What A Joy Is Learning 7.2 My Fishpond

What A Joy Is Learning 7.2 My Fishpond

I had built a pond and an island, with shallows, as wide as possible in my small back garden, The very thin, very low wall border was done by very patiently  cementing not smoothly, but by spoonful cementing 100% cement, like building a mini Great Wall of China, working for days, and so must I build also a wall around my island.  These should be very strong even when you stand on or kick it and it’s still strong today after more than 20 years out of use.  Imagine when there would be a leak, how rescue so many fishes, how find the leaking spot? I made emergency outlets, cemented barriers in case of a big rain or leakage and so I became a bit of a water engineer, Ha.ha.

Not a landscape artist, I had Nature be the artist and do the work. There were many kind of water weeds from the marshes, growing, in or floating on the water. They thrived and became a water paradise but after a long time only some, many didn’t survive as perhaps the strongest water weeds changed the water quality as most suited to them, killing the others. I planted the  Yangliu (Chinese willow) in the garden,  there is the Waringin, a bird nested and bats visited.

I had fishes from the marshes, which I took home from my running travels in the country, most have I succeeded to save from drying ditches during a dry season or when villagers were catching fish by poisoning a ditch or pond. Such kind of fishes were not displayed, sold by aquarium-fish sellers, no one would buy them, they were regarded as ordinary, worthless: the cupang, sepat, beunteur, tigerfish, julung-julung, cenang-cenang, freshwater-shrimps, a sawah frog. Snails. They’re watchful, on guard. In the beginning, they live peacefully, prosper, multiply without having to feed them and I had a lot then.

The young generation today haven’t seen them. You almost never would see them again now and I have no pictures of them.

My sawah frog, a superb jumper, grew till it “quacks”, my cenang-cenang  are skilled jumpers, jumping out of the pond in a hard rain. I had a spider weaving her web above the pond, a stray dragonfly laid her eggs, her pupea looks very frightening and was very ferocious too. My wild white water-lily bloomed, I had a waterplant that had their flowers on the floating leaves, the touch me not, planted near the pond became a mini  flambuoyant tree, with its branches stretched over the water, ...

The maanvis (moon fish) parents, an aquarium-fish in a natural surrounding, were watchful brooding, herding, guarding their brood and as they grew, seeing them swimming together as hundreds of aeroplanes was an enchanting sight, 

But as my tiger fish, so innocent before became so big, ferocious, I lost  almost all my cupangs, all my shrimps and was forced to free it in the kali Ciliwung (river) including the snails from the Bogor Botanical Gardens which I succeeded to hatch, became a serious threat razing, grazing my waterplants.

See, watch them swim, eat, fight, make love, brood, ... live rather than learn it as dull as taught at school, so learned but dead and dry as lectured.

I could enjoy learning, love almost anything were I to have the time. Not only Nature, but also Mathematics, Astronomy, Languages, Geography, Oceanography, History, Music, Art, ... and most of all, Life’s Philosophy and learn it by watching, hearing, playing, singing,  painting, doing, investigating, ... it live, not in a hurry, not burdening, torturing your brains. You can never enjoy, eat, learn  more than what is your capacity unless you want to be sick, stressed. You can’t hurry, speed up your life. Life is too short, even thousand years, would you learn it all, yet am I content and happy with the little I achieved, know, am capable of.

March 2012