Airplane

Rushing wind propels our bodies upward – skyward we soar and glide and coast on the currents of the invisible element. The one that can’t be seen – yet whose reach is seen in and through all, over and under, by and before. I look out the little oval window down thousands of feet to the ocean below and see a little boat.

A boat so small that when I hold my little pinkie up to the window and shut one eye tight I can see it vanish. I open my eye shut tight and it reappears. I shut the other eye and the boat skips across the great body of water below. I shut and open my eyes alternating between the two and watching the little boat below hop back and forth across the waters. And then I shut one eye and it disappears for good.

I turn my head and press my face closer up against the little oval window and watch the little boat until I can follow it no longer. It vanishes for good in our journey’s trail.

I look up at the screen in front of me and watch the little airplane icon make its journey across my screen. The altitude has climbed to cruising and remains steady at several thousand feet. We are above the world. I think of what’s below and what we’ve soared above.

Below there’s strife and broken walls and shattered dreams. Tears and scratches and wounds that don’t even bleed. There’s the absence of wholeness and the void in which once sat health. And in it all sit my children.

We are flying above it all. But even in the danger and in the brokenness and imperfection there are fragments of beauty and goodness like shrapnel shards – like fractured crystal vases and broken champagne glasses.

I close my eyes to the little screen and block my peripheral vision to the little oval window and I imagine the world down below. I see my girls playing in the yard in which I grew up. They’re chasing the cat and little sister is leaping up toward the clouds as if in hope that she can catch the dreadful neighbor’s pigeons. The laughter of delight erupts from their little bellies and climbs into the skies far farther than their little arms can reach.

I open my eyes in a sudden start. The sound of the volcanic laughter of delight can be heard so clearly in my heart I think it must have traveled up through the 35,000 feet and penetrated the impenetrable walls of this airplane. The imagined yet real sound of this laughter blankets me with a peace that weights my eyes tight shut again. And I dream.

I imagine the sound waves from the girls’ laughter propelling our airplane further along its little journey line across my screen. I open my eyes again and watch the little airplane icon inch further across the screen. And I find myself cheering them on as it inches onward. ‘Laugh, little girls, laugh!’ The love and the life in their laughter fuel our journey toward our destination.

For hours I am opening and shutting my eyes and laughter is cascading through my ears and through my heart as the little airplane inches onward. Before I know it we hit down with a thud and skid down a mile of Hawaiian tarmac. The beauty of the other state jets past my eyes as I am once again pressed up against the window to take in the beginning of the adventure that awaits us.

Under my breath – perhaps not even audibly, but maybe louder than I’m aware – I whisper a word of thanks to my girls for their laughter that’s propelled their parents to the other beaches. I smile, grateful that the difficult part is done and the adventure can begin.

But in that moment something in me wonders if maybe somehow the adventure isn’t already underway. For the true adventure lies not just in the highs but also in the lows. We don’t know how high we are until we’ve known what it is to be low. 35,000 feet is meaningless without knowing the feeling of sea level. Now back at sea level, I look out across this different kind of clear deep blue, and I see it differently now that I’ve come down again from the frightful heights of 35,000 feet.

I look over at you and catch you looking at me with that look of complete peace you always bring to me. Deep in your eyes, I can see your thoughts are mirroring mine. I know one day we’ll bring this kind of adventure to our girls too. Though in order to bring them this gift we too have to have first made the journey ourselves.

I turn to look back out at the vibrant colors on display on the other side of the little oval window, but on my eyes’ way over they catch sight of the little screen where now the little airplane icon sits parked at its destination. Distance traveled and distance to destination numerically and most abstractly articulating the vast expanse we’ve just journeyed.

The 2,490 miles seem like a meaningless number, unfathomable to our minds that can but compute the 154 miles home, or the 42 and 24 miles to work each day. I close my eyes again and know that the last five hours have taken me far further than 2,490 miles of the blue of the ocean below and the sky above.

The last 2,490 miles and five hours I have journeyed through fear and back out again. I have coasted above the abstract unknown into a place of inexplicable understanding. And all on the waves of two little girls’ laughter.