Horizon: A Creative Prompt
What is the boundary of your yearning, your wishes, your power?
Horizon
Explorers, sailors, and camel drivers have always known what a horizon is, but it wasn’t until the Italian Renaissance that painters began to work with the perspective of a diminishing horizon.
Something is new and alive on the horizon. The edge of a rising sun, the eclipse of the setting moon. Mountains, dark shadows in the distance or snowy closer up.Â
In the Midwest, the horizon comes at the end of a flat expanse, although less in Minnesota, where I grew up. There, gentle glacial moraines filled with water to create lakes amid rolling hills. They could be dreamscapes with infinite horizons.
What does the horizon taste like? The flavor of possibility, of intent. The restaurant at the end of the universe, balancing on the event horizon.
Know this: you will never reach the horizon. I remember looking out the dining room window of my dorm at Berkeley. A hill rose, golden in the California summer. I thought, what if I went up that hill?Â
So I did. I walked straight up it. It was a good hike. And when I got to the top, there was another hill. But it was time to go home. I expanded my horizon that day, but another beckoned for later.
Write about your metaphorical horizon. It’s an edge, a border, a boundary. The finite superimposed on the infinite. The pot of gold is at the end of the rainbow, but the rainbow extends over the horizon, the unreachable horizon.
What is the boundary of your yearning, your wishes, your power? Let your ambition extend its feelers toward that unattainable horizon. Keep your eyes there, even though at times your footsteps falter.
Reach for the horizon. Stretch toward the unattainable. Throw your heart over, and your spirit will follow.
The next meditation will be on Stretch.
Click here to read Journey, the previous creative prompt.
Read more from Fran at Becoming….
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Horizons
While living in Salt Lake City, I always looked to the west, away from the Wasatch Front that created a wall against the eastern portion of the country. To the west, the horizon glittered with sunlight on the briny Great Salt Lake. A vast field of crusted salt flats challenged all comers to cross, only to meet more desert where ghost towns of broken dreams dotted the land. The final horizon, the final barrier looming up to contain me, was the Sierra Nevada.
My attention, my dreams were of a more exciting life outside the theocracy that contained me. I yearned for the utopian greenscape of California. Eternal sunlight. No snow or ice. Energy, innovation, freedom to believe and become. At last, I packed my car and a U-Haul truck in which my Dad followed me across the Great Basin.
His resistance to my fleeing from his home must have hurt him deeply, but my sister convinced him to let me fly. I would always love him no matter how far away I lived. He and my sister, however, remained inside their small world at the foot of the Wasatch. They had already reached their horizons while I still searched for mine.
I met the waters of the Pacific Ocean and cast my lot among people who resented me as an invader of their Paradise. Somehow, with new friends to shelter my fears and teach me the ways, I prevailed. I found my soul mate, bore the child that would bring light with her, and whittled my dreams to proper proportions, honing the rough edges of my talents. It took a deep swallow and a jump off the cliff of trepidation, but at last I learned how to fly.
I love the concept of never ending horizons. so often we narrow our worlds, limiting our view of what is possible. there is always a journey ahead, we only need to take that first step. I will be contemplating this again and again. especially when I feel the walls closing in. thanks, Fran