Wherever you are,
Take a moment.
Turn in and let the day go.
Tune in to your breath as you inhale and exhale.
Let your breath drop all the way into your center.
Let it go.
Welcome to a hit of hope.
I used to live unalike.
Now I do not.
And there is an entire tragedy in between those two sentences.
But what you need to know is,
I did not want to leave the lake,
But such is life.
Now 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 looked like a Walt Disney drawing coming to life and who,
Like so many things in spring,
Are here and gone.
Here and gone.
That phrase thrummed in my head as I drank my coffee beside a lake recently.
When I realized I was sitting at a lake,
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 that past lake where all kinds of metaphorical leeches were sucking the joy right out of me.
Inhale.
Exhale.
I teach writing and a favorite new tool that I have discovered in teaching poetry is called a kenning,
Strongly associated with Old Norse and Old English poetry like Beowulf.
A kenning takes two words,
Puts them together,
And lets them be a sort of translation for something else.
A wave floater is a ship.
A whale's acre is the ocean.
Because I was sitting at that 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.
Endless time.
Inhale.
Exhale.
A kenning for ephemeral time is hankerhook.
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,
With wanting and desire.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Ordinary time is pancake state.
The first few bites might be delicious,
Even really 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.
Inhale.
Exhale.
I struggled to come up with a kenning for hard time.
Mountain purse,
Rucksack volcano.
A friend suggested boulder-born.
Hard time carries with it that sense of burden.
Heaviness you have to drag up,
Down,
And all around.
And how you never know when things might blow sky-high,
Or when,
Or if,
The weight of life will lift.
Inhale and exhale.
Lastly,
As I was writing this,
A friend talked about endless time,
And she suggested the kenning for that might be cave maw,
To capture time's never-ending appetite.
Dark,
Dank,
Full of claws and teeth,
This time can rip us to bits inside.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Whether time feels long or short,
Sweet or uncertain,
It is so hard to live in the present,
But the present is the only time we've got.
The here now.
The in here.
So be now struck,
Today toward,
See life as an instanter feast,
And be the available animal.
Woof.
Roar.
Cockadoodle do.
Whatever.
Wake up,
And live now,
Live wide,
Live deep,
And live light.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Be well.
