No tomorrow can be like today. We are moved in every moment. It is strange how we graduate things, determining value, inclusion, exclusion, and pattern. At what point does experience override the need for the execution of dismissal or exclusion?
What scale is the arbiter of going all in, right now, for this moment? What point is it that makes now OK? Is it enough to be moved by the song of the first bird, on this the first morning of the rest of however many mornings are left? Is it enough to be moved by the smell of the eggs I am cooking, when, I know, that somewhere, there are many who have never known the taste or smell of eggs? Is it enough to be moved by the whistle of the train, far away, reminding me that sound has a haunting form of distance, of mystery, and of the menace provided by all mechanical things that cut through the natural world?
Is it enough to be moved by the sky so blue there is no proper name for it, only the move of the pupils to open wide enough to try and take in something so impossibly wide, far beyond capacity to be fully taken and ever held? Is it enough to be moved by the bats at dusk, as they struggle to find enough, meaning thousands of tiny bugs in this suburban nightmare where the insect biomass is a small pittance of what it was even four years ago? Wings that beat maybe 17 times a second in full faith of a buggy sky? Is it enough to be moved by the wind, as it passes, full of voices I don’t understand, where instead, I make up what I want the wind to be saying to me? And even though that is somehow a product of my imagination, do I give in to allow that it moves me?
To be moved, is to take a breath. To be moved is to have a body, and the senses that go with it. I think, this is enough. All the other moving is memory and projection, and memory changes as we change, and then even, sometimes, we voluntarily change memories, too. It moves us to do so. As do our hopes and fears for the future. As we lay bound within fantasy, something right here slips away.
Not that fantasy is excluded from all this wonder. Even movies, those phantasms of visual industry, move us. I’ll always remember the last scene of “Schindler’s List” as Schindler, played by Liam Neeson, after receiving unfathomably deep gratitude from those whose lives he saved, he nonetheless collapses on the train tracks. “I should have done more,” he says, in a deep weeping faint. This moves me. The “more” that haunts us all is everywhere, and in everything.
Always, there is so much more. But in this moment, I am moved to hold it close to the vest, to move towards a secret cherishing, to find within the enfolds of my comforting protections, to understand that what moves me is always right here–and always beyond me as well.
I can’t tell you what I had for breakfast last Tuesday, because too much has happened since then. Sky-deep waves have rolled across my sentient, sensual, and sentimental self. They are pushing me up into that sky and dragging me down under with a mouth full of the saltiest of waters. Earth, sky, water, and the air of my breath are moving me to places never seen before, if only I show up to notice. How could tomorrow possibly be like today?
Is that salty water taste in my mouth fed from all the tears rolling across the surface of this globe in any given moment? To be fair, I could cup my ear and hear all the laughter around the world, too, as I occasionally seem to prove it by taking a slice of life from would-be influencer video shorts. LOL. Social Media. Even in the deepest delusions there is a seriously deep grain of truth. Of human need. And the human need for always connecting to more and deeper human experience.
More to cherish. More to grieve. More to wonder. More to give care to. How could tomorrow be in any way like today? How fortunate to have no tomorrow. No tomorrow will match the opportunity of today. Till then, I say to you, all my anticipatory thoughts, “You may stand back, and stand by.” Til we next meet a new day, if I should be so lucky. What then?