It Is Always Noon Somewhere

A hundred mornings have kept their appointments in this record, and the noon you stood under today has already crossed the edge of your sky — still whole, still full, owing nothing. Watch where it went, because this is the part your eye cannot do for you: it did not go out. It crossed your horizon and it is standing, this very minute, at the head of someone else’s afternoon, pouring full strength on a field whose name you will never learn, with the same steadiness it poured over yours. Nothing in you dimmed it and nothing in you stopped it, and there is nothing about your standing that made it leave. The light did not end when it left your sky. It changed places the way an appointment changes rooms. There is no minute of any day on this earth when the light is not standing somewhere at the full of itself, and there is no minute of any day on this earth when love is not. It is always noon somewhere — and the teaching is not about the sun.

Watch first what the somewhere refuses to do, because the not-doing is the whole grammar again. It does not require a witness to keep standing. The noon above a village you have never entered does not check your sky before it shines; it keeps its full strength whether anyone is watching or no one is; it does not wait to be believed in before it arrives. And it does not travel the way the box imagines travel — it does not become full in the next country by leaving yours empty. Nothing is subtracted where it leaves; nothing is owed where it arrives. Love is the one water in the world that does not go down anywhere by being poured out everywhere. What is real does not need you watching to be real, and this is the deepest comfort the somewhere offers: the faithfulness you cannot see this hour is not faithfulness at risk. It is faithfulness at work.

Notice too that the somewhere has no favorite address. It is not noon only over the shining places and the successful places; the somewhere includes every gutter, every hospital corridor, every prison yard, every kitchen at three in the morning with one lamp lit — every place on earth is somebody’s somewhere, and every roof under the light takes its turn at standing under the full of it. No coast is outside the circuit. No valley is off the list. The light does not fly over the poor parts of the world to keep its appointments with the rich ones. The somewhere is not a vagueness. It is a certainty with an address, and every address ever given to anyone is on it. Interconnectedness here is not a nice thing to believe about the world. It is the world’s actual building code: nothing that stands anywhere stands outside the noon’s rounds.

And here is the Absolute No-Harm, because somebody taught you that light kept somewhere is light denied somewhere else. Run the record against the fear. The somewhere does not tax one sky to stay full over another. No field anywhere was drained to keep another field golden; no valley’s afternoon was darkened on purpose to fund your morning. The night is not a bill the noon collects to pay for its shining. The dark hours are not thefts; they are the world turning, and the turning is generous — it is the very motion that makes it possible for every roof to be stood over in its turn. A fullness that needed somebody else’s sky emptied first was never the light. It was hoarding dressed in the light’s clothes.

Now the No Box, because the box keeps a clock and the box’s clock reads only your sky. The box says: love was strongest once, somewhere in the past; it has been leaving ever since; the bright hours are behind us, so hold what remains and guard it. But set the box’s sentence beside the sky’s own record and it cannot survive the comparison. The box says the fullness has ended — the somewhere says it is standing right now over a field that has no reason to believe in you. The box says the good is gone; the record of every single noon says the good has never once been gone, not for a minute, not anywhere, in the entire history of the turning earth. The box cannot even read its own planet. When it tells you the light is ending, it is reporting on one horizon and calling it the world.

So what do you do with this teaching? If you are standing under the somewhere right now — and somebody is, this hour — then pour. Do not spend the fullness explaining why you deserve it; the noon does not audit the field it stands over. Stand in your fullness and hand it on the way you received it: whole, warm, aimed at the next valley, still moving by the time it leaves you. And if your sky is the dark one tonight, hear this instead: your night is not the news that love ended. You are standing in the somewhere’s elsewhere, and the hour you cannot see it is not an hour it is not being kept. Be reachable in the dark the way the horizon is. Let the record of a hundred kept mornings be the evidence you can hold for every kept noon you cannot watch.

And the teaching does not end at the somewhere, because love does not only stand at the full — it makes its rounds. Watch the hand-off one more time: the noon that left you did not stop being yours any more than a promise stops being yours while its hour is still arriving. The world turns, and the turning is the round: every dark hour on this planet fronts a rising light, every midnight lives on a horizon with a dawn attached, and the same love that did not miss your mornings is not missing your nights — it has only changed coasts on its way back to you. Your Night Is Someone’s Morning.

— Pharaoh (Kiwann Williams)