In the past three years I have created two rather small ponds. it would have been better to have had one large one but there was a mass of concrete in the way – so two ponds it is. And through sitting, watching and waiting and clearing out duck weed and string algae I feel I have come to be closely involved with pond life. I think pond life is a term of insult but the whole thing is wonderful. Basically pond life seems to arrive as if from nowhere. I did begin with some frog spawn from a friend but last year a load of toads arrived and this year I was amazed to see newts… At least two so far and I’ve seen them attacking one another… perhaps there is an aspect of slight horror on first relating to the newts. There does seem something prehistoric. But I’m also thrilled that the pond can sustain all these life forms ..
In his autobiography called Native Realm Czeslaw Milosz, the East European poet, writes about his ‘old resentment toward nature, my fear of her cruelties – nature meaning both the one outside us and the one within us’. And in one of his letters to Thomas Merton, Milosz takes issue with what he sees as Merton’s sentimentality towards nature. When I realised that all the frog spawn in pond B had been eaten by the newts I felt this cruelty and feared for the tadpoles in pond A. When I bought four pond snails for pond B I participated in that cruelty because in my ignorance I didn’t know that newts can kill and eat pond snails. The frogs eat the slugs and today one ate a woodlouse – I watched it jump up and take it. So yes Milosz fears the cruelty in the natural world – the impersonal matter of fact aspects of it .. after all the frogs are being frogs and the newts are being newts. Thomas Merton talking of rabbits writes of the ‘rabbitness of God’ – in other words God is in all those rabbits and in the pond life … but surely human cruelty has the added horror that often we can weigh up what we are doing and why and still act ruthlessly, without compassion. I find Jung’s belief that God is both good and evil, compassionate and cruel a difficult one… The Christian belief is that God is love … and as human’s we choose whether to be kind or cruel…