Night Flight

I flew to Virginia last night to spend my 40th birthday with my family. Yaw always says things happen as they should, whether we understand it or not. Ok, I'll buy that.

My flight was supposed to take off at 6 pm. Due to storms and some kind of problem with the jet, my flight did not take off until 8:30 pm. The delays left me time to learn that my mother was in the hospital, and to speak to my Dad and to her. I was reassured that the doctors felt it was not anything serious and were just keeping her for observation. I will call them in a little while to see if they have decided to release her yet.

Once in the air though, we climbed above the earth and up into the skies where I found myself looking out into a crisp clear night sky. To my great pleasure, the constellation Orion was to my right, seeming to lay horizontally across the width of my tiny window. I watched him point the plane towards home and knew that all would be well, in one way or another. (This goes back to my teenage years when my brother, sister, and I all joined a group called the Explorers-and offshoot of the Boy Scouts that is for boys and girls together. Our group was specialized in Parks and Recreation. There are all different sorts of Explorers groups: Law Enforcement, Adventure, Medical, etc. Our group always met in Newport News Park and we learned about the forest and her creatures. We often went out on night walks through the park with the ranger who was in charge of us: Mike Poplawski. He’s higher up in the Parks and Rec department now, I believe, but he had an impact, and maybe one day I’ll find a way to let him know that. The one thing I could almost always count on was finding Orion up there, looking down on us. Since then, I’ve always felt that if I was lost out in the wilderness, or within myself, if I could just spot Orion all would be well. Crazy, I know, but what are you going to do? He has power because I choose to give it to him. As long as I believe that, it will work.)

Below Orion’s prone form, there were the distant thunder storms that had rocked the east coast all day, now drifting out over the Atlantic and performing their astonishing fireworks displays for dolphins and sharks and whatever other water creatures cared to observe it.

It was beautiful to see those great lofty clouds light up with shades of blue, purple, and pink, then disappear again into the pitch blackness below the stars. Giant mountains of nature's fury, they glowed from within, from behind, from below; then they were gone until another lightning strike brought them back. One here to the east, another farther north, then south. Sometimes it reminded me of the scene from "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" where the mother ship pauses above all the scientists on top of the mountain, and they have their little musical laser light show. But this was nature putting on the show all by herself, and frankly, she's quite impressive without any outside help from us mere mortals.

Changing my concentration again to view Orion resting above all this splendor, I wondered if in some way the stars and galaxies within his great constellation could look on us from so many millions of light years away and see the show our beautiful planet had put on for them. I hope they appreciated it as much as I did. Though, I know down here on the planet, there were tragedies and fear in connection to the fierce storm, seeing it from this vantage point was completely different. We were in nature's way and she was in no mood to worry about us. She had work to do and we should just respect that and step aside.

One should always respect a power that is beyond one’s understanding. I may not be the most spiritual woman on the planet, but I know when I’m in the presence of something far greater than myself, and there she was, showing me her stuff the whole flight home. Amen, sistah.