Horizon Line Tattoo Meaning
Shared goal, common future, unity, and a horizon that joins us.
Nut was the sky and she swallowed the sun every evening and gave birth to it every morning.
The Egyptian sky goddess Nut — depicted as a woman arched over the earth, her body the vault of heaven, her fingertips touching the west and her toes touching the east — swallowed Ra at dusk and carried him through her body all night. At dawn she gave birth to him again at the eastern horizon. The horizon was the threshold of her body: the place where the sun emerged from the goddess into the world, red and wet as a newborn, beginning again.
Every culture that has ever existed has understood the horizon as the most significant line in the visible world. It is the boundary between the known and the unknown, between what has happened and what has not yet happened, between the world you stand in and the world you cannot reach. You can walk toward it forever and it will always be exactly as far away as it was when you started.
The word horizon comes from the Greek horos — boundary, limit — the same root as horoscope, the casting of limits on time. The horizon limits what can be seen. It does not limit what exists beyond it. Everything beyond the horizon is real and present and simply not yet visible from where you stand.
For sailors, the horizon was the first warning system — the crow's nest existed to push the horizon back, to see a few miles further than the deck allowed. The horizon is the edge of perception, not the edge of the world, and the whole history of navigation is the history of people sailing toward it anyway.
The horizon is always moving away from you. This is either the definition of futility or the definition of purpose.
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