The Sea Has Already Called My Name

Each morning
this old body grows a little quieter.

Its footsteps are softer now,
as though it already hears
another music
calling from beyond the hills of time.

I do not grieve.

How can I mourn the lantern
when it is the flame
I have always loved?

This body was a robe
borrowed for a season.

The One who wears it
has never grown old.

I have mistaken myself
for skin and memory,
for a handful of stories
gathered like shells
along the shore.

Yet the one who gathered them
was never the shells.

He was always the sea.

Now I feel the tide
rising inside my own heart.

Soon it will climb the beaches
where I wrote my name in sand,
and with one gentle breath
erase every footprint
I believed I had to leave behind.

Nothing is lost.

The ocean
does not mourn the wave
when it returns home.

Time has been
a patient teacher,
but even time
cannot keep me forever.

There is a country
where no clocks are needed,
where thought grows still
like a bird
folding its wings at dusk,
where silence
is not empty,
but overflowing.

I have dreamed of that place
without knowing its name.

Now I recognize it.

It has been waiting
inside every breath.

When this small house of bones
opens its final door,
do not look for me
among the ashes.

Look instead
where light
has forgotten
its own beginning.

There I will be—
not as a man,
not as a memory,
not as a voice,
but as the quiet
that lives inside every prayer,
the space
between two heartbeats,
the wind
that bows the cedar,
the river
that never asks
where it is going.

Call it God.
Call it Love.
Call it the Great Silence.

Names are only cups.

I am thirsty now
for the water
that has never been divided.

And when the last wave
lays itself down,
there will be no farewell.

Only the sea,
remembering
it has always been
the sea.