The Size of the World

This post was sent out as an email a few weeks ago, but not posted on the site until now — with pictures!  Click on each image for large format views.

I’m at 36000 feet over Alaska. The mountains are enormous below me, crystal white and laced with glacial rivers.  Scarves of clouds float above, at high altitude, golden, and denser rivers of clouds flow down some of the great canyons. The landscape is huge. The moon hangs over it all, bright in the morning light.

I foget how big things are, tending the little details of my own life.  This becomes a part of my practice, remembering.  Waking early, I hold off the crowding thoughts of resonsibilities and schedules and allow myself to fly for awhile over landscapes.

There are great landscapes within me that I have gathered over decades. But this talk of within and without is all nonsense.  I go, flying along hundreds of miles of seashore, sweeping up the coastal mountain slopes, loft above the great valley and tumble down a river with the descending water, its clarity slapping an intense freshness awake in me.  After I’ve remembered the bigness of life I’m ready to begin my responsibilities.

There are windows all around us. Water on your face in the morning can take you and wash you in mountain streams.  The birch tree outside my building carries me, if I let it, to its wild birch brethren arrayed in vast forests along Lake Superior’s north shore.  The song bird can tuck you in it’s feathers as it flies its migration routes.

We’ve just flown across the Berring Strait.  All ice flow below.  Even from 36000 feet blocks ice stand out clearly. How big?

Freedom seems to me to be often a matter of keeping perspective.  The smaller I permit myself to become in my concerns the less free I am; the bigger I can imagine, in contexts and landscapes, the greater liberty I enjoy from the tyranny of circumstances.

For another perspective on size read the poem:  The Size of Mountains

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