The Call to Freedom

One day I passed a shepherdess
a-wandering through the gravel plains.
“Is this your home?” I asked her,
for her eyes looked foreign, and
filled with pain.

What follows is the narrative
passed that day from her to me
of how a shepherdess could be
so lost.
So trapped.
So free.

        “Yesteryear, I was like you, content but for the careless few unanswered questions pestering my bright young mind, ‘til one day I faced the pest (fed up at last, longing for rest) and chased it ‘til another I did find.  This led to a thousand more and all at once the walls, the floor, the ceiling held such suffocating menace that I cried out—and a whisper came, building into a hurricane, and suddenly I was transformed…transformed!
          “This is how I came to be the shepherdess that now you see, the beauty my captivity had longed for. And yet, alas! My new eyes see a browning grass, my new mouth tastes metallic water, my new ears hear a roaring thunder (that comes not from the sky, but from an overpass). There was a bliss in ignorance and happiness in lies, for now the world I see ‘round me no longer satisfies my thirst for truth that has been newly whetted.
            “But weep ye not for me, my friend, for truth, it lies ahead.  I glimpse it deep within my soul and know that I am led to it by one who beckons softly me! Oh, beckons he so sweetly that content and free I cannot be, nor want I to, till he (oh he!) finds me (oh me!) on this great journey, passing through toward him. Like one in love I follow him, ne’er looking to behind (for what know I of shame or pride or anger, sly remembrances?), nor look I before me to divine my own good way (for I know mine eyes would lure me to a place my head to lay and return again to slumber to ease my impassioned hunger and to stay).  No, within me I do look, to my heart which has been stolen by the one I dearly love, the part of me through which he speaks of all the things that fill my dreams and fuel my feet and give my life (and my strife) its meaning.
            “I pray thee follow me, young lad, to the place where I am going (but as you are, I know you cannot know the things I’m knowing).  Can you not, though, bright young lad, find in your heart the question that inspires searching for the prize you know that you’ve been missing? What is that prize worth to you, the answer to the question?  Is it worth your everything? Your future? Your possessions?  For you to follow me, you see, your eyes, they must be opened, your heart must then be softened, and your soul awakened, lastly.  You mustn’t hesitate to burn the bridges to your dry and dreary past with the fire of a passion for a love you know will last through the rest of your forever—(and then a thousand more!)—diminishing the life you only thought you had before.
            “The choice is yours alone to make, only you can set your path: along the comfort of the sidewalk or the truth of cool, wet grass. The first, it would be easy, for that way you now well know; ‘tis the way to the familiar world and the comfort of your home. And you see the other way, I think (yes, by now I’m sure). Has the plain and loathsome nature here not yet lost the lure of don’t-know-better?”

Now I looked around me
And was stunned.

All my life
I’ve walked this trail,
this vain
and plain
and gravel trail,
not letting myself ask
the question:
Why?

Never have I asked
or looked around.
Never have I asked,
nor looked, nor found.
Never have I asked
the way to open up my
down-turned eyes
from the dry and static
inorganic ground.

Now the mountain range,
set distantly before me
and the path of wilderness
my eyes can fin’lly see
grant me this, the choice
that I never asked nor sought for,
and curse me with
this longing:
To be free.

(“I pray thee follow me,
Young lad,
To the place where I am going…”)

…To be free.