Yet the mystics of Germany and the Netherlands, who once used the sea as a symbol of hostile, purifying space, now start to use the desert as their metaphor instead. The sea is too busy, too practical; the desert is still pure and utterly strange. The sea was beginning to be known. When the mystic Hadewijch writes about water in the thirteenth century, she does not see it as the terrifying prospect it once was; the abyss is no longer a threat to life or the end of the world, for her it is a way to think about the tempestuous nature of God himself and the way you can be lost in love. Leviathan
...more
