The Way the Lotus Remembers

There are mornings
when I cannot tell
whether I am walking through the world,
or whether the world,
with infinite patience,
is walking through me.

The old paths never seem as old
as my memories make them.
Each stone beneath my feet
rests in its own silence,
asking nothing of me.

The wind has forgotten
the meaning of urgency.
The mountain answers no questions
because it has never needed
to explain its existence.

Even the river,
carrying no passport,
crosses every valley
as though every shore
has always known its name.

For years
I believed I was choosing the road.
Now I wonder
if the road was quietly choosing me.

Perhaps every turning
was waiting patiently
inside the first breath
that entered my being.

Perhaps karma
is not a chain forged from yesterday,
but a hidden seed
already holding
the shape of the forest.

I have wandered through forests
where bamboo bowed
to no ruler
except the invisible breeze.

I have watched water
carve its devotion
through ancient stone,
not through force,
but through a patience
deeper than desire.

Stone offers resistance.
Water offers surrender.
And neither asks
which one will endure.

There came a season
when I stopped asking,
“Why this path?”

The question itself
became tired from traveling,
growing softer
with each sunrise.

Instead,
I listened.

Not to voices.
Not to answers.

But to the stillness
before every sound
remembered itself.

Then I understood—
or perhaps
I surrendered
one more illusion.

There had never been
another shore to reach.

The mystery I was seeking
had been quietly breathing
beside me all along.

Perhaps every blossom
already knows this.

The lotus does not reject
the dark waters
that cradle its roots.

It gathers what is hidden
beneath the surface
and returns to the world
something pure and fragrant.

No flower forces the dawn.
It opens
when the moment arrives.

Perhaps awakening
is not a mountain
to be climbed,
nor a treasure
to be collected.

Perhaps it is simply
the gentle unfolding
of what has always been waiting
within us.

Now,
when I wander beneath
these measureless heavens,
I no longer ask
where the road will lead.

For every path,
whether through joy
or sorrow,
through birth
or death,
through forgetting
or remembering,
moves toward
the same mystery—

where every drop
recognizes the rain
from which it first awakened,
and the lotus,
opening one final time,
remembers
it was never only
a flower,
but the blossom,
the rain,
the sky,
and the One Breath
that dreamed them all.