I
We come into the world without remembering—
only the first astonishment,
the sudden weight of being here,
the rhythm beneath the ribs
that was sounding before we knew our name.
Were we elsewhere before this?
Was there some sphere
from which we came,
and to which, one day,
we shall return?
We cannot say.
A veil is drawn across the greater things:
thin as breath upon glass,
close enough to trouble the eye,
yet always beyond the hand.
Now and then
it seems almost possible
to lift it—
but then the moment passes.
So we are born into smallness,
into the brief astonishment of days.
The clock moves.
The seasons turn their quiet pages.
What we love begins,
even as it is leaving us.
We hold the moment
and it is already memory.
And still—
beneath all this passing,
something in us listens.
II
For we are not solitary threads.
We are strands of one long making,
twisted together in darkness and light:
knotted here,
frayed there,
broken perhaps,
but never wholly separate.
Something binds us.
Perhaps we hold one another
without knowing that we do.
We have seen what human hands can do—
the wound,
the cruelty,
the small betrayals
that can darken an otherwise ordinary day.
We know the weight of evil.
And yet, beside it,
through it,
sometimes answering it—
love.
Love, appearing where it should not be.
Love, given when nothing is owed.
A kindness from a stranger.
A hand reaching through the dark.
Again and again
some inexplicable goodness
rises from the wreckage.
Not triumph.
Not certainty.
Something quieter.
A mercy beyond our reckoning,
constant as the lamp
left burning in a window at dusk—
a small light saying
someone is here.
You are not alone.
III
If this life is all we are given,
then it is so little.
A handful of years.
A few recognitions.
A little laughter.
Some grief.
The names of those we cannot bear to lose.
And yet—
something in us refuses the arithmetic.
There are moments
when the ordinary world seems briefly transparent:
a note of music
held a little longer than it needs to be,
the way a piano answers a violin,
a hand finding ours in the dark,
light moving across water,
bread broken,
wine poured,
the unasked-for kindness of a stranger.
For an instant
the veil seems almost weightless.
And we sense—
not understand,
not prove,
but sense—
that we move within something
without beginning or end;
something too exquisite
for the language we possess,
too immense for the small instruments of the mind.
Perhaps eternity does not announce itself.
Perhaps it is hidden
inside the passing thing.
IV
We cannot lift the veil.
We cannot know
what waits beyond the last beat of the heart.
There may be a door.
There may be only darkness.
But sometimes it feels
as though the door,
if there is one,
would not open upon somewhere strange.
Perhaps it would be a homecoming.
Perhaps we would discover
that we had never been outside it—
that all along
we had been returning
to something that remembered us.
So let us be here.
Briefly.
Let us hold this moment
while it is still ours to hold.
Let us be astonished
by the light,
by the music,
by one another.
And when the moment passes,
as all moments must,
let something in us remain listening—
to the deep turning beneath the world,
to the silence beneath the sound,
to the unseen thread
that runs through all our days,
strand against strand,
life within life,
held—
and holding—
as the great wheel turns,
and turns,
and turns,
within something eternal.