Something compels you to travel by plane.\u00a0 There are people to meet in another city; or there is work to be done in other places; or there are deep and rich and painful histories embedded in earth and stones you must touch to experience; or there is a pleasant oasis to refresh your dry spirit.\u00a0 You must go.<\/p>\n
At the airport, you are aware that home already has been left behind.\u00a0 This is not a stable place.\u00a0 It is a transitioning place.\u00a0 Any stopping here, even for a meal, is temporary.<\/p>\n
The cabin door is locked and the plane pulls from the gate.\u00a0 There is no turning back now, not without literally creating a federal incident.\u00a0 Taxiing to the runway, waiting in the take-off queue, you stare out from the constricted aperture of your window portal at the great sliver-skinned dragons thundering into the sky ahead of you, hauling faceless cargoes of souls to the far corners of the Earth.<\/p>\n
A slight but persistent force compresses you into your seat as jets hung from wispy airfoils — engines of power most people in history could scarcely have imagined — rocket you above solid ground.\u00a0 The beast dips a wing and banks upward, a resistant mass of pressurized air pushing you up, up, towards a solid bank of clouds, against gravity’s heartless grasp.<\/p>\n
Into the cloud deck, all is gray-black-oily-wet.\u00a0 The beast shivers, wing-tips flexing, skin stretching, rivets straining.\u00a0 Nothing appears through your portal.\u00a0 Nothing but a Brownian motion of storm.\u00a0 You are noplace and you could be anyplace.<\/p>\n
Suddenly the dragon’s nose pierces through cloud tops and everything is light.\u00a0 A dazzling Sun breaks over endless miles of rolling marble-white, perfections of the classical forms, pillars of Hercules, thrones of gods.\u00a0 From here it is clear:\u00a0 where you have been, where you are, where you are going.\u00a0 The petty embroilments of the city you have left have dropped away, the horizon stretches ahead, and everything you see fits into a crisp and beautiful pattern.<\/p>\n
Hours later, there are subtle shifts in cabin pressure.\u00a0 Passengers and crew grow more alert, tense.\u00a0 Soon the flight will descend once more through a cloud deck of chaotic uncertainty.\u00a0 It will thump rudely onto the tarmac of a different airport, another transitional space, open to a new city.<\/p>\n
In this new city lie your urgent appointments and tasks.\u00a0 There wait the wisdom and refreshment you seek.\u00a0 If you stay for any time at all, you will encounter also new entanglements, pains and mysteries, much like and yet much different from those you knew at the place you had called home.\u00a0 Memories of clear Sun on cloud-tops arrayed over limitless horizons will seem false, inaccessible, unreal.\u00a0 And you will once again pass through cities and ports and clouds and heights, heights and clouds and ports and cities, stretching out and summing up, rolling on and on and on, until you arrive at the Final City at last.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Something compels you to travel by plane.\u00a0 There are people to meet in another city; or there is work to be done in other places; or there are deep and rich and painful histories embedded in earth and stones you must touch to experience; or there is a pleasant oasis to refresh your dry spirit.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2263","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spirituality"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p824rZ-Av","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2263","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2263"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2263\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}