Waves of the Dusk

The high priest sat upon the hill in a field of lavender resting on an old, wooden bench. The bench faced to the South and overlooked the ocean, and the sounds of crashing waves could be heard faintly in the distance, carried on a gentle breeze that contained also the smell of salt, and iron washed from the ruddy shoreside cliffs. The priest was reminded of his hometown in the mountains to the distant north, far from any ocean yet rich in iron all the same, and host to the same rusty aroma. He did not often like to think of home, but in certain moments such as this one it could not be helped. These the moments where no matter how hard you try to stay in the present, something in the nostalgic subconscious takes over, and suddenly you are transported to another place and time, held captive by your own memory.   As the last suggestions of daylight began to melt below the horizon, the priest set his gaze upon the sun, dim enough now that it did not bother him to look at it. The moon was not terribly far apart from it in the sky, and both moved at their own steady pace across the astuary ceiling of the Earth. So often it happens that we look at the sun or the moon in the sky, and in any given instant they appear to us stationary, an immovable fixture of the heavens, raining down on us with whatever warmth and light they can provide. Much less often do we take the time not only to look, but to watch – to follow and track their passage in real time and observe them, not as fixtures of the divine but simple objects like us, drifting through the void of the cosmos into which all material things were once thrust. On this evening, as the sun grew purple with dusk, the high priest found himself doing just this. He gazed at the setting sun and the rising moon and saw their motion relative to his own, to himself and to his own Earth, and just as well he saw all of the distance that lay between he and them. In his moment of seeing, he felt that he stood on one end of a bottomless, yawning chasm, and that that particular chasm was only one in an endless series of crisscrossing ravines and gulleys that separated every other thing in the universe from each other and from him, and in the next moment the high priest felt very small.   All of the great astronomers and holy men of the world would tell you that we are small and insignificant compared to the immensity of the rest. Yet, to be told this and to understand it are two quite different things. As the moon soared slowly in the night sky over the restless, crashing waves of the Earth, the priest understood for perhaps the first time in his life how small he truly was. All his years he had been living in the space defined by himself and the things that he could see, hear, and feel. Yet now he felt that he was part of a space much larger than what his bodily senses could perceive, and that the very tools which he had been using to define his existence and all of his experiences were in fact limiting him to a much smaller reality than he had truly taken part in. He looked to the ground and imagined all of the people on the other side of his Earth, physically distant from him yet connected to the same ground he walked, breathing the air he expelled from his own lungs, and watching the very same sun and moon as they danced their endless dance in the sky.   In a distant land, a woman sat under a tree and – watching the sun rise – she wept.