The Ocean

Imagine there was an ocean, a bit like the Atlantic Ocean, which humans didn't really properly cross until fairly recently in history. That ocean kept the prying hands off European conquest from the Americas for hundreds of years because being able to navigate it required a whole bunch of things to come together; we needed compasses and watches, ships to withstand the big waves, and just the sheer will to take conquest across the violent sea.

Imagine you were standing on the coast of Portugal in the sixteenth century and looking out to the west.

What would you think was out there?

As far as your senses tell you, you're looking at an expanse of water that might as well go on forever, but you think that it probably doesn't. Mythology always puts something at the end of the Earth and wither it's a World Serpent or a celestial dome it's the same thing, really, it's just a point, essentially an arbitrary point, where the world just stops.

And beyond that?

Well, that's the realm of things that are and are not, that's west of west, that's the vastness of Jehovah, or the expanse where Yggdrasil yawns on forever; it's somewhere, but it might as well not be.

But we crossed to the far shore, eventually, and we found a land of pearls and gold, strange jungles, humble temples, and civilizations that were once mightier than we might've been able to believe.

But, image there's another ocean, a bit like the Atlantic, and you're standing on the shore, and you're looking out over the water, and you're wondering what's there.

But you know that the Earth is round, and that everything circles back in itself eventually, and you know that, beyond Earth are the stars and all the heavens, the universe and whatever might be bound up in that.

You know all that because we mapped it all out, but imagine you're standing on the shore anyway, for a laugh, but it's not a psychical ocean, if you will, but a gulf of understanding.

You don't know if anyone's ever crossed it, or even if it stops or just goes on forever, but it's known to be dangerous to try to find out.

Ideas and understandings get stormy out there, and it feels more like constantly fighting than actually learning anything or getting anywhere. The things you think out in that ocean seem to want to drown you, and sometimes you just get stuck, becalmed, and you have no idea how far you've come out what direction you need to point your bow in so that you can see the shore again.

If you're brave or stupid enough to put the shore over the horizon then you're putting your life in the hands of chance, or so it feels. You have no idea how the currents are out here, or if the direction of the wind will maybe even turn you right back around. You don't even know what you're trying to find, if there's anything to find, and most people who've gone out and given thier fate to the sea, have never returned.

Why not?

Are they all dead?

Or did they find something so great that they didn't feel like coming back?

Interested?

Want to know what the far shore is like?