The Field Does Not Count Your Absences

You have been counting your absences like the field was counting them too — every day you were not standing in it, every morning you did not look east, every green you missed. You kept a tally against yourself and assumed somebody was keeping one behind you. Here is the correction, and you will want to argue with it, so it comes plain: the field does not count your absences. It never did. There is no column in the dirt with your name at the top, no record of the days you were elsewhere, no balance owed on the other side of your return.

The counting was fear’s job, and fear is a diligent bookkeeper. It kept the whole tally by hand, in its own handwriting, and then it showed you the total and said, look what they are holding against you. But nothing was holding anything. Rain fell while you were gone and did not wait for an apology. The sun crossed the whole sky on the days you were not watching it, and it did not do it for the record. Things grow without witnesses because growth has never once required a witness. You were the only one who counted.

And here is the part worth saying slowly: being found is not a reward for unbroken attendance. You did not have to be present every day to be findable. Water finds the low places — all of them, in any order, without reading a tally first. The low place does not have to prove its thirst. It does not have to show the water a receipt for how long it has been dry. The water comes because the low place is low and the water is water, and that is the whole arrangement, and it has been the arrangement since before anyone was around to doubt it.

Notice what go and be found does not say. It does not say go and be found perfect, or found on time, or found with a story about why you were late. Findable is a location, not a performance. You can stand in the middle of an ordinary morning with nothing arranged, nothing polished, nothing prepared, and still be exactly as findable as you would have been with a speech. The field has never once asked anybody for an introduction. Grass comes up next to things that never introduced themselves.

So go — that is still the instruction, it has not changed since the walk started — but go like somebody who is not being followed. No one is auditing your route. The horizon does not take attendance, and the field you are walking into now does not need the version of you that stayed up nights balancing the books of your own absence. You were never being graded for distance. You were only ever asked to be findable, and a thing that keeps moving is the easiest thing in the world to find, because everything that loves it knows the direction east.

You are not behind. There was no schedule to fall off of. The field did not count your absences, and now you do not count them either, and what is left after all the counting stops is just this: a low place, wide open, with weather coming toward it that has been on its way the whole time.

So do not stand at the edge of the field waiting to be looked at. You are not the watched thing; you are the place the water is going. The low place does not pray for the rain and does not perform for it either — it is simply lower, and the water was always coming home. Be the low place, and the finding stops being an event and becomes a direction. Everything after this is just the water arriving.

— Pharaoh (Kiwann Williams)