Something Just Beyond the Firelight

 We are always on the edge of vastness.  It is always there, just out of reach.  We keep missing it…barely.

My mother told me a story about something mysterious that was sighted off the coast of Long Island several decades ago.  It was like something moving through the water, just under the surface.  It was enormous, creating a wake behind it without breaching the surface.  Just at the surface.  Many people saw it, but nobody saw anything, if you know what I mean.

My mother said that one time, she and my father were out in his boat, Sea Fever.  It was during the time of these sightings, and my mother was a bit nervous.  Their ride in the boat went as it normally did.  Then, Sea Fever’s motor sputtered and died.  This, too, was not entirely out of the ordinary for the boat.  My father got to tinkering with the motor.  My mother looked out into the vast, black ocean.  Suddenly and almost instantly, the wake appeared in the water.  My mother…I imagine her wide-eyed and incredulous…watched as the wake slid by the boat, silently.  She saw it, but she saw nothing, if you know what I mean.  My father was too busy working on the motor.  He missed the whole thing.  The wake disappeared.  The motor started.  My parents went back to the boat slip. 

Now, I don’t know how much of this story is real and how much of it is a reconstruction from the memories of a child with an over-active imagination.  The wake I imagine was vast…wide and deep.  At the bottom there is a hint of something, yet there is…nothing.  Nothing that can be seen.  I imagine my father’s boat teetering near the edge, my father oblivious to the gargantuan sea creature that threatens to consume them whole, boat and all.  It does not notice them.  The motor mysteriously restarts, and the giant from the depths slips back into it night-black domain.

The image is one that I have never forgotten.  Even now, as an adult, as I recount this story, the imagine is vivid in my mind…crisp and clear.  It is more real than some of my own memories.  As I ponder the great vastness that is just outside of our reach, this imagine comes to mind.  There is something so huge out there, so enormous, that it can and will swallow us whole.  The only sane reaction is fear.

Fear is a basic reaction to the unknown.  It is instinctual.  I imagine early humans, children of Adam and Eve or early hominid ancestors…it’s irrelevant for our purposes today…sitting by the edge of a cave, perhaps by firelight.  Within the five to ten foot bubble of light from the fire, they are safe.  At the mouth of the cave with their clan behind them, they are safe.  But beyond that delusional envelope of safety, there is the vastness of the world ready to overcome and wash them away.  It was at the edge of the firelight, at the mouth of the cage, where fear went from being just an instinct to an active, cognitive process.  It was there that stories of what might be beyond were first told.  

To this day, when confronted with this vastness, I believe the first reaction is fear.  Fear will hold us back.  It will keep us from connecting to the great heartbeat of Existence itself.  The very essence of who we are in relation to Everything lies in our connection to this vastness, this great power that words fail to capture.  If you have felt it, then you know what I mean.  If you have not, then I cannot articulate what it is like.  It pulses.  It glides.  It skirts the surface, below the surface, just out of view.  We are pulled towards its event horizon.  We are drawn to its light.  But always, always, it is just out of sight, just beyond our meager five senses. 

I do not know what it takes to push beyond the limits of my human, Earthly self and touch that which lies just beyond the firelight, but I will spend the rest of my life reaching out to it.