Flying still remains something relatively new and exciting to me. The shapes of the clouds and the rapidly changing landscapes are always beautiful and beckoning from above, particularly since I may never see them from below. I found flying over Greenland especially majestic, watching the glaciers flow and break apart right into the sea, before expanding out into smaller and smaller icebergs. The perfectly manicured fields of Azerbaijan a few hours before, just after the mountains around Tehran, were also a lovely sight through the clouds, fed by the winding rivers out of the nearby Caucuses. The integration of small things can all be clearly seen from 30,000 feet, all the parts adding together. I remember back in the Kilimanjaro Region, even the snowy peak that bred countless stories of the past can only be seen from a plane during rainy season.
The last and latest flight leads to my grandmother, who is going through a period of her life we will all have to eventually face, indeed, one of the only things we all have in common. I cannot imagine how difficult it is, the daily, perhaps hourly challenge of being brave and accepting the physical demise of age, knowing absolutely how one's story must end. I have put myself in her position a number of times, from the perceived safety of youth and distance, and I have come to think that in this peculiar final isolation is the comfort of knowing everyone there is has gone through this before, every generation for a hundred thousand generations of human history, so it is the natural order to embrace it with open arms. Dying is as much a part of the interconnectedness of things as a new child being born. Snowy mountains turn to rivers that flow into the sea, then condense and fall as snow atop mountains. Trees fall over and rot and turn into the soil that feeds other trees. Thematic catchphrases aside, I really see life and death as one inevitable circle bigger than ourselves, which makes me feel very wholesome, and it needs no talk of heaven or hell or the straight rigid lines that carry us there to make me feel that transitory life itself is a spectacular thing.
Beautiful words come out of the tribal nature of Africa, away from the world of nations and borders and all the Western infused "emancipation" of the last 150 years. Who is to say that if the world had maintained the ideology of small communities bound by families, tied to and integrated with the land in which children still grow up outside free amidst the animals, it would not have been a better and more simple place? A bushman replies, "I am as young as the most beautiful wish in my heart, and as old as all the unfulfilled longings in my life."
The last and latest flight leads to my grandmother, who is going through a period of her life we will all have to eventually face, indeed, one of the only things we all have in common. I cannot imagine how difficult it is, the daily, perhaps hourly challenge of being brave and accepting the physical demise of age, knowing absolutely how one's story must end. I have put myself in her position a number of times, from the perceived safety of youth and distance, and I have come to think that in this peculiar final isolation is the comfort of knowing everyone there is has gone through this before, every generation for a hundred thousand generations of human history, so it is the natural order to embrace it with open arms. Dying is as much a part of the interconnectedness of things as a new child being born. Snowy mountains turn to rivers that flow into the sea, then condense and fall as snow atop mountains. Trees fall over and rot and turn into the soil that feeds other trees. Thematic catchphrases aside, I really see life and death as one inevitable circle bigger than ourselves, which makes me feel very wholesome, and it needs no talk of heaven or hell or the straight rigid lines that carry us there to make me feel that transitory life itself is a spectacular thing.
Beautiful words come out of the tribal nature of Africa, away from the world of nations and borders and all the Western infused "emancipation" of the last 150 years. Who is to say that if the world had maintained the ideology of small communities bound by families, tied to and integrated with the land in which children still grow up outside free amidst the animals, it would not have been a better and more simple place? A bushman replies, "I am as young as the most beautiful wish in my heart, and as old as all the unfulfilled longings in my life."
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