Some things are never-ending—endings in particular.
When situations, relationships, jobs, or eras come to an end, we tend to focus on the pain of the immediate moment, instead of what the circumstance may have taught us or brought to our life. We may grieve and dwell on the memories of what no longer is, instead of finding ways to embrace the unknown.
We can easily get stuck in the shadows of our sorrows when we could celebrate the unborn and surrender to the light of change instead.
Accepting change has always been a challenge to me—particularly when it comes to romantic relationships.
When the intimacy ceases to be and the sharing of two souls ends, I have found myself stuck in reverberations of the passion lost.
The afterglow of a long dead fire can burn forever in such paralyzed memories.
It can be painful to be stuck in what feels like a frozen fire or a static sea—but we do not need to burn out when the flame of an era dies. We do not need to drown in the sea of our longing sadness. For every ending is not just a new beginning: it is itself a magical experience of the merging of the time-bound and the infinite.
Where one wave of life ends and another begins, the ocean of eternity roams. It is an empowering, enlivening, and exciting place to explore: to experience a point of eternity, to be in a timeless state of expansion.
I was recently blessed with such an experience of eternity and expansion. I was at “The End of the World,” an intensely beautiful place in Cabo Sao Vicente in Portugal where the waves of the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea explosively die into one another, giving birth to ripples of new waves in the water.
It was there I recalled a very special meeting of love. And as the waves crashed into each other, leaving only a signature of silence on the surface of the resting sea, I remembered our ending, too.
I had instantly felt a resonance with the beat of his heart. It was love at first breath, a connection that would last beyond death.
The pools of passion and waves of wisdom in his eyes told me that he had dreams that were boundlessly deep, beyond the confines of our shallow world.
I had only one desire: to let him be my ocean, and to be his sea. To become one wave, and to be the entire water.
Where I would end and he would begin, we would eternally be.
But our one wave of wonder was eventually split. I would only swim so shortly in his sea. He never got to dive deep into the oceans of me.
We tasted but the surface of a common sea.
We were blessed and bathed in a mutual ocean of love, but our wave of timeless togetherness was crushed by change.
Yet we certainly were forever. We were, and are, never-ending lovers—lasting infinitely, in a limited capsule of time.
The motions of the sea, like those before me at “The End of the World,” depict so beautifully this relationship of endings and beginnings—and the eternal nature of their merging.
Every wave is an independent capsule of time, a separate story of love. The sea is made of eternity—but the ocean is made of time. Every ending interpenetrates every single beginning. And every dying wave would never rise anew without the movement and the energy of the old.
It is an infinitely moving energy, an always-changing flow, and a process that is eternally alive.
Like the two merging seas at “The End of The World,” we can pass on the waves of energy that have both baptized and drowned us.
And so it is with our sharing of love. What was once given, shared, and received does not have to cease to exist. We can pass it on: rise, crash, merge, die, and be born anew.
At The End of the World {Poem}
At the end of the world, our lives began.
Two grand bodies of water, relentlessly and endlessly becoming one with one another.
We devastated time when we collided into each other.
We melted death when our wild waters merged.
And when our beginning ended, a new world was born.
Our common breath became one with the air and gave breath to all new lovers.
The beats of our hearts were crushed by the waves and emerged in the core of every other soul in love.
Our last whispering kiss was the first spark of two future lovers’ bliss.
Where I end and you begin, we were.
Where we were, new lovers shall be.
Where everything begins, nothing ever ends.
When we die to love, we are eternally beginning.
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“Eternity is not a long time; rather, it is another dimension. It is that dimension to which time-thinking shuts us. And so there never was a creation. Rather, there is a continuous creating going on. This energy is pouring into every cell of our being right now, every board and brick of the buildings we sit in, every grain of sand and wisp of wind.” ~ Joseph Campbell
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Author: Cecilia Vinkel
Image: Audrey Reid Instagram
Editor: Callie Rushton
Copy Editor: Travis May
Social Editor: Waylon Lewis
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