The Precipice

I'm running through the warm sand, excited with the anticipation of tepid salt water splashing against my skin. The smile on my face must be exuberant. The water will be a welcome, temporary relief to a permanent sun.

It feels so harsh now and I wonder why? In the beginning it was warm, nourishing, its gentle whispers on my skin felt like what I imagine the touch of an angel to be like; a giving, soft life force. Yet now, here in this moment, it is harsh, searing and unforgiving.

The heat of the sand beneath my feet has increased with such intensity in a relatively small time frame. It is no longer a soothing massage to the fascia of my feet, but a scolding reminder of the duality of life itself.

Everything has two sides.

With this thought I want to stop running. I want to think this through a little before I am wrapped in the arms of the ocean where my thoughts are stolen from me instantly. The waves rip at them harshly until I give up my thoughts, they wash them ceremoniously into another world. Sometimes I surrender them immediately and others the waves must fight for them, either way, the waves always win.

I stop. I'm exhausted. I'm not thinking now of the duality of life. I am thinking of the fundamentals. Water. I am so thirsty. Dehydrated possibly, from this heat? The sand is scortching now. I look toward the sun, as though to proposition it. Stop? Be kinder? The vast space above me is the palest colour of blue, blurring into white powder, not one cloud in sight.

I am confused. I begin to question everything. Why is this heat so harsh and the water so far away. I look to the horizon for the hypnotic depths of the ocean and there is nothing.

I spin quickly around to another perspective in search of the dark blue, nothing. My heart rate increases as I spin around and around, anxiety growing, how did I get here? My breathing catches as I see water. The confusion subsides, only to be replaced with disappointment, the water is my own tears, veiling my eyes like water cascading down a glass pane. Tears pool at the bottom, apparently drowning out the waterless world before me. I recognise the irony in this.

I am standing in the middle of the desert. The scorching sun appears to be preparing for sleep and strangely I now crave what once was hurting me intensely. It will be freezing soon. Immobilising, I quite literally may catch my death.

As I stand here in isolation, inside I am screaming and outside I am suffocated in a thick heavy silence. Suddenly in this restricting openness, I am closed, unconsciously conscious of all that is going on around me.

In my peripheral vision I see a lone bird fly across the sunset, it grabs my attention. It is black from this perspective though could very well be white. I breathe in and out as I turn on my heels again 360 degrees. I am acutely aware now of the external calmness surrounding my internal chaos.

I look upon the bird again. Such grace and liberty. I am in love with its motion. What it represents to me. The future I think it will have, its perspective being so far greater than my own. I watch its dark form slip away from me into a progressive darkness of its own.

I look down despondently upon my now blistered feet. The darkness is coming. I can feel its icy cold fingertips caressing my neck. My mind turns from its touch and demands I move! Yet my body is paralysed, unresponsive. The only thing I am able to move are my eyes, I search to the left and then to the right.

The sky above me and the ground below me have lost their heat. They are conversing now, speaking the same language, morphing into one, slowly losing their individual form in preference of unity. They choose each other now, over me. I can not tell where one ends and the other begins.

It’s a synesthesia of sorts, all I can see is a reflection of the sound of my surroundings. The all consuming deafness of the echoing silence, has been recreated into the nothingness I see before me now.

It is then that I realise, I am in the middle of somewhere and no where, far from anywhere and so close to everywhere that this is actually where I am meant to be on my journey.

I have spent every single hour of every single day working toward recognising this one moment.

I now sit in shifting sands, the world around me is still, it is dark, it is silent. It is precisely as it should be at the precipice.