The moments that sustain.
The others – all the others – need their full share of attention. You can’t even begin to know the value of what sustains without the context.
No one-size-fits-all in what sustains and what doesn’t. Sometimes, it can be the memory of something so fleeting, you hardly noticed it in the moment. A scent. A specific slant of light on one rock formation, or even on a piece of stone on a cracked sidewalk. The crinkle of a smile from a stranger with nothing to sell, and nothing to get from you other than the equivalent of that hi-hi between two sentient beings on planet earth.
Or the powerful connection from a conversation with someone you’ve appreciated for a long time; someone who’s been circling you, while you circled him or her. The moment never just right; and then, here it is. The moment. What will come of it? Mystère. No matter. A connection. A direction. A form of affectionate respect for the power in things, in animals, in people. Affection, plus respect.
The moment that sustained me, yesterday, had to do with a horse and the conversation that horse allowed between myself and someone else.
The rest of yesterday had none of the blessed quality of the day before when I worked on revision as if in a place of total privacy and trust. Yesterday was fraught with a sense of intrusions and all the frustrations that come from being crowded, inspected, suspected, questioned, observed, caught out, interpreted, analyzed, labeled. A place of sleeping and waking nightmares.
The story has those moments. Life has them too. As far as I’m concerned, the story isn’t about the night or the day mares. The story is about those moments that sustain. The moments, for example, when a human and a horse form a bond of trust from which they can learn from one another, and give added meaning to all the experiences that came before, and whatever lies beyond the next bend and twist in the trail.
There’s no horse in this story. There will be in the next. Whether the horse in the next story will have the shape of one or of something else: yet to be discovered.