Flying

I’ve always loved flying. Not the experience of sitting in the same position for untold hours, stuck between a plastic pillar and a feisty two-year-old, but the feat of human ingenuity that propels a big machine into the sky, rising high above the land to afford impossible views of the world below. Today I saw the wasteland of the Mojave, unimaginably huge, stretching out endlessly to the distant horizon. I saw its mountains, thrust upwards by the earth itself, its fine filigree of dried riverbeds, each in actuality wide enough to swallow city blocks. I saw its splayed fingers of plateau dropping sharply to the flats below, spawning smaller cliffs, ultimately feeding into an extinct mesh of varicose rivulets leading to nowhere. There was water here once, a lot of it, successive riverbeds and shorelines carefully tracing the desert’s history over the eons. Layer-cake strata appear where the land melted away before forgotten torrents. I watch the ochres and umbers give way to Martian red, knowing that millions of tiny ferrous ions erupted from stars to color the landscape I see before me, the earth Cartesian-smooth until broken by bolts of rock violently ejected through the surface. The clouds float in, a small delegation at first, then a quilt of gray and white, as topographically exciting as the ground it cloaks. I feel incomprehensibly small.

I know what it is to be Moses, leader of the people, but awed to the extremes of humility by the sight of the corner of God’s throne. Harassment of stones and chattering masses are inconsequential amidst mountains that dwarf cities. Man is from dust and returns to dust, and Thou art King, living and everlasting God. And I have to close my window so as to aid in the creation of an artificial night for the rest of the passengers on board. We pray this week and throughout the year for healing, for providence, greedily for personal things alongside our pleas for forgiveness for similarly insignificant transgressions. And then we cry out that we are but clay in the hands of our Maker. Like the microscopic minerals that paint the desert, do our strikes to the chest make up something bigger, or are they largely irrelevant in the greater scheme? An optimistic view says this is the actualization of unified field theory. The micro and macro are different aspects of the same process. A compassionate view says it’s just different strokes. Now over Vinland, with my window open to see the circuit board towns pulse in the dark, I can’t say. I feel entitled to my bitterness by the flailing toddler in the seat next to me and the belligerent El Al flight attendants. But I am also overcome by majesty of the world.