I miss living on a lake. I miss watching the otters play on the edge of ice and black water. I miss the arrival of the absurd Hooded Mergansers, who look like a Walt Disney drawing come to life, and who, like so many things in spring, are here and gone.
Here and gone.
The phrase thrummed in my head as I drank my coffee beside a lake this weekend. Then I realized—I was sitting at a lake and missing sitting at a lake. Rather than being present at this current lake, where the light danced on the water and the orioles dashed from tree to tree, I was lost in the muck of a past lake, where all kinds of metaphorical leeches were sucking the joy right out of me.
A favorite new tool that I have discovered in teaching poetry is a kenning. Strongly associated with Old Norse and Old English poetry (think Beowulf), a kenning takes two words, puts them together, and lets them be a translation for something else. So, a wave-floater is a ship. A whale’s acre is the ocean.
At the lake, I was not in the present moment. I was in memory: the now-gone.
Two flowering trees stood nearby. I knew they would soon be bereft of their flowers, and suddenly, I was thinking about all the different kinds of time: ephemeral time, ordinary time, hard time.
A kenning for ephemeral time is hanker-hook. There can be an ache to this kind of time. Something is beautiful; we know it won’t last. This kind of time stains us with yearn.
Ordinary time is pancake-state. The first few bites might be delicious, even sweet. But then every single day, you have to make your way across the flat, never-changing surface of life. It’s not long before you feel bloated and blah.
I struggled to come up with a kenning for hard time. Mountain-purse? Rucksack-volcano? I couldn’t figure out how to capture the sense of burden, the heaviness you might have to drag up, down, and all-around, how you never know when things are gonna blow sky-high.
Whether time is long or short, sweet or uncertain, it is almost impossible to live in the present, but the present is the only time we’ve got. The here-now. The in-here. Today-toward. Instanter-feast. Available-animal. Woof. Roar. Cock-a-doodle-doo.
Wake up, and live now. Live wide. Live deep. Live light.
Now-struck.