Precipice of Land and Sea

I had had to cross some barrier at the edge of the world in order to pass into the realm of the ancestors, where I was to learn a fundamental truth.

The barrier was like a wall of thick smoke which extended to the sky, and to both horizons, and obscured all that lay beyond it.

On the other side, I found myself atop an immensely tall cliff. It stretched windingly out of sight into the distance before me.

On the left was boundless desert, while on the right was limitless ocean.

For a time, I wandered.

I met an old man in the desert in my wandering, and I knew him to be an ancestor to mankind. He appeared as an embodiment of the principles of nature, naked, with dreadlocked hair, a gnarled walking staff, and ochre-painted skin. He had various things tied to his body and his staff, including animal pelts, nuts and berries, bunches of dried leaves, and wooden ornaments.

His skin was deeply lined and textured, telling stories as old as humanity. Together we walked along the cliffs, and though we talked, we did not speak. We walked along the edge of the precipice between land and sea. Perhaps we mirrored the walk of all mankind upon such a precipice.

Eventually we stopped, whereupon he revealed to me a vision in which a house was raised up in the wilderness. The house grew, and was destroyed, and grew again. As I watched, I knew it to be an image of the civilisations of man.

I felt a powerful sense that even as we stood on this precipice where the world meets the primordial sea, we stood also on the precipice where history meets eternity.

Thereupon I woke.