Flying!

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Click on photos to enlarge Fading Glories

“To chase the glowing hours with flying feet.”
Lord Byron

Mango Mob

“One way can be learned by starting to see the magic in everything. Sometimes it seems to be hiding but it is always there. The more we can see the magic in one thing, a tiny flower, a mango, someone we love, then the more we are able to see the magic in everything and in everyone. Where does the mango stop and the sky begin?”

Joshua Kadison

Froggy on Vacation

“Is there anything more beautiful than a beautiful, beautiful flamingo, flying across in front of a beautiful sunset? And he's carrying a beautiful rose in his beak, and also he's carrying a very beautiful painting with his feet. And also, you're drunk.”

Jack Handy

Looking at the top photo above got me thinking about flying.

Running through Honolulu Airport is a street called: Aolele, "Cloud Jumping" Street. As a child I dreamt copiously of swimming among the clouds, my namesakes. Perhaps my first longing.

"I've looked at clouds from both sides now" sang Joni Mitchell. I used to take that song rather personally. Who doesn't have (at least) two sides?

Yes, we flightless bi-peds have longed to soar since forever. The gods, the bewailed ancestors, and all good things await us up there. Don't all of our pie-in-da-sky dreams promise so?

We routinely sip, and flip through magazines as we ignore the deathless dream of flight among the clouds playing out just beyond the funny, double window. But if you prefer to ponder by that un-shaded window, your cabin-mates might complain about their b-movie being "spoiled" by your transcendent reverie. "How dare you converse with eternal imponderables (you weirdo) when there's freeze-dried amusement right over here?!"

I treasure certain airplane memories; the setting sun that I chased all the way west from San Francisco, home to Honolulu; the entire flight suspended in a single golden moment of painterly glory.

The astonishing lace of lakes below proclaiming "Minnesota" truly a "Land O` Lakes." Just LOOK at it!

Baja California, cranked out between two seas. . . The infernal night industries of North Jersey, and the twinkly, inviting fairy lights of San Francisco's pleasure-land beckoning below.

The endless flight over ocean that "raised" a low cloud, a somehow change, that heralded my isles ahead. And then a peninsula and a cliff. "Molokai!" I realized, just before the captain announced it. . . Landing on the Big Island amid gray vast lava deserts of stone, and secretly enjoying the dismay of first time visitors who expected Disney Land (knowing they'd find the beauty after all). . .

The darkened airport "out lands" beyond the fields and fences, where my boyfriend and I would park and feel the planes taking off too close above - overwhelming as the emotions we explored. . .

I want to fly like Sky King and Penny, or Whirly Girl in her Sikorsky. To flutter ever higher like an effortless feather, or jump way up among my cousin clouds who wander lonely in their crowd.

I long to fly, though this earth is dear;

Though losing her beneath my feet

is a special and final fear.

A L O H A! Cloudia