36,000 Feet Over Black and White

36,000 feet over the Rocky Mountains and all I see is how much the snowcapped landscape looks like the ocean, the ocean that birthed this very earth billions of years ago. Familiar peaks and valleys, uplifts and plateaus, rivers and ridges explored during my two miniscule decades at home in Colorado become abstract art through the camera lens. What seems so solid liquifies. Mountains fold and flow into ocean. My face is glued to the window from the Front Range to Nevada. Feelings of happy and sad flutter around my heart and trickle down my cheeks. I miss the grounded connection of family and earth and yet in the weightlessness of flight I feel free not knowing what tomorrow will bring, like the ebb and flow of the tides washing ashore. These snapshots merely momentary fragments of a stark beauty frozen in time and space, never to appear the same again. Like going home never feels the same, whether you’re gone ten years or ten days. The desire for what once was, or what might yet be, casts a spell over what right now, Is. This. Here.