Crossroad

People bustle around me, all moving in their own directions. Some show me smiles; most have their heads down, muttering to their cellphones or to themselves as they spirit off seeking some new place to be leaving again. In the midst of them, I stand alone. Isolated as they jostle me. Invisible to their avoidances. I reach out, touch – and the world pivots on my heal. A soul reels with me while all the rest is silent. Frozen. There is joy. There is contact. There is peace.

Then I must let go. I cannot lay claim, cannot capture. So the best I can do is send a soul off in a new direction. A smile on their face, but they move away from me. Moving toward their own fiction. They do not realize the truth. What I am seeking is a hand that reaches back to my own. One who does not grab to take, but to give. To save.

I am standing in a desert. I am cool but I watch the sun burning towards me as the shadows shirk away for the recesses under rock. I am lit but I do not burn. I am as isolated as before. Time moves around me and beneath me and over me and I wait for the coming press of night, the chastizement of a new sun. I watch the mountains move, but my feet do not. I am alone in my vision. Who would share this truth?

I stand at a crossroad of my own making. Before me is a river. Before me is a jungle. The river is clean, it is going someplace, it is refreshing. The jungle is dark; it is hot, full of pitfalls. It confuses in upon itself. There is danger there. But the jungle is solid, and the river moves of its own. I do not know where it takes me, and my footing is not sure. It may sweep me from my feet, it may drown me. The jungle is full of danger, but I am isolated from it. The danger moves around me as the sun spans the earth, but my feet do not move from the spot I walk in, and I have no need to fear.

The river is open to me, but the jungle does not choose me. So I stand at a crossroad of my own making, and feel the sunrise set behind my back, shield my eyes from the burn of the moon, and wait for the mountains to move.