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# Turning Over
- URL: https://essays.bluegreentheology.org/turningover/
- Published: 2026-08-09T19:00:18.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-09T19:00:31.000Z
- Author: Gideon L. K. Pollach

Some clarity only comes after everything gets stirred up first. Before it can settle, it has to churn.

That's simply what happens every year around this time in a pond, and apparently in a life.

St. John's Pond has gone through its turnover, right on schedule. The layers that separated all summer, warm on top, cool and still below, have mixed themselves back together, and for a few weeks the water carries all of it: everything the bottom has been holding since spring, stirred up and suspended and, frankly, ugly.

If you walked past on Sunday you saw it. Dark, cloudy, not a pond you'd choose for a photograph. But the churn runs both directions.

All summer the bottom layer sits sealed off, losing its oxygen to decomposition with nothing to replace it. Turnover breaks that seal. The same water that carries the mess up carries oxygen back down, all the way to the depths that have been starved of it since June. What looks like falling apart is the mechanism that keeps the pond from failing.

The water is also lower than any of us would like, and here the visible trouble is the smaller part of the story. Most of what is happening now on the preservation side is invisible: engineering studies, permitting, a list of questions the State sent back that our firm is still working through. From the shoreline, it looks like nothing is happening. I can tell you it is. Some of the most important work any of us do happens where no one can see it, filed under a heading nobody photographs.

Even the mighty Danube is turning up its own history this year. Record drought has pulled its water down low enough to expose a woolly mammoth and a fleet of sunken German warships, all of it hidden for decades.

What the river kept covered, the receding water revealed.

And as this reaches your inbox, Sarah and I will be driving Woodford to Ithaca, to Cornell, the last of the miles between us and an empty seat at the table.

Eight days ago we stood with pride at his Eagle Court of Honor with two of his oldest friends, all three of them Eagles now, all three of them leaving. The summer of Wood is ending the way every summer of a child ending does: quietly, and then all at once.

Our emotional water levels are low right now, and our emotional weir looks a little unsteady, too. I am not rushing to fix that. I raise it because a pond that pretends it is not stirred up is a pond lying to you, and because all things require revolution for refreshment.

There is something to wonder at in the whole cycle. The pond does this every year, and every year it teaches us the same thing again: change is messy. What looks murky right now is not the last word. Once it settles, it will clear. It always has.

**A Prayer**

God of the turning water, who is not frightened by what churning brings to the surface: hold what has been stirred up in us this week, the mud, the missing, the low water and the unsteady weir alike. Grant us the trust that clarity is coming even now, unseen, the way it comes to a pond that has to lose its stillness before it finds it again. With Christ, who sat with the disturbed water at Bethesda and did not wait for it to be calm before he came near. *Amen*.