy on ourselves. Don’t jump out of one dirty pond only to jump into a bowl of clean water that is too much of a shock to our system and we can’t survive. That is why many people who win the lottery find themselves poor again in a remarkably short period of time. We need to work on raising ourselves up to a higher level of existence little by little. I have heard some call that raising their vibration and it is a good analogy. If we lose our temper several times a day we can’t just expect to wake up one morning and never lose our temper again. Focus on maybe losing our temper only one time today. If we want better relationships, work on the ones that we have. Work on our relationship with ourselves. If we find ourselves fighting depression or worry or sickness, every time we think about the situation, think what would be a better feeling thought? Choose to dump out a cup of stinky green water and pour in a cup of clean, sparkling water. Pretty soon we will find ourselves swimming around in crystal clear water and we will hardly notice the change, until one day, it will dawn on us…. wow… my pond sure is clean…

Looking back on that time period in my life, I was the goldfish living in the mucky green water but I didn’t realize it. I think that is why I had the dream about the fish surviving. My guides or my Higher Self was saying… hey help is on the way.. soon you will be swimming around in sparkling clean water and you will wake up one day and say… wow… what a change… but don’t be too hard on yourself if it doesn’t happen overnight………