You keep asking the hour what it owes you,
as though the day were a lender
and you the trembling, apologetic debt —
counting on your fingers the years behind,
the years perhaps ahead,
as if life were a sum that could come out wrong.
But put the ledger down.
The light does not arrive on time.
It does not arrive at all —
it simply is, the way mercy is,
the way the first morning was,
pouring itself out over everything
without once asking whether you deserved it.
This is the secret the rivers carry to the sea:
nothing is owed, and so everything is given.
There is no waiting room in the whole of creation.
The cup is warm against the palm now
or it is only the rumor of warmth,
which has never once warmed a living hand.
What you have called not yet
is a country with no roads into it.
What you have called too late
is a door painted on a wall —
walk toward it your whole life and you will only
press your face against the cold of your own fear.
Turn. The real door was always open.
It opens onto this.
Be unfinished, and unafraid.
The wave does not weep that it is not the sea.
It rises, it is wholly and gloriously the wave,
it carries the moon on its back for one instant
and is complete —
complete in the rising, complete in the falling,
owing nothing to the shore that waits to take it.
So with you, beloved and unrepeatable.
Not the child you were, not the elder you fear,
not the final breath that someday
will be drawn for you as gently as a sheet —
this breath, the one moving through you as you read,
this single unrenewable miracle of air,
is the entire inheritance,
the full estate, the whole kingdom handed over,
and it is enough,
oh, it was always, always enough —
and you are standing — yes, even you,
even now, even here, with all you carry —
in the middle of the only room there is,
and the room is vast,
and the room is blazing with a light
that asked for nothing,
that was lit before the stars were lit,
that has been waiting,
patient as a held breath,
the whole of your life
for you, at last,
to lift your eyes
and see that you were never once
outside its radiance.