Your Night Is Someone’s Morning

A hundred mornings have kept their appointments in this record, and every one of them arrived for somebody — so walk to the other side of the clock now, because the teaching follows you there too. Stand where you are standing. If it is day where you are, remember your last dark hour. If it is night, stay exactly where you are, with the lamp you have, and look at the truth your sky keeps hiding from you: at this very minute, somewhere on this earth, it is morning. Somewhere a kettle is finding its voice, a window is going gold along its bottom edge, a field is drinking its first light without asking whether it deserves the day. That is not a different sun. That is your sun, keeping an appointment on the other side of the world while your sky rests. The light did not leave you; it changed coasts. Your Night Is Someone’s Morning.

Watch first what the night refuses to do, because the not-doing is the whole grammar again. It does not confiscate the light. It does not cut the sun down to fund its hours, does not spend one sky to decorate another, does not make anybody poorer by making somebody’s window gold. The turning of the earth is not a debt being collected. It is a door swinging, and this door has never once swung only one way. The night does not take the light; it carries the light around. By the time you finish this page the somewhere will have moved again — the dark over you is already leaning toward another horizon the way a wave leans toward a shore, and the shore has never once failed to receive it.

And the someone is not a metaphor. This hour there is a farmer walking out into his rows with the frost still on them, a mother warming a bottle in a small bright kitchen, a stranger at a bus stop watching gold come through her window on the way to work she needs. Not one of them earned the morning. Nobody is issued the dawn on merit; there is no application for the light, no test to pass, no waiting to be found worthy of the day. The morning was never a wage. It was always a gift moving on rails the world laid down before any of us were born — and the rails run through your sky too. The same round that is standing over the someone this hour is carrying a morning to you: unhurried, unspent, unharmed, closer with every hour of your dark.

And here is the Absolute No-Harm, because somebody taught you that light is a fuel, and that your night means somebody somewhere used up your share. Run the record against the fear. No morning anywhere has ever been dimmer because your sky was dark. The light is not spent by being given; every shining place in the record shines the same at the same instant, because giving is the only thing light knows how to do with itself. A love that could be used up by being shared was never love — it was inventory, and inventory is what the box is made of. Your dark hour takes nothing from the world’s morning. It only takes its turn.

Now the No Box, because the box loves the dark hours. The box keeps its clock on your side of the world. It reads your one window, measures your one horizon, and announces what the whole sky is doing: the light is gone, the good has ended, the dark is permanent, guard it. But the box cannot read its own planet. Its darkest sentence — the good is gone — is the one claim the turning earth factually dismisses every hour of every day, and it has been dismissing it for four billion years without interruption. While the box says night, the somewhere says morning, and only one of them is talking about the world. The other is talking about a window and calling it everything.

So what do you do, if your sky is the dark one tonight? Keep the lamp. Do not spend your dark hours writing indictments against the light; the night has kept every appointment the light ever missed and has never once been called on it. Be reachable instead. A porch light counts. A kind word counts. The steady, unglamorous work of a person who trusts the turn counts — so keep your own lamp lit, that the turn may find you at home. Then let the night do its quiet work, because it has work: the water soaks down while the fields sleep, roots grow where nobody applauds, seeds divide in the dark on schedule, and none of it is wasted. The round keeps you too. It made a night for you not to lose you, but to hold you while the light changes coasts.

And when it comes — and it comes — do not meet it like a stranger you had stopped expecting. Every kept morning in this record is a receipt for the one standing on your horizon now. The light has crossed an ocean to reach your window, and it arrives exactly as it left every sky it ever visited: pouring full strength, keeping nothing back, asking no questions about how you spent its absence. Morning does not audit your night. It arrives the way love always arrives — undiminished by the distance, unconditioned by the wait, handed on whole from every sky it crossed to stand over yours.

Morning Comes All the Way.

— Pharaoh (Kiwann Williams)