The Myth of Horizons

In the warm glow of the waning day, I sat near the edge of a crumbling yellow cliff and looked out into the vast Pacific Ocean. The horizon, that familiar line that separates the ocean from sky seemed indisputable in its significance. Spreading in the distance, the water-sky horizon makes a neat line that appears to divide two worlds—unlike the heaving and interrupted squiggle-pastiche of the mountains and cities. But the line that makes us think “sea” and then “sky” simultaneously is a myth. There is no line between the ocean and the sky. The earth, sea and sky are in constant chaos, relation and exchange. The wind and sun evaporate water; the sea belches CO2 and misty fizz, the rain falls only to be evaporated by the sun in an eternal cycle—one eternal round. The lines that we seem to see so clearly between our bodies and our souls, our culture and nature are equally mythological.