A Song of the Seeker's Way

I have wandered the long paths asking, and asking

Through cities teeming with ten thousand voices

Across prairies where wildlife share secrets to the wind

Along the edges of oceans that know no boundary but sky

What am I hunting, the question itself is the chase

Fleet-footed, dissolving like mist when I approach

Reappearing at dawn with new contours, new promises

Always one horizon beyond my grasping hands

I have sought it in the faces of strangers

In the eyes of lovers who swore they held the answer

In books whose spines broke open like portals

In silence so deep I could hear my own blood singing

The hunt, the hunt, it is everything

The compass spinning wild in my chest

The magnetic pull toward some unnamed truth

The footprints I leave that become the path itself

Sometimes I believe I have caught it

In the cry of a newborn, in the last breath of the dying

In the moment between sleep and waking when I am neither

In the taste of bread broken with friends around a simple table

But it slips through my fingers like water, like light

And I am glad, yes, glad

For what would I become if the hunt were over

A creature at rest, a fire gone cold

No, I am the arrow and the archer both

I am the scent on the wind and the hound that follows

I am the question that generates questions

The seeking that justifies the soul's existence

Perhaps we are not meant to capture meaning

But to be captured by the search itself

To find our purpose in the perpetual pursuit

In the holy, trembling act of wondering why

I hold within me the hunt and the hunted

The empty-handed return and the abundant harvest

The despair of the missed shot and the ecstasy of the near-miss

For they are not separate, they are the same beating heart

So, I will continue, footsore and faithful

Through all the countries of being and becoming

Knowing that what I seek seeks me also

That the hunt itself is the meaning I have been hunting all along

Whoever walks this earth as wanderer, as worshiper, as lover of leaving

Join this expedition toward the unknowable

For we are all hunters of the infinite

And the trail goes on forever, blessed and unending