Yesterday I took a ride in a friend’s airplane. We flew over the Everglades and surrounding areas at about 3000 feet. What a unique perspective looking down on the world from such a height: so many inland waterways in this part of Florida and the vastness of the Everglades without a human made structure for as far as the eye could see. Farmland you would otherwise never know was there because roads to get to it are few and far off the beaten path.
There’s so much going on we just don’t see or know about without rising above the obvious exposure of our everyday lives. Missing at that height moving with the clouds, is the noise and chaos of life on the ground. You see the landscape all laid out in a neat and orderly fashion with only small slow movement of an occasional car, human life imperceivable.
Sitting in the cockpit I thought of the Richard Bach books I read: Jonathan Livingston Seagull and Bridge Across Forever and understood better Bach’s love for small airplanes and taking people up for a ride.
Flying fascinates me – not in big airplanes where you hardly notice you’re up in the air – but the idea of taking flight and rising above to gain a new perspective. When I was little I would pump on my backyard swing as high as I could go, imagining I was flying with the birds into the sky. The first time I went parasailing behind a motor boat in Jamaica and lifting off the pier into the heavens was an awesome sensation – flying. It’s the freedom of it that calls to my soul, the lightness, the expansion, escaping the hum drum and entering the mystical.
Flying both physically and metaphorically, takes us out of the ordinary into another dimension where we can envision a new way of being – or many ways of being. I long for a new system of getting from point A to point B like the chamber in the Starship Enterprise where Scottie can beam us down and back up again. But until then flying in airplanes, even on new minimalist schedules, will have to do.
I booked a flight today for Portugal via Montreal using a credit from one of my many cancelled flights. The 4th of July I will arrive in Lisbon – barring any new halting developments – my independence day, flying into a new adventure.
June 1, 2020