Topic 196: Echoes

Carol:

Echoes of Things Past

As always, my father pulled me out of my sleeping bag too early. I pulled on my blue jeans and jacket, grabbed my fishing pole, then followed him along the trail that led from our campsite down to the water’s edge. It was just light enough that I could see my breath as we picked our way along the pine-needled forest path. We descended the last few yards to a spot where the trees gave way to a clearing at the water’s edge. I was glad for our early rising when I caught my first glimpse of the glassy, mist-shrouded   mountain lake 
 

While my father readied the poles with bait, I sat down on a rock and searched along the edges of the lake for signs of other campers, but we seemed to be alone in the chill and quiet. Suddenly, a sound emanated from the far shore, echoing through the forest.  A bird’s cry of such a sorrowful tone that I pulled my coat closer around  me. The cry reverberated; then, out of the mist glided a single loon, its slow movement disrupting the calm of the lake’s silvery surface.  Continuing its mournful call, the loon turned and disappeared back into the mist, leaving nothing but the echo of its song behind.
 

Fifty years later, I don’t remember the name of that mountain lake somewhere in the Canadian west. We may have caught fish for breakfast that morning, may have grilled them over the campfire my mother had been tending, may have talked about the clear, chilly air of the summer morning.  All of the details of that perfect, mystical sun rise have faded except the mourning call of the loon and its glissando, setting off ripples through the water.
 

I suppose I would have taken a photo if I had a camera at the time, but the act of looking through the lens, staging the scene and pressing my fingers against the metal of the camera would have broken the sanctity of the moment; I would have shifted from being inside of the scene to being outside of it.
 

How often have I grabbed a camera and yelled out, “Stop” so that I could freeze for time the joy, the beauty, the spontaneity of a scene only to produce the pale imitation of a blood-red sunset or the out-of-focus fluttering of a butterfly wing? How do we capture a moment of bliss without killing it?  Wordsworth talked about poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquility.”  Great writers, composers and artists have the power to create— or re-create--scene so vividly and authentically that we are propelled back into our own memories. Emotions are revived and savored, echoing from the original experience, rippling through time. 
 

Marcel Proust traced the smell and taste of French cake, a spongy and sweet madeleine, back into his childhood,  a literary journey that became the seven volumes of A La Recherche du Temps Perdu.  When I see a loon, I am transported backwards to a single frame in the action of my life; when I hear a loon, I disappear into the single note from the song of who I am.
 

For sometimes, when our world is not our home
Nor we any home elsewhere, but all
Things look to leave us naked, hungry, cold
We suddenly may seem in paradise
Again, in ignorance and emptiness
Blessed beyond what we thought to know:
Then on sweet waters echoes the loon's cry  (from “The Loon’s Cry” by Howard Nemerov, 1981)
 

Source:
Excerpt from “The Loon’s Cry.” Contemplativetoday.blogspot.

Megan:

I'm taking a sick day. I'm either having an allergy attack or coming down with a cold, but either way, I'm spending the day in bed.