This Life This Night

This life, like a playful prayer on the wind, ruffling your dreams like it does your hair. This life, every one you ever loved or ever will, holding you safe in their eyes. This life, sweet Goddess, this life. I was looking for all the things I thought I needed to look for, in all the places they told me to look. I never looked within. Now I do. And I see, Goddess, I see. What I was looking for was the emptiness of looking within. Where the looking and that which is looked for cease to matter. I am the eye and the beholden. I am the lover and the touched, the whisperer and the ear. I am what I never need to look for. This life, this vessel of miracles, this playground of hopes, this is my perfect garden, where I need never need.

I felt it on this night, just now. I felt the universe strike my unstruck chord, and I felt the vibration shiver my soul aglow. I felt my words dance, like mystic dervishes in the dust, raising clouds of it to the sky, like golden prayers from imperfect men. I saw a joy within me, so complete and so pure, as I cannot describe. How could I even begin? My word dance is a fledgling thing, young and unsure. How I begin to describe what I felt, when it felt like a thing beyond the naming of words to clothe it in understanding.

I could taste her, this life. Like the fruit from an old mango tree, that still liked to see children smile. Like the taste of my lover's lips, when they grow still and hungry for me. Like a drink from a fountain in the desert of your own mediocrity, that compelled you to dream again.

I could hear her, this life. Like the song of Heaven, I knew by heart before I was born and made to forget. Like my mother's voice calling me home, and my the sound my father makes when I put my arms around him. I heard her like the sound the winds make, when they blow across your skin.

I realized I was happy today, and forgot to ask myself "Why?" I had blinked and become at peace, from a lifetime of being ready for war. I had sat in my living-room, with the heads of the palm trees outside for company, and been perfectly happy. I wrote these words and felt their joy as I did. They danced for me and I danced with them, around this large fire, this life, like naked savages who had given names to every star and rejected this future. I realized that even in this city, even on this night, I could be happy, just for being alive. Nothing else.

I wish you felt this way, too
And you will,
Soon

Amen