The seeker had been walking for a very long time.
No one quite remembered when he had started. The old people of one village
said their grandparents had seen him pass through as a young man, his sandals
new, his eyes bright with a question. Now his beard was white and his sandals
were thin as paper, but the question still burned in him: Where is the
divine? Where can I find God?
He had looked everywhere a person could look. He climbed a mountain so high
that the clouds lay beneath him like a field of wool, and he sat on its
summit for a year, waiting. The mountain was silent. He crossed a desert
where the sand sang in the wind, and he listened for a voice in the singing.
The desert told him nothing. He sat in cool stone temples until his knees
ached, staring at carved images, whispering, "Are you in there? Are you
here?"
He bathed in seven holy rivers. He fasted until he was thin as a reed. He
studied with teachers who knew ten thousand verses by heart. And still, when
he closed his eyes at night, he felt the same empty ache. God was always
somewhere else — on the next mountain, across the next river, behind the next
locked door.
One evening, old and tired, he sat down on the bank of a slow river simply
because his legs would walk no further. He was too weary now even to search.
He stopped wanting. He stopped reaching. He just sat, watching the water
catch the gold of the setting sun.
A fish jumped. A kingfisher dove. A breath went in and out of his own chest,
quiet as a sleeping child.
And in that stillness, with no searching left in him, something turned over
inside his heart like a key in a lock.
The light on the water — that was the divine. The breath in his chest — that
was the divine. The fish, the bird, the cooling air, the tired old man
sitting on the bank — all of it, every single thing, was the one life he had
been chasing across the whole world. It had been looking out through his own
eyes the entire time.
"Vasudeva is all," he whispered, and laughed, and wept, both at once.
He had searched for many lifetimes. And in the end, he had not gone anywhere
at all. He had only, finally, seen.
