Meditation on a Pond

Geese sound overhead followed by quiet. Then again, sharply, an echoing goose honk from out beyond the pond. The echo dies slowly. Sound traveling over water fades out in tendrils that diminish slow, slow…..leaving a space for ……something.

That slapback of sound jars me into awareness. It is sharp, echoey and unexpected. In the moment of its happening I am not certain what snaps me out of my reverie. I am sitting at the edge of the pond and my eyes sweep long from left to right. I search horizon and trees, shrubbery and pond’s edge.

Nothing.

There’s an occasional croak of a frog. Small plish-plash as another frog leaps from the bank to break the water’s surface with a muddling of the water and weeds. I hear the sharp whistle of a blackbird or a thrush in the bushes ringing the pond.

On a whim I look up and there they are, more quiet this time as they wing overhead. Canada geese heading north. I imagine I can hear the air breaking as they flap against it and there….

The sound comes again, first from above me as I sit looking upward, and then again a few seconds later from off to my left as though hidden in the scrub pines rimming the pond. A second echoing honk and cry, the sound expanding as I look skyward then fading, fading, … into faintness as they pass overhead.