Neuro Pond

As the aquatic explorers amongst us can probably tell you, mussels don’t always just sit there clinging to rocks in clusters. They get out and about, albeit quite slowly. Mussels in the open leave long winding trails in the sand behind them.

These trails, with their straight segments and curves, their wild spirals and sharp angles, intersect and blend to form an image on the rippled backdrop; an endless and ever changing image. In time, the imperfect is completed, the crooked is straightened, the empty is filled and the old is renewed.

Some may argue that the mussels are merely following their nutritive and reproductive destinies, but there are reasons those nutrients are in those concentrations in those places at that time, as there are reasons those particular creatures are alive, there, then. On and on, the events that have transpired throughout history to make this image just so are truly mind-boggling. From asteroid impacts to tiny flapping wings, it is the result of nearly everything that has happened before and it tells an amazing story. Like it or not, we are all part of this story.

Perhaps someday we will be able to read and understand it in its entirety. For now we can only derive meaning from tiny views of an impossibly large image, like studying the pieces of a trillion piece puzzle one piece at a time as the picture gradually evolves. A daunting undertaking it is, but for those who wish a glimpse of understanding in it all there’s Neuro Pond; A shallow sandy-bottom pond of mussels where you may silently contemplate the conditions, the complexity and the chaos in the myriad of lines taking shape before you. A must for all rock garden settings.

It does have an interface which is vague and elusive and incomprehensible to us by normal means. Only by inaction and oneness with nature can we be in accord with the interface. This could take a lifetime, so, while you’re working at it, just sit there at the pond for a few moments each day, as still as the mussels are slow, and ponder how this small fragment of existence, this image, came to be. There’s no telling how much insight you will gain.