Redtree Times

Carried Across (2020)

Listen and learn.
Time
is divided
into two rivers:
one
flows backward, devouring
life already lived;
the other
moves forward with you
exposing
your life.
For a single second
they may be joined.
Now.
This is that moment,
the drop of an instant
that washes away the past.
It is the present.
It is in your hands.
Racing, slipping,
tumbling like a waterfall.
But it is yours.
Help it grow
with love, with firmness,
with stone and flight,
with resounding
rectitude,
with purest grains,
the most brilliant metal
from your heart,
walking
in the full light of day
without fear
of truth, goodness, justice,
companions of song,
time that flows
will have the shape
and sound
of a guitar,
and when you want
to bow to the past,
the singing spring of
transparent time
will reveal your wholeness.
Time is joy.

–Pablo Neruda, Elemental Odes (1954)

Time is joy.

When all is said and done, isn’t that the truth?

I love this poem from Neruda. The idea that we stand at the confluence of two rivers, one moving forward and one backwards, speaks clearly to my own perceptions of our place in time and space, that our present is simply an intersection of two lines on a great continuum or grid– a past line which veers away from us as it meets the future line which takes us ahead.

Where they come together– the present– is unique in all the time-space continuum. There will never be another such point, another such moment for each of us. In a mere moment it will become part of the past line receding from us, swept away by the river of the past as Neruda describes it. Though another point on the continuum soon replaces it, the present, with all the richness, joy, and potential it holds, is taken from us.

It moves into the past tense.

The wholeness we encompassed in that now is gone.

I’ve watched a lot of such nows be washed away from me. Most of the time they erode without my knowledge

But over time one learns– hopefully– to notice and appreciate the two rivers as they come together for that brief moment. When that happens, that now, that present moment, is indeed joyful as we see the singularity of the moment in all of time and space.

There will never another now like it.

Celebrate it.

Since Neruda writes that time that flows will have the shape and sound of a guitar, here’s a song from a favorite album, When I Was on Horseback from 1991, from guitarist Martin Simpson. The song is The Keel Row and has the joyful feeling I struggle to describe. The song itself is an old English folk song that refers to the keelmen who used their flat-bottomed bat to ferry people and things on the rivers. The painting at the top, Carried Across, depicts such a boat. It hangs here in the studio now and take a precious moment most days to give it a look. I never get the feeling that it is wasted time.

I am trying to cut back on telling you to git.  But this morning you really are crowding my present moment, my time of joy, so I will respectfully ask you to git.