Shorelines

We are attracted to shorelines. Those boundaries at once inconstant and incessant. We revel in the space to be seen above the sea, out away from land, inaccessible by feet but freeing to the traveling mind. We play in the wind and sand and froth, delight and lament the wind that takes heat from the land, slowly deposits heat in the sea.

Humans seek out shorelines, boundaries, interfaces, confluences, edges, membranes. Among solid and liquid, liquid and gaseous, spiritual and inert, sacred and profane. And there--there at those interminable fractal shorelines--there does life take root, move and settle and sway. The boundary is incubator, but more than that, the fragile sliver of emergence, where the life happens, where the living congregate, how we all move together.

If we should be constituents of an intracosmic body, a macroorganism of our own making, then we ought sensitize to shorelines. For these are the natural confines from which life began and to which life returns, homing with vestigial instinct and open longing and unknowable hope. These lines are never the same, they live on a different scale, and perhaps we shall learn from such patterns.