St. John's Pond Watershed Alliance

04/27/2026

Each Sunday Board Member and Rector of St. John’s Church Gideon Pollach offers a reflection centered on the pond. This week it’s entitled: Wild Geese.

Last week the temperatures pushed into the eighties. This Sunday it will be forty-two degrees with 100% chance or rain. Cold Spring Harbor in late April does not ease you into anything.

04/14/2026

New website. Check it:

SJPWA.org

03/31/2026

Our dear pond continues to teach.

In this Bonus Holy Week episode, Gideon reads his letter to a 17th-century monk, Brother Lawrence. This episode is a Holy Week companion inviting you, dear listener, to practice the practice of the presence of God in this Holy Week. It’s a little longer, but hopefully, worth it. To read the letter...

03/30/2026

Come sit and pray at St. John's Pond.

Monday of Holy Week:

He walked into the Temple and turned over the tables.
The money-changers had moved into the court of the Gentiles — the one place in the Temple where the nations could come to pray. Commerce had taken the place set aside for the outsider. The house of prayer had become a place of transaction.
What we do with space tells the truth about what we believe. What we do with water tells the truth about what we value.

The pond here is open. It is not for sale. It asks nothing from you.

Come pray at the pond edge. St. John's Episcopal Church, Cold Spring Harbor.

03/25/2026

By now, you may have noticed something has shifted.

The air sounds different. The pond edges are busy in a way they weren't a month ago. The Tree Swallows have arrived — iridescent blue-green, impossibly agile, skimming the water's surface for insects with a precision that makes you wonder if joy and efficiency are sometimes the same thing.

The Eastern Bluebirds are back in the nest boxes. The watershed, which was quiet and still in January, is filling back up with life — not all at once, but in waves, each one building on the last.
This is what restoration looks like. Not a single dramatic moment, but an accumulation of small returns. A blackbird in February. A Phoebe in March. An Osprey over the harbor. And now this — the swallows turning in the light above the pond, doing what they were made to do.

Creation has been moving toward this all along. We just had to pay attention long enough to see it.

Come walk the pond this week. The meditation garden is open. The watershed is alive.

Follow the pond and the watershed at stjcsh.org

03/19/2026

"You are dust now. You were dust then. You will be dust again. Invaluable dust."

From our Sunday Reflections series — in case you missed it.

The freeze broke this week. After three solid weeks of ice, the pond's surface is finally softening — not dramatically, not with any announcement, but in the quietest way possible: puddles forming on top of ice. Water sitting on what is still frozen, waiting ro find a way through.

03/18/2026

They're back. Watch the harbor.

Sometime in the next few days, an Osprey will appear over Cold Spring Harbor — hovering, then plunging feet-first into the water, pulling out a fish with those extraordinary reversible talons. It will look effortless. It is not.

What makes the Osprey's return remarkable isn't just its precision. It's that we almost lost them entirely. DDT thinned their eggshells to the point of collapse, and by the early 1970s they had nearly vanished from Long Island. The ban in 1972 changed everything. Slowly, painstakingly, they came back.

The Osprey didn't restore itself. It needed the water to be fishable, the habitat to be healthy, the humans to finally stop poisoning what they depended on.

This is why the work of the St. John's Pond Watershed Alliance matters. Clean water, restored habitat, native plantings — these are not abstractions. They are the conditions under which life returns.

Come walk the pond. The meditation garden is open. The Ospreys are watching the water. We can too.

Follow the pond and the watershed at stjcsh.org

03/08/2026

This week’s reflection: “What looks back.”

The snow is mostly gone, but the pond hasn't quite decided what it wants to be. Not ice, not open water — something in between, gray and uncertain, the kind of landscape that makes you long for resolution in either direction. Colder, so it would commit to being ice. Warmer, so it would open to cla...

03/08/2026

"God who sends what falls from beyond our control, you give us snow and silence, manna and grace, the water that becomes life. Teach us to receive with open hands what we cannot earn or manufacture, and help us trust the quiet that reveals what our noise has been covering."

From our Sunday Reflections series — in case you missed it.

By the time you read this, we'll know whether the predicted storm lived up to its forecast. But whether we received six inches or two feet, we all experienced the same strange gift: the roads fell silent.

03/05/2026

"I should confess something. Every February I start wearing more sweaters. This is not entirely about the cold."

From our Sunday Reflections series — in case you missed it.

I should confess something. Every winter, somewhere around February, I start wearing more sweaters. And vests. Sometimes both. I tell myself it's because I'm cold. This is not entirely the reason. The truth is that winter adds a few pounds and I would rather not think about it, so I add a layer. One...