The Way

It enshrouds me

The pressing, palpable darkness

I blink once, twice

Trying my vision, my perception

Against the obsidian veil

Nothing

Am I alive or dead?

Seeing or blind?

Only one thing for certain

Lost.

No up or down

No landmarks to distinguish

No sign posts to follow

Who am I? What am I?

Why am I here?

Or am I truly here, or anywhere, for that matter

The inky blackness of the void is suffocating

It somehow seems to beckon me forward, onward

But I have forgotten how to move

I am both floating and sinking

Here and not

As I question the nature of existence itself

When there is no doing, when there is only being, what is left

What do I seek for, what could I find?

A melancholy wave drifts lazily across my psyche

Does it matter, any of it?

Where I am going or what I am doing or who I have become

All of it settles into the infinite void

Within and without

The breath in, the breath out

Now, there is something

And so I focus on my breath

As it sings a song of the finite in the infinite

In, and everything begins

Out, and everything ends

Again and again

A cycle, a completion, a birth, a death

With each gentle rise and fall of my chest

And then I feel it

The point of connection

The thread of hope, of promise

The one that binds me to the endless flow of existence

The grand dance of the cosmos, of the universe

Of all that ever was and will ever be

And it tugs on a part of me that I had all but forgotten

A speck, a seed, a spark

Deep within, not my human heart, something more vast

An endless sea

Maybe a soul

And all at once, I remember how to move

I recall that there is a point to it all

I just don’t know it yet

But that is what I am seeking, that is where I am headed

The spark inside begins to grow

The starless night gives way to a twilit glaze

And though I still don’t know the way

The light that emanates from the core of my being

Speaks in whispers laced with life and flame

I am the lantern

And I will always light the way