I wanted to call across time while the music played a lonely haunting cry through the mouths of long wooden pipes. Their hollow whistling notes seemed to beckon to love lost, like forlorn hearts.
Their chiming echoes calling, "Seeker, can't you hear me?"
The musician was not visible. The tune heard across a gulf I could not bridge another way. Reaching out to touch someone through time reminded me how nearly impossible I found it to remember their appearance, the resonance of their laughter while their eyes glowed with joy's remembrance.
A subterranean reverberation of drums vibrated Earth's atmosphere as if to summon those absent souls. Ice tumbled down the face of mountains, falling to collect in a pool where the sun could melt it, and like the blood of those wounded in war's battles, the liquid would leach into the single entity of its beginning.
That was what we were given and that was what we lost.
I helplessly watched as you bled. Your life flowed and collected around the seat of your spirit while you shriveled as if wanting to die. However, life is too strong and your power too much interlocked with mine for either of us to flee this Earth before our tasks are completed.
"Seeker, can’t you hear me?"
Crickets stirred sound that brushed dew-laden grasses. It is too soon to mow, too late to harvest. Their song evoked confusion, but within their message laid the answer, we sought. Listen to them dance with nature’s cymbals entwining their limbs, chiming each step, each heartbeat. The crickets spoke softly to us to stop hiding and continue the quest.
They sang stories written but forgotten in archives tucked between stones along the stream that feeds the Pool of Life. Stories once recited by the Giver of Knowledge as the tree bore fruit offered to the Creator in thanks for the opportunity to live and prosper under the grace of enveloping sustenance.
Stories of battles won and lost, lives forfeit for the sake of the quest without the knowledge that the quest was preservation of life. Stories of warriors those Seekers struggling against foes uninvited, and therefore unintended.
However, cold rain persisted, the crickets fled, their songs muffled and forgotten. The pipers resumed their hollow whispering calls into the wilderness of lost time and love.
One unknown man crawled across the wet, slippery surface of the life summit, having climbed to become what a man must be in his lifetime, and found that a man would not have to prove himself a man if he were to become one.
The rain carried him down the mountain as if now discarding the remnants of the unnecessary and dropped him in the Pool of Life.
There the man found his purpose.
Rain pelted all living things, killing some with the fruits of salvation while others received nurturing from the same bounty. Bodies drifted along unnatural streams gouged into the Earth to flush the ruined dreams of Seekers who had given up their quest before reaching their goals; given up when a lifetime's completion remained only a heartbeat's distance. A single step a small caress a smile or hand held out in kindness.
It is easy to quit, but difficult to succeed.
Small child-sized bodies lie in the sun
I watched to make certain I wasn't one
the soldier standing, holding a gun
was the person who might have won.
Footsteps rustled leaves even though wet
and life moved forward without regret.
We're taught stories, a fragmented vignette
of hollow tales and another's need to forget.
Standing, I knew I must move away
the soldier had lowered his gun to pray
the bullet he fired tumbled the day
turning light into words he dared not say.
I can watch and see his sorrow and tears
his shoulders shudder under so many years
and while his features blur with the cheers
the crowd walked away, and like me disappears.
Time danced with our lives and taunted us to challenge it with deeds. However, those tasks set by others were never to be completed. It is within our grasp to control the flow of time by calculating emanation of our thoughts. Chaos ruled only within the context of undisciplined attitudes, flowing into mountainous drifts, crossing the paths we selected as our own. A stiff current of unexpected events, life's promised fulfillment, churned a heartbeat into arrhythmic palpitation that drew breath from a floundering body. But a spirit at peace is a calming influence on all it embraced, on all it touched, and on all who ask, "Is this the way we should walk this path?"
"Seeker, can you hear me?”
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1 comment:
I wrote the original version of Seeker after learning that one of my oldest friends had died. He was thirty-eight. Both of us were born in the same hospital, he five days before me. We needed fourteen years to find each other, and when we did in High School became more brothers than friends. Several years later, war called me to service. He was rejected for medical reasons.
Long after I returned from fighting, laden with undiagnosed PTSD, he confessed his shame for not joining me in war. I told him he would live better without the experience. He did not need to seek my forgiveness.
Again time passed. He sat deep in depression with a handgun on the table alongside his telephone. He told God that if He wanted him to continue living, have someone call him. The phone rang, and when he lifted the receiver, heard a woman say, “Don’t do it.”
This is true. I have spoken with her. She did not understand her need to call him, but was glad she did. They married two years later and lived a happy life.
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