Promontory

“A promontory is a raised mass of land that projects into a lowland or a body of water... Most promontories are formed from a hard ridge of rock that has resisted the erosive forces that have removed the softer rock to the sides of it…”

The natural world lends itself as an external symbol of inner landscapes.

Grasslands, and prairies, and foothills; crags, and couloirs, and precipices.

The Valley of the Shadow of Death.

The Sermon on the Mount.

The River Styx.

And so on.

Perhaps the vastest, earthbound symbol of the interior landscape is the ocean.

Expansive and narrow, deep and shallow, life-affirming and life-denying, dynamic and magnetic, calming and terrifying; a fixture of art, from Homer to Melville.

It’s a perfect theological, psychological, or mythological stage.

The symbol is powerful, as it encapsulates totality; it gives, and it takes away.

It simultaneously contains potentiality and reality; a statement as paradoxical as it is self-evident. Odysseus experienced a fundamentally different ocean than Ahab; yet, beyond appearances, it was all the same. Water, and salt, and life.

The servant of Mammon occupies the same ocean as the Saint. But, one is thrashed about on his sail-less pirate ship; the other glides across a placid expanse of glass, one eye kept heavenward.

“The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight,” wrote Joseph Campbell.

The mystic swims, in Campbell’s terms, because he knows.

He knows that the waters mirror the swimmer; Truth never leaves his sight.

The turbid, coarse waters of emotionalism obscure a path home; yet, they also expose that which does not stand the test of time.

In time, all that is false falls away; evil consumes itself.

Beyond desire, beyond words, beyond birth and death - a blazing lighthouse stands on the cliffs, unperturbed.