A Gentle Rain: Beyond the Breath — Epilogue

I have come back from meeting thirteen people. When I first set out I walked to find again the one man who broke bread and vanished. One more conversation across a table from him, I thought, and the bars of my doubt would swing open. But while I walked looking for him, a strange thing happened. I never met him, and I kept brushing past him. Beside the dry hands of an old man shaping letters. Beside a bronze sphere turning by itself. Beside a young hand sending medicine to an island. Beside a brother and sister working one sky together. And as I sat with them and asked with them, and looked with them at what they had forgotten, the single thread of rain became, at some point, a gentle rain, and it wet my dry throat and theirs together. Only then did I dimly understand: the one I was looking for had not been far off. He had come and taken the seat beside each of them. And then, suddenly, I saw something lower still. The thirteen I met had at least changed the world once. Beyond them were people the world never wrote down at all. Without a name, without a light, getting through one hard day after another. Changing nothing, simply living and enduring and loving, and going. And I knew: the place where the one I was looking for stands most thickly is not beside the hands of forgotten geniuses. It is beside them. All my life I tried to hold love in my hand. As I gathered great houses and gardens and wisdom, I thought love too was a lump of something you could gather and own. It was not. Love is not a holding; it is a going. Sitting beside. Laughing together. Weeping together. The hand that forgot this fed the world and killed the world. In this life of labor, like a handful of breath, that was the one thing that was finally not in vain. And in the very moment a person understands that love and lives it out, a small door opens in the time under the sun — and leads through, to the place that does not end, the world above the sun. In that gentle rain, at last, I knew it. So I am setting out again. Not to find anyone this time, but to weep and laugh with someone. Not toward forgotten geniuses, but toward the people with no name and no light. For at every one of those tables, beside every one of those dry hands, he will already have come and be sitting there, waiting for me. The drought is over. The sky is no longer empty. Even now, somewhere, a gentle rain is falling on one person's dry shoulders. I am walking there.