Come fly with me

     This morning we take our daughter Rachel to the airport in Chicago for her flight to the City of Angels.   She will go through the air in a long silver metal tube,  crammed with her little dog into a seat that always feels too small, confined in a very small space for hours.  It doesn't seem natural to go hurtling through the air in a piece of metal machinery much heavier than air.  When I get home from having flown back from somewhere,  I always feel only partly here, as if a great many of my molecules were still back there where I was.  So then, where am I?  Here or there?  Its hard to tell, in a way!   To be in Chicago in the morning, and Los Angeles in the evening---how can that be?   Call all of me go so quickly from one place to another very far away, very different place?   My body may do it,  but my soul needs days to catch up with my body and become  totally present to where "I" am.  

      Is this the sort of flight that human beings have dreamed of for untold centuries?   When I dream (literally) of flying,  I always flap my arms up and down like a bird and lift off and soar.

Sometimes I have to flap harder and longer than other times to stay aloft.  A couple times I have gotten as high as the stars!   But I am always drawn back to earth by that mysterious force we call gravity.  And I do not come back down gladly.  I yearn for "the incredible lightness of being"  that would make me like a "feather on the breath of God,"  to use Hildegard's memorable phrase.

      For me, and perhaps most others,  flying is a symbol of freedom---the freedom to soar on wings of inspiration, of joy, of beauty  into a Sky that goes on forever.   That would be heaven!

      Still, I am glad I and my loved ones can get in airplanes and fly from here to there.   We see much more of each other that way, and of places we want to be.  When Georgia O'Keefe first flew, she was entranced by the magic of looking out the airplane window and seeing an endless pattern of little white clouds floating in blue below her.   She did a huge painting of what she saw.  Now, when I fly in airplanes,  and see those little clouds, they remind me of her painting. 

And oh! I do love looking straight out the window at the moon looking so close I could reach out and touch it, and gazing down at fields and forest,  vales and mountains, flowering meadows, flashing seas, not to mention clusters of fallen stars at night where cities must be.  

      Its a great perspective I get up there in the wild blue yonder.   And when I don't get it from a plane window,  I can always soar on wings of imagination to that heavenly place where I can glimpse the Big Picture.