The Two Ponds

The Two Ponds: an ancient fable about rest and industry.

            No matter their urban joys and strife, the ancients delighted in nature. They may have lived for pomp and pageantry, but they also celebrated in prose and verse the pastoral life and told tales of shepherds meditating on life amid their flocks. This tale is less well-known. More a fable, with its speaking nature, it remains relevant for us today.

            The fable takes place in a valley outside a small town. In the valley there were two small ponds. The one closest to town was larger. Situated in the central plain, it lay in the sun. Birds gathered near its banks, and one side there was a grove of small trees.

            The second pond was further off, near a rise of hills, where it remained in their shadow morning and evening. Rushes grew along its banks, and on one edge rose a single tree. It was older than the others at the larger pond. At first glance its growth seemed inverted, since the upper reach of the tree was shorn of branches and leaves. Its trunk, too, grew not straight, but rather sinuously, as if to testify to weathering many seasons.

            The first pond, basking in the sun, felt proud of its health. And the trees, too, though shorter than their neighbor, looked down on its age and deformity. But when the town shepherd came into the valley to graze his flock, he came to the second, smaller pond. The sheep wandered in the grass near its banks, while he often leaned against the tree, silent underneath its branches.

            The larger pond was puzzled and irritated by the shepherd’s choice. It cried out to its neighbor, “Why has he brought his sheep to graze near you? I am closer to town; the sun warms me. You are smaller, shaded, and have only a single, old, ugly tree. My trees are more beautiful and numerous. They are useful, too, since the townspeople cut them down for their buildings.”

            The smaller pond did not reply. Day in and day out, at morning and evening, the shepherd came with his flock. He rested on the tree with his staff and seemed almost a part of its growth. The younger trees heard their pond’s resentment. While they also wondered at the shepherd’s folly, over time those that survived the axe noticed that their form, too, began to change and to resemble that of their elder neighbor.

            The sunlit pond saw their reflection in its waters. It noticed how the passage of the seasons aged them, so as they grew their trunks shed their upper branches and reached ever skyward. It recalled how the solitary tree at the shaded pond was once like them, younger, and how the shepherd, as a boy, climbed it to get closer to the sky and look back across the fields toward the town. The town then, too, was less industrious, and children and families visited the valley.

For other fables, see here.