The Arrow

​​ The Arrow - By Lucy Hinton

There’s an arrow that points through us all

Headed with intensity towards…

The ultimate goal of life

A mark upon

the path of the infinite

We all serve this nameless course

for we are at once arrow, bow and quarry

This mysterious hunger to be alive and fly forth is what bore us hence,

we belong to it

It is of our dreaming

And at the same time

it is dreaming us.

Why do waves head to the shore

again and again?

~ moved by the circulation of that which flows

through the cycle of all

Joining ancestor’s breath with newborn cry

We, the living,

are the wave-crests raised

by the journeys of the dead

Every arriving wave is a little death

If you stand close enough

You may hear the hushhhh

of its final breath.

Yet what is death

if not the freedom to fly

through the sacred gateways of change?

Why did our ancestors

take care of our forebears

and we, the children of our kind?

It was of the passion of the Great Arrow

that flies through the heart

of All creation.

Animated with determination

to travel ever further

into the mystery,

piercing and expanding.

Dreaming is to the soul

what breathing is to the body

It has no known goal

yet is a vital sign of life.

The Great Arrow cannot be removed,

the trick is to listen closely

for its whistle

and become one with it

flying straight and true,

or even tremulous and curved,

content simply

with the flying.