The Beloved and the Bride Awaken

the dawn...

Once there was a man who had the dream
to be a mighty warrior;
and this man heard of a kingdom
strong and powerful.
It was distant--
some said only legendary--
but he thought:
I will seek out this land
for surely if it is real
I will learn to be
the master of my world;
I will learn this
from its inhabitants.
So I will not leave that place
until I have the secret
of that kingdom's great power.

Long were his travels
with many false turns,
restarts,
backtracking
and harsh climes.
But eventually, he came to a place
where the people no longer referred to this kingdom
as mythic.
"Keep to this road.
And when you find the place
where the desert holds the moon,
you will be very near,"
said an old sage sitting
in a city gate.
So the man turned squinted eyes toward the desert--
and he said--
"Many are the years since I've put foot to sand."
Indeed, he'd grown to manhood in a desert, but had left it
long ago
bent on a life in fertile lands that flowed
with all the good things that last
for a season;
but as the season changed,
so did his heart...
changed enough that he looked
across the rippling pulse
of land exposed
and he wondered
"Will I remember how to survive there?"
The old man, reading his mind, said,
"You have the eyes of a desert urchin.
You will be fine out there,
that is if you have the courage
to begin."

So the man set out across the mounds,
mounds that held no promise of life for the next day,
for the next year
--only a promise of shifting,
of movement under a hot wind--
and he reached into his most inward parts to find
survival gear.

Gradually, he discovered the old man was right.
Gradually, he discovered that the feeling he'd long-called
Distase
would claim again
its birth name:
Fear;
a name long buried in the shifting sands that were
within him;
fear of such a world as this--
fear locked in the grain of a boy grown,
locked because it was never threshed in manhood--
this fear
finally broken,
and the chaff blew away.

Slowly, signs of life sprang up
in his peripheral vision,
until one day he reached his hand
to stroke the petal of a desert rose
and as the tail of his turban snapped in the wind,
he looked to the horizon that was behind him
--a horizon no longer lifting even the hint
of that "safe haven" now long distant--
and he thought, "Where did I get the idea that
there was no beauty in this place?"

So the man acclimated,
and thereby proved many wrong who lounged
still in the lush lands.
Strangely, (as these things go)
to prove them wrong had fired his courage
until there was nothing left to prove
and courage was a thing better saved for
inward rather than outward feats.
Accomplishment evaporated like fleeting raindrops on the desert sand,
to be replaced by something better,
as he traded one mirage for another--
in that mysterious place where heat-visions are
what you make them.
And he wondered
if he would ever leave the desert again.
At last, he was ready to consider
the riddle.
For his quest was made no less mysterious
by the regaining of his desert footing:

"Keep to this road,
and when you find the place where
the desert holds the moon
you will be very near."
Until now, simply keeping his feet to that road
had been mysterious quest enough,
with shifting sands
twisting outcropping
buttes to skirt
as weathering had often turned an ancient path
impassable--
but always he had found the trail again;
And nowhere along it's way
did he find a place
that seemed to hold the moon.

Then a new clawing anxiety
surfaced--
not that of a dissatisfied boy,
but of a man with avid survival skills--
a knowing welled up
that even hidden water was growing scarce.
And soon, water became his all-consuming need.
Never mind fanciful quests...
Never mind reaching beyond the fears of youth...
Water was the goal.
Because none of the rest mattered
to dry bones on the desert floor.
Finally, he did something he hadn't done in years--
he prayed to the God he'd met in the desert
so long ago.
He asked for life.
And as he did,
a gentle breeze swirled across his face--
a breeze with a freshening quality to it.
He turned into that air:
did it not carry at least a hint
of moisture?
So at last, he left the road
all for the hope of water.