Never underestimate the power of a small body of water to teach mindfulness and break bad habits. For the ten years I lived in Singapore, I was a champion multi-tasker. It wasn’t unusual to have half a dozen projects spinning in the air at the same time while zooming around Southeast Asia and managing a large house and endless houseguests without a pembantu. I moved in a flurry of efficiency as I cooked, solved problems and met clients. I forgot how to do just one thing once, mindfully.
When I moved to Bali, my first pond taught me to mono-task. Instead of drinking my tea while doing my email, scheduling my day, making juice and brushing the dog, I learned just to enjoy my morning tea by the pond. This simple exercise took months to learn and I still don’t always make it to the bottom of the mug without being distracted. But now I know it’s possible just to do one thing at a time. Just be, with my tea and the pond.
No one who has a pond could possible require a television. A pond offers constant drama and no advertising. Life is endlessly being born, eaten, eating something else, blooming, or making sticky love under a leaf. A lily unfolds to the sun, dragonflies the colour of jewels hover in the heat. A frog lays her eggs on a lily leaf, and they float like black pearls among the blossoms. Basking snakes eye tadpoles with calculated interest. Delicate lizards cling to plant stems. Toads and fish splash and flash between the lotuses and at night bats torpedo down for resting insects.
I was hooked on ponds. How could I continue to hone my mono-tasking skills without one? So as soon as my new house was ready to sleep in and the books and spices were unpacked, we started digging a big hole in the ground in front of the patio.
Advice began to pour immediately. The pond should be oval, it should be square. It should be lined with cement-no, it should have a plastic liner. The cement should be 3 or 5 or 10 centimetres thick, poured in one or two layers with rebar or finishing nails or chicken wire or staples for strength. Or not. The corners should or need not be reinforced. The cement should dry for one or four days or a week, kept damp or soaked daily with a hose, or not. It should be finished with water-proof paint or expensive plastic barrier or nothing at all. No wonder the damned project took so long.
Nyoman thought it was all a load of nonsense. A Balinese pond, he announced, was a hole in the ground with a layer of concrete. Period. Upon gentle interrogation he allowed that yes, Balinese ponds did leak and were hard to clean. Rolling his eyes discreetly, he accompanied me on my mission for the Perfect Pond. Together we quested for information through the back alleys of Denpasar and the thinking boxes of long-suffering engineers and architects.
It took a long time just to dig the hole. I’d drawn a modest rectangle at first but people kept making what seemed like sensible suggestions and in the end it was quite a bit larger than initially planned. We used the excavated dirt to make the garden bigger. That necessitated retaining walls; we consumed unbelievable amounts of cement.
As soon as the first layer of cement was laid in the pond, the dogs leaped in to leave their mark. The next morning we found a couple of frogs under the wet sacks. "Looking for a house for later," observed Wayan as she released them. A pair of Javanese kingfishers flashed past, monitoring the work and biding their time til the hole in the ground was stocked with succulent fish. Already the nascent pond was attracting life.
One day, removing the plywood siding from the damp walls of the pond, Nyoman shouted, "Binatang!" our code word for wildlife. Clinging to the wall was a black scorpion the size of my hand, a perfect museum specimen. My staff wanted to burn it alive, which seemed awfully brutal. We caught it in the biggest glass jar in the house and I took it to a restaurant where I was meeting a friend for dinner that night, hoping to glean some information on its life and habits. This being Ubud, people would wander by, casually pick up the jar, say "Big scorpion," and carry on with their conversations. No one offered to give it a good home. It began to look quite depressed and eventually Maite and I liberated it in the jungle behind her garden.
It took Nyoman about 4 months to finish the pond. Dig the hole, measure, pour the cement, bend the rebar, pour more cement, lay the edging, apply the plaster, paint on the waterproofing, absorb a huge amount of information about building ponds…it was very much his project. One day I came home to find NYOMAN carved in bold letters along the brickwork. The artist had signed his work.
The next day we filled it with rainwater and bought lotus plants and water lilies. I joined Nyoman in the half-filled pond, placing bricks and pots and arranging leaves to float in the clear water. We agreed that the water would not be so clean for long. "Soon there will be fish shit," said Wayan pragmatically.
For a pond must have fish. It seemed impersonal to just buy them when friends were offering stock from their own ponds. I spent a hilarious Sunday morning trying to catch fingerlings from Wendyl’s ponds. Graceful swoops of the net proved fruitless, and soon we were dragging the bottom and bringing up muck, dead leaves, sticks and the occasional infant koi. As I walked up the path with my catch Penny called out that she had too many fish in her bathroom pond. A very messy 5 minutes later I had a grand daddy koi in a bucket and a dress that was wet to the waist.The new members of the family were tipped triumphantly into the pond and the next day Nyoman installed the pump.
Then we all sat quietly for a long time looking at our pond in the slanting light of the late afternoon. A dragonfly arrived, circled and landed on a leaf. The fish flashed among the plants. From nowhere a frog appeared and pensively crouched on the edge. A kingfisher landed on a high branch and eyed the water with satisfaction. In a single day the pond had come alive.
I start the day now sitting on the patio step with a dog on each side and a mug of tea in my hand, busily mono-tasking. It’s not an easy skill to acquire, but yes, it can be learned.
