On Horizons

If you have read my bio, or the copy on my landing page, you already know something oddly specific about me: I love horizons. When I first appended that little sentence to the end of my bio, it was on a whim. I wanted to share something that would show you who I was, invite you into my world in a way I couldn’t by just listing facts about myself. She loves horizons is what my subconscious offered up, and I took it, because my subconscious usually hands me better things than I can come up with on my own.

I was just home on the Big Island for the new year, and as you might expect, I spent a lot of time looking out at horizons. Naturally, my mind turned to wondering why, of all things, I chose this specific totem from my inner world to share with the outer world. She loves horizons. On the most surface level, it’s as simple as it sounds: I do love horizons and always have. They are beautiful and vary immensely depending on facing, weather, and time of day. They are both constant and ever changing, and I never tire of watching them. There is just so much to love! But, I love so many things: waves crashing on a rough coast, roses, ferns, rich soil, clean stone, the wind at night… why horizons? I couldn’t say exactly, and so I observed myself observing that distant place where the sea (or the land, as the case may be) meets the sky.

Horizons, as it turns out, affect me physically. On the one hand, I already knew this, but on the other, I have never tried to articulate the feeling, so I will try. There’s a small bloom that begins in the chest, like the energetic equivalent of an involuntary parting of lips, along with what I can only describe as a slight impetus towards the horizon, as if the spirit itself has been roused from the seat of my bones to lean forward, glimpsing a home it has forgotten but nevertheless knows and longs to return to. It is a feeling of wonder, brimming with hope and a quiet boldness, but shot through with keen sense of apartness.

Now, I must say, laughing at myself a bit, that my love for horizons is suspiciously correlated with my love for complex and bittersweet emotional states. Coincidence? Unlikely. But also, the other things that strikes me immediately is the beauty. Oh the beauty. Whether brilliant with sunrise or sunset, or clean and blue at midday, or framing the edges of a rainstorm as it’s swept across the ocean by the trade wind’s broom, the horizon is simply beautiful. I sometimes say in my personal conversations that love cannot be compelled, but the beauty of the horizon, in all its many guises, tempts me to retract that statement. I cannot help but feel that such beauty all but compels love.

And as if to make me feel that beauty all the more sharply, I was reminded during my new year’s trip home that for much of my life, the particular beauty of the horizon was hidden from me on account of our volcano. As it had been during my whole childhood, the volcano was erupting once again. This in and of itself does not bother me; while it is occasionally destructive, I have a great love for the volcano and its environs and actually feel very lucky to have grown up on its flanks. But where there are eruptions, there is vog. Vog (volcano smog) is largely composed of sulfuric acid and aerosol particles. It is hard on the lungs, it makes you feel lethargic, and when the volcano gets going, the south and west sides of the Big Island are positively marinating in the stuff. Vog can also mask the horizon completely, muffling all the crystalline beauty of sea and sky under a blanket of dingy white. On those rare days growing up when the horizon was perfectly clear, it felt like all the cosmos was opening up. Colors stood out more vividly, from the mountain to the ocean, making everything feel renewed, including me. Such a day was a real rarity. It was special and precious. It was like waking from a spell, but knowing, of course, that you’d soon be put back to sleep.

This rarity imparted an additional layer of meaning beyond beauty to my young mind. Horizons were orienting. The world was more real, made more sense, when I could see them. Of course, this is true in the most mundane sense as well. All horizontal lines are orienting, really, it’s quite obvious, but I never consciously appreciated it until my first brush with vertigo a few years ago. While true vertigo has been mercifully rare for me, I can still become dizzy quite easily. Turning over in bed or having the lights turned out when I wasn’t expecting it can trigger, sort of, mini attacks, and focusing on the horizontal edge of my dresser or a window sill is what gets the world to settle around me once more. The horizon does the same. When all my life has been turned upside down, or is whirling around me in a turbine of sharp edges, the horizon tells me this is up, this is down, this is sea, this is sky, it is okay that you will never be the same, for neither will I. There’s something so solid and concrete about the horizon, somehow defying the fact that it is not a solid or concrete thing. I find incredible delight in this. As always, at the heart of a thing lies its paradox, its mystery.

Another paradox: Horizons by their nature circumscribe. They delimit. They literally hem you in. They keep you at the center and refuse approach. And yet, they are the very embodiment of the call to adventure. Why might this be? Perhaps oddly, what comes to my mind is the idea of “island fever.” People often ask me if Hawaii gives me island fever. The answer is no, not at all. On the contrary, I feel incredible spaciousness when on islands, even small ones. On an island, no matter how heavily built up, civilization stops right there on the sea foam. Beyond is a world of wonder and power which we may visit, but cannot inhabit. In that borderland, it is obvious: This world we’ve built, our towers and walls, the shiny portals in our pockets that tell us everything is the most important thing ever all the time? They are naught but the sands of tomorrow.

Perspective. Perspective breeds spaciousness. And I think this gets at a part of this second horizon paradox. Like the high water mark, the break zone, the drop off, the horizon gestures to some other place, but on an even higher order. Not just physically other, like the open ocean, but truly strange in that the things we thought mattered don’t, and the things we thought impossible aren’t. This strikes me as a bit of a cosmic joke, that the horizon orients you only to then gleefully plunge you headfirst into a deeper mystery once you’ve got your bearings. If you could truly go to the horizon—not just the place on the map where the horizon lay when you headed out, but truly unhook yourself from space and freeze time in such a way that you could approach it—you’d find the Earth peeling away beneath your feet. You’d have—impossibly, inexplicably—escaped the tyranny of the center and found yourself at a true edge, looking upon that which had been previously locked away in the eternal beyond. What greater adventure could possibly exist?

All of this, then, is part of what horizons mean in my own personal lexicon of symbols. If I had to summarize it, I might call it faith in the existence of an overarching beauty that exists even when I cannot see it, a spiritual kind of object permanence. And moreover, the audacity to approach that beauty. So, horizons. Why horizons? I’m still not sure, but that dark part of my brain is handing me an answer, so we’ll go with it: I want to escape, but who wants to escape alone? Let’s all escape together. If you love anything at all the way I love horizons, share it, in whatever medium comes to your hand. Share your night winds, your ferns, your roses with the world. Expound upon the paradoxes and mysteries curled up in their hearts. For surely, they all gesture beyond, offering their own idiosyncratic manuals for escape. Let us compare maps. Let us reflect our wonder between us until we shine like stars and slip the very bonds of the world. Together.

The photo included with this post was taken by me on a trip home last summer. It shows my foundational horizon, looking out from the southern coast of the Big Island on a perfectly clear day.