042825poem.txt

Ten Days Under the Silent Sun

Once there was a traveler who wandered into the mountains, seeking nothing, but carrying everything.
The body was heavy with stories. The mind, a marketplace of forgotten voices.

For ten days, the traveler sat.
The sun rose and fell like a slow, breathing beast. The stars spun their secret music. The earth murmured beneath still feet.

Old rivers of memory surged and flooded the plains. Ancient bones of sorrow were dug up by unseen hands.
At times, the traveler became a fox chasing the echoes of a vanished hunt.
At times, a stone drinking the silent rain.
At times, only a mist, clinging to the branches of thought.

Pain spoke. Love spoke. Hunger spoke. Even the very marrow of old battles sang in strange tongues.
Everything was witnessed. Nothing was grasped.

One morning, before the bell that never rang, the traveler glimpsed the weaving of the forest:
Every leaf falling, every bird vanishing into mist, every breath returning to the sea of breath — all without resistance.
Nothing permanent.
Nothing owned.

And so the traveler learned:
To lose the war is to win the garden.
To feel everything is to carry nothing.
To walk with the heart of a wolf and the patience of a tree.

When the tenth night fell, the traveler rose not as a conqueror, but as a river, finding its way again to the ocean.
There are no certificates for rivers. No medals for rain.
Only the quiet certainty of flow.

The journey had not ended.
It had barely begun.