They Remembered

Down at the shallow edge of the pond nearest the church, a bluegill turns on its side and beats its tail against the bottom. A cloud of silt lifts and drifts off into the green water. The fish rights itself, hovers for a moment, and does it again. By the time they rest, a pale circle has opened in the mud, clean sand showing through where a minute ago there was none.

I have been watching all week, relieved. I didn't think I'd see it again.

Last year we rebuilt the pond's edge. We excavated where the bank meets the water.

We set barriers against sediment spread. They caught most. But a film of soft mud settled anyway over the sandy bottom where bluegill nest.

These fish return to the same shallows each spring. They fan circular nests in sand. One settles at the center of each, guards eggs. The whole edge becomes a nursery. I worried we had closed that bottom forever.

We had not. The bluegill returned. They found the sand buried under the new layer of sediment. They set about uncovering it.

I can't tell whether they blow dirt away or sweep with tails. What is clear: they knew the hard bottom was still down there. They remembered.

They were willing to work to reach it.

I have gone back and forth on what I am watching. Perseverance, some stubborn will to return? Or simply what a healthy creature does, the way a seed finds its way toward light? I suspect the bluegill would not understand the question. The will to come home and the nature that makes coming home possible may be nearer to the same thing than I assumed.

This Sunday we begin a new church season: the long green season the church calls Ordinary Time. The high feasts of easter, Ascension, and Pentecost are behind us. Now comes the ordinary work: showing up, attending to prayer, clearing what has settled, returning to the ground we were made for. The bluegill are already at it. Green pollen gathers along the edges, the water is slowly clearing, and out in the middle, there are five new cygnets exploring from Franklin pond. I have learned not to get too attached to the cygnets. These aren’t even ours. Our pair did not successfully tend this year. 

The fish teach the steadier lesson. The sand they are working toward did not go anywhere. It was there under the silt the whole time, holding up the nursery, waiting to be found again. The bluegill did not make that bottom. They could not see it under the new mud. But they trusted it was there, and they were right.

Some of what we love gets buried, and that covering is real. 

Maybe what gets buried with it is a sense that anything solid remains underneath. The bluegill work as though that ground, that solid ground, still holds. I think they know something that we forget: that the ground we rest on is not ours to make or to lose. It was laid down before us, and it holds us up now, whether the water is clear enough to see it or not.

A Prayer:

O God of the bluegill, who needs no theology to find the solid place — give us that confidence to navigate through clouded waters, to the ground we did not lay, the ground we cannot lose. On Christ, the ever-present source of all life. Amen