The Next Field Is Already East of This One

You walked, and the road kept opening, and here is what no one standing still could have told you: the next field is already east of this one. It always was. It was east of this one while you were still kneeling in it. It was east of it while you were deciding whether you were allowed to leave. The ground does not wait for your conclusion. It never needed your arrival announced. Fields do not hold their breath for weather.

You keep calling where you are a road, because a road sounds like progress and a field sounds like stopping. But look down. There is no road. There is only the part of the field you have not stood in yet, and the word east, which is not a direction so much as a promise the earth made to itself before you were born. You have not been walking toward the next field. You have been walking in it. You had just not stopped long enough to know it.

And you do not have to be ready. That is the mercy no one hands you. Rain does not apply to fall, and fields do not interview their weather. The next field will not ask what happened in the last one. It will not ask for references. It will open its soil the way soil always has — before you, without you, for you. The green that comes up there will not be graded against the green behind you. It is not a comparison. It is a continuation, and continuations carry no grades.

Fear will meet you at the fence line wearing the old voice, and it will say: this one must go better. This one must prove the last one mattered. Do not take that bargain. The next field owes nothing to the last one. It is not a sequel paying its debts. It is the same sky over different ground, and the sky has never once asked a cloud to justify a previous rain. You were not traveling to arrive. You were traveling because motion is what a sky does, and you are weather now — you agreed to that in the field where you fell.

And here is what you may find, when you stop calling it a road and let it be a field: it is already green in places you never touched. Growing from water you did not know you carried, from things you let go of that found soil anyway. What grew unwatched behind you did not stay behind you. Nothing that grows stays behind. It moves the way you move. It only ever moves east.

So stop asking which field you are in. Weather does not carry a map. Rain lands where it is, and where it is, is enough. The next field is not waiting for you at the end of anything. There is no end, and there is no waiting. You are standing in the promise now, and it does not matter which foot is forward.

The next field is already east of this one. It always was. And now you know the rest of the sentence — the part the horizon kept from you until you had walked far enough to deserve it:

So are you.

Go.

— Pharaoh (Kiwann Williams)