Oliver was minding his own business in his own little corner of the pond. It was a beautiful day both in and out of the water, which is a very good day indeed for an amphibian. The flies were plentiful and the mud was soft. He surely had, he thought, everything that he needed. His life was satisfying and complete, and he could continue on like this forever. He was comfortable, and that’s an important thing. He closed his eyes and fell asleep.
Suddenly, Oliver was awakened by a loud and wild splash in the water not too far away from him. Without moving a muscle, he looked sideways — which is easy to do when your eyes are on top of your head — in the direction of the splash. He saw something that didn’t belong in the water, something that reminded him, somehow, of the giant things called “nets” that the older frogs had warned him about when he was just a tadpole. He had paid little attention to the ramblings of the elder frogs back then and he wasn’t about to start now. He rolled his eyes and slowly shook his head, thinking, “What does this net have to do with me?”
Oliver answered his own question: “It has nothing to do with me! I am big and strong and I have lived in this pond my whole life, as have my parents and grandparents before me! These nets have never bothered any of us. I am safe here. I know my way around. This is MY pond, after all. Always has been and always will be.
So he laughed at the silly net that had nothing to do with him and thought that perhaps he would swim under his favorite lily pad and hide from all the frothy ruckus. He was safe. That was all that mattered. Maybe he would even make up a song about it, as he often liked to do. This was his pond, after all.
Time passed. Perhaps it was a day or maybe it was just a minute or two. It was all the same to him.
Oliver was again jarred awake by another loud splash and felt himself being dragged through the water. He was being pushed and pulled first one way and then another and felt himself flipping and spinning over and over as if he were caught in some kind of current. When the tumbling finally stopped, Oliver looked around again with his big wide eyes. All he could see, on every side of him, was the thing called “net” that he had only seen at a distance before. He was inside the net, he began to realize, and his pond was outside the net. His world had been turned upside down. He was wedged against this rough and sharp thing that bit into his back and legs. His feet were tangled and he could not move. For the first time in his life, he felt helpless … and scared.
With a sudden rush, Oliver was lifted out of the water, out of the only home he had ever known, and he found himself suspended high in the air, held aloft in the net and being admired by a giant masked man who said loudly, “Well, looky, looky what I caught! This is a fine specimen. A fine, big fat one that will make excellent soup!”
Oliver had no idea what “soup” meant and took offense at the idea of being called fat, but he wasn’t too worried. He thought that perhaps this could all be a very fine adventure. The giant’s hand reached into the net and grabbed him, rather roughly, Oliver thought, and shoved him into a big, dark bag. He landed with a thud against something that felt very much like, well, another frog.
“Hello?” he said. “Is someone else here?”
“It’s me,” said another frog.
“And me,” said another.
He recognized the other two voices immediately as ones he had heard for many years in his pond. He remembered them from his tadpole days when they all swam together and played hide and seek among the rocks and grasses.
“Hey, what are you guys doing here?” he asked, and they all had the same answer: “We were minding our own business, keeping our heads down and providing for and protecting our own families from the usual dangers of the pond when all of the sudden we were in a net and then here we were in this bag with you.”
“Huh,” said Oliver. “Imagine that. I never thought that anything like that could happen to us.”
Time passed. Perhaps it was a day or maybe it was just a minute or two. Who knows? Oliver was pretty comfortable in the dark bag with his old friends, and they had a good time recalling the good old days in the pond. They wished it could be that way again. Then suddenly the bag shifted sideways and then upside down. He felt himself falling out of the bag and landing against something hard and wet. Once again, he was in water.
“Yay!” Oliver called out. “We’re back home where we belong.”
“Think again,” said one of the other frogs. “Look around you,” said the other.
Oliver looked around and considered what the other frogs meant. He was up to his eyeballs in water, that much was true. But this water was crystal clear, unlike the dark and murky water of his pond. And instead of rocks and grasses and giant cattails, he was surrounded on all sides by a high, smooth, circular wall. He looked up and saw the giant’s face glaring down at them.
“Soup’s on!” said the giant, who then, with a clang, placed a cover over the top of Oliver’s new circular pond. There was that word again, he thought. Soup … soup. Where had he heard that word before?
Time passed. Perhaps a day went by or maybe it was just a minute or two. He missed his old pond but this new one was not entirely uncomfortable. The water was a bit warmer here but there was something nice about that, in a way. Oliver sat back on his hind legs and relaxed. The three of them began reminiscing and telling more stories of when they were just tadpoles, of gathering around their mothers and grandmothers and listening to stories and songs late into the night. Perhaps, they said, this was now their pond. It was smaller but just as good. Better in some ways. Maybe even great. Who knows?
“Do any of you remember any stories about soup?” Oliver asked. They all shook their heads and sat in thoughtful silence. Oliver knew there were some stories he should remember, but it was all so long ago, and he hadn’t really been paying much attention. It was ancient history, after all, years before he had even been born. Oliver wracked his brain to find the memory he was searching for. He sat for what seemed like an awfully long time.
Finally, like tiny, cool drops of rain falling on his head, some memories began to come back to him. He started to remember some of the stories and the words of the old songs his grandmother used to sing. And then, even sitting in the warm water, a chill went up Oliver’s spine. The memories were becoming darker and scarier. No wonder he had forgotten them. No wonder they were buried so deep. Who would want to remember such things?
He could hear the sounds of his grandmother’s voice saying, “Beware of the giant and his pot of soup! Beware of the net!” He could hear the song his grandfather used to sing about the importance of everyone — frogs and fish and otters and even snakes — sticking together in the pond and watching out for one another. Oliver told the other frogs what he was remembering but they didn’t seem very interested.
“Don’t be ridiculous!” one of them said. “That has nothing to do with us! We were safe in our old, good pond and now we are safe here in this new one.”
“And we’re together!” the other frog said. “We all look alike and sound alike. We like the same things. What more could we ask for? Don’t be foolish. And, by all means, don’t upset the giant with your worries. He seems very nice.”
Oliver nodded in agreement but he wasn’t sure. Something deep inside him told him something was very wrong. Perhaps he shouldn’t ignore that feeling, he thought, just like he shouldn’t have ignored the net the first time he saw it. That would be like ignoring the shadow of a hawk when it flies over the pond. Everyone knows that when you see a hawk’s shadow, the hawk is not far behind. Everyone knows it’s time for action, time to move.
Time passed. Perhaps a day went by or maybe it was just a minute or two.
“It’s getting warmer,” one of the frogs said. “The water is starting to hurt my feet.”
“Same here,” said the other frog. “I’m beginning to think this new pond is not like our old one at all. I think something might be wrong.”
“That’s it! We’re getting out of here,” Oliver said to the other frogs. “The water is too hot. There are a little bubbles forming around my feet. This hurts!”
Just then the giant lifted the lid above their heads. White and black flakes fell down on their heads. One of them sneezed.
“It won’t be long now,” the giant roared. “This frog soup is going to be great!”
“Frog soup!” they all croaked. The lid clanged shut again. The water got hotter.
“I’ve made my decision,” Oliver said, looking around quickly. “It’s time for action! I’ve got a plan. We’ve got to move now before we run out of time. The next time the sky above us opens up, I say we make a jump for it before it’s too late.” The other frogs nodded in agreement.
Time passed. This time it was just a minute or two. Oliver heard the giant approaching and then heard the lid above him shift. As it did, he shouted, “NOW!” and they all sprang out of the water and landed on the rim of the pot, tipping it over and spilling the hot water all over the front of the giant sending him sprawling to the ground and yelling about his soup.
“My soup! My soup! My very good and delicious soup has been ruined!” the giant screamed. “It was going to be the very best soup but now it’s running and jumping away out the door!”
There was no stopping the three frogs once they got outside and found their way to a path they knew led to their old pond. With the giant running and screaming red-faced behind them, they reached the edge of the pond, leaped into the air, and landed with a perfectly synchronized splash. They dove deep to safety, together at the bottom of the pond. High above them, they could see the giant, still waving his arms and yelling about how this was HIS pond and how he could take whatever he wanted out of it.
The frogs laughed, as only frogs can do from the bottom of a pond.
Later that night, all the younger frogs and tadpoles gathered around Oliver and his friends as they told the story of their great misadventure. They told them about the net and the giant and the soup. They told them of the importance of sticking together and watching out for one another. Oliver sang them a new song about never ignoring the shadow of a hawk or the splash of a net.
Some of the young frogs seemed to be listening, while others had far-off looks in their rolling eyes.
Time passed. Perhaps a day went by or maybe it was just a minute or two or maybe it was longer than a day.
“That could never happen here,” one of the young frogs said.
Afterword
There’s an oft-told fable about a frog and a pot of water. It goes something like this: If you throw a frog into a pot of bowling water it will jump out the moment it hits the water, instantly sensing the danger. But if you put the frog in lukewarm water and slowly turn up the heat, it will not notice the danger and will ultimately boil to death. It’s a cautionary tale, the moral of which is pretty clear and simple: We should pay attention to the slow, incremental changes happening around us and take action before it’s too late. We should deal with dangers, complacencies, bad relationships, biases, burnouts and poor habits that deteriorate us slowly over time. It’s good advice.
But there’s a problem with the fable, I have learned from a number of sage and scientific voices on the internets: Frogs are smarter than we give them credit for. In reality, frogs will not sit complacently in a pot of increasingly hotter and hotter water and just wait to die. They will jump out at some point. Good for them. Still, most, if not all, fables don’t hold up to reality and scientific fact-checking. I mean, do we seriously think a tortoise could ever beat a hare in a foot race or that an elephant would stand still and allow a mouse to pluck a thorn from its foot? Hardly. Scientific truths about anthropomorphized animals are not in the bailiwick of fable-makers and truth-tellers.
The point of fable-making is to convey a larger truth, such as, let’s say somewhat randomly, the fact that so many people might idly and complacently be sitting in their own simmering pans of comfort right now while the world around them is obviously boiling. But perhaps (and hopefully), what we’re doing while we sit in our metaphorical pans is discerning our next best steps. Maybe we’re remembering what we have been taught. St. Ignatius of Loyola gives us his own water-based advice for just such times as these.
In his rules for discernment of spirits, found in his Spiritual Exercises [specifically Rule 7 in the second week, 335], he uses the analogy for water falling onto a sponge to describe how God gently touches our souls, encouraging and nudging us to move from “good to better.” In opposition to this image, Ignatius tells us that the “evil spirit” acts “sharply, with noise and agitation, like a drop of water hitting upon a rock.” Or, we might add, like being thrown into a pot of boiling water.
So that’s the place in me from which this story comes. I think there are very likely numerous and diverse meanings and contexts for this story in today’s frightening world. I’ll let you figure those out for yourself.
Top Photo: © 2010 J. Ronald Lee.