Monday, September 15, 2008

Thoughts at 40,000 ft.

Yesterday I found myself sitting in the back of a Lear. Something I've never done before. It was at once an odd and serene feeling. It was a long flight back across most of the country flying between the remains of Ike to the south and a massive system stretching from New York to Colorado to the north. It was an unusually calm flight, neither turbulence nor traffic to intrude on our little universe in the sky. And in the tradition of countless men through the ages, I turned to bad prose to express my thought.

To dance and play among the thermals and winds near the earth is to know a joy only other fliers can grasp. The seeming effortless gliding at 40,000 ft., with no sense of speed and very little sense of time brings one to the alter of thought. With the feeling of unlimited possibilities of the mind and the one pure thought just tantalizingly beyond ones grasp. Crying for just one more fleeting instant to finally place it on your tongue. To be spoken maybe with the air of an afterthought to the ether around you.

Looking out at the cities below, creating odd shaped galaxies of light among the scattered isolated stars of farms and rural towns. I find myself gazing inward. A sense of stillness filling me like one sometimes finds laying on a grassy hilltop pondering the points of light set up in the heavens.

Below the ponds and lakes creating darkness's in the city/galaxies like motes in the eye of God.

Looking down or looking up, it doesn't matter. Both will find the minds eye turned inward. A quiet contemplation urging me to examine a life never fully understood.

2 comments:

Ambulance Driver said...

Bad prose?

Not hardly.

It's as good as Scully when Skywritings was still active.

aepilot_jim said...

Thanks AD. But I was really trying for bad. Maybe I'll try making it rhyme a la Dr. Seuss....

the possibilities...

the possibilities....