Seeing the World from the Inverse

I was in an airplane a few days ago. It was my first real opportunity to fly and sit in a window seat. It's odd to me that flight is possible. Don't get me wrong, I understand the physics of it. I know why it works, and that makes sense, but it still seems so wrong. And I even enjoy flying. But it's like one of those dreams. The ones that seem real, and you want them to be real, but you know they aren't. It's kind of like that, I suppose. There I am, and it all starts off ok. I am sitting there in a normal position safely buckled in, kind of like a car ride. And then I start moving. Suddenly, I am going faster than I have gone in any car, ever. And then I am off the ground. And it's just not right. Fun, and kind of cool, but wrong.

Eventually you are going through the clouds. If it's a really cloudy day you are looking at a backwards world. The clouds are all beneath you. A big layer of glorious pillow soft looking white. And it's all under you. If you care to you can look up. And that, my friends, is where the really sight to be seen is. Upwards, there is a color not normally known. It's this deep glorious exquisite color of blue. It's not the Crayola sky blue. Crayon sky blue is a cheap washed out imitation in comparison. It's this wonderful blue of the deepest ocean, or a perfect sapphire. You can almost see stars peeping through, it's that dark of a blue. And for about an hour, I wondered why green was my favorite color. Because if I could be continually surrounded in that wonderful azure blanket I think I would be happy forever.

I don't understand what bothers some people about flying. Aside from the outright wrongness of it all. I don't know why some people have trouble sleeping on the plane. To me the sound of the engines is kind of comforting. It's this soothing continuous purr that drowns out everything else. There you are floating in a pure blanket of cerulean. You are separated from the world below by a downy soft looking ocean of cloud. You might as well be one of the last people left. For all you know you are.

But then, for about fifteen minutes during the descent into Portland, you are drowning in a sea of grey and white. Everywhere you look there is only cloud, and you can't help but think that the pilot is going to crash you into a mountainside. But then, right before you are sure you will never see anything again, and you have begun to suspect you have gone blind, you break through the clouds that hang over Oregon in the winter. And you remember why green is your favorite color. Because suddenly you are awash in a jungle of it. Shade after shade pops out at you. As wonderful as the infinite and eternal expanse of gorgeous sapphire was, the forest of chartreuse and emerald is even more breath-taking. While the sky high above the clouds and the world was the perfect blue, the color that the hero's eyes always are in romantic stories, the variety, the limitless selection of shades, outweighs it.

Green is comforting, it's alive, it's breathing. And while the blue of that sky will make you feel like you are the only person within the atmosphere, the green of the trees and the grass and the rivers will remind you that you aren't. It wraps you up, and carries you home.