Sea of Grass

I'm not sure we will ever get over the ocean.

It's the limit, I believe, of our imagination as human beings.  Sure, we understand that our planet is bigger than the ocean, or that the sun is bigger than our planet, or that the vastness of the cosmos contains orders of magnitude beyond measure.  But we can't ever grasp those sizes the way we can grasp the ocean.

I've been thinking about the ocean here, in the prairie.  I'm ranchsitting for some friends right now, taking care of their herds of bison, longhorn, and llamas.  Zipping across their fields, with miles of grasses waving in the Texas breeze, there is no other metaphoric vocabulary with which to describe something so big and open.

It's almost beyond cliche to talk about the prairie as a sea of grass.  Covered wagons were called schooners, after all.  I always think of Gregory Peck's character in The Big Country, a retired Navy captain who came west because the land reminded him of sailing.

I've heard outer space described in these terms ("The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean" was an episode of Sagan's Cosmos).  And God, too, I have often heard is an infinite ocean of light and love.

So, as I said, I don't think we'll get over it.  It's oceans all the way down for us.  Anything bigger than an ocean is an ocean, too.  It's the biggest big our ape brains can handle.

This is a strong example of the disconnect between thought and language, though an aspect of that problem we don't often consider.  Lots of us writerly types get all flustered over the fact that we have thoughts which have no appropriate words, but with anything bigger than the sea, the opposite is true.

We have a word for universe, but we can only think ocean.