"How, then?" you were asking, even after
he met you on your way.

You would pause or pose to pen the question
many times to me.

Was it perhaps that question that undid 
everything between us?

I never answered you because I loved you
and perhaps it felt a betrayal
of the One truth, the only truth
that was the essence of all that was
pure about the love
that ran between us,a river.

How would they believe if they did not know?
How would they know if you did not go?
How would they see if you did not show
them the way?

But the way
cannot be shown. It must be walked.
And no matter how much we talked
through time about it and no matter
the silence through the stain and splatter
he came to show us he was the Way
as we are when we lay down
the need to lead
and follow
the call
home.

Then life opens up. Consider the lilies
he told us once. See the birds of the air.
Put your finger in my flesh.
Look and see!

"When you walk within it..."
His words echo in my heart whatever
time or space I'm in. 

He who was one with Life,
the Light of the world, had no need
of argument. He simply walked,
sometimes shaking off dust,
sometimes buckling beneath the weight,
sometimes running to the children,
sometimes gliding across deep water.

He walked with me and talked with me
and his gentle heart celebrated me most
when I allowed life to change me
as it did when I met you again.

You, who I had once dismissed as brash
and beligerent, a bastion of pride who denied
the Way he came to open up, the Life he came
to show us how to live—You changed me,
not because someone came to show me
or to tell me or to persuade me.
Certainly not. But what I found as true
was all that seemed lost in you: the dream,
the dance, the day, all that's clear now, 
in the stillness of my life's night.

The Life rose up from within
and it was true gift. Do you not remember
the way we laughed at nothing and cried
at everything and the truth of the tenderness?

How was it that the rose became a thorn?
How was it that your smile turned to scorn?
On your journeys, journeys that would have been ours,
did you not slow down long enough to see
the miracle and mystery of the moment?

How then could you be free?
Wasn't that always the true r question?
And have you found it in your undying loyalty
to the cause of the church with a capital C?
Look at all that has been accomplished
in the organization of ideas through time.
Yes, it is impressive but sadly oppressive, too,
and it must grieve you if you are not blind but see.
But what of the things we expressed, besides
the poetry and professions ever true for me?
What of the inner light, the life that rises up?
What of the Love that never dies
no matter how you try to kill it?

The real war was never between us.
It was between the twin wolves within you,
within me, within us all. Once upon a time
and place you touched that mystery and lived it
with me. Before you turned upon yourself
and fell beneath the weight of a shame
to which you returned instead of the grace
so freely given, of which you spoke so eloquently.
You were always free.

But one does not know this
simply because someone tells them so
or gives up everything in a failed attempt to show
the way or try to say I love you. How then
will we begin? How then will the story end?
This then is where I tripped in time myself, 
for to ask how and try to lay out a path
or make my case or communicate
is not the way of Life.

Allowing this, I must lay it down,
even this life and the only love I've known
within it—not literally but as a metaphor
for true meaning found in mystery,
true movement in the stillness,
true momentum in this waiting, wondering,
watching for signs of life
along the Way.