The Aerial Horizon
Forget where your feet are and simply enjoy the view.
Blurred Brilliance
Like a blurred light on the distant aerial horizon, some moments are too brilliant and incomprehensible for us to fully understand before they vanish into the night…and some of those moments are incapsulate in the people we see everyday and yet still vanish before we understand their significance.
Forgetting the Snow
As snow piles up around us and makes it difficult to move our feet, roll our tires, and get into the air, I look up at the sky and as if crying out for an escape from the mire of snow and dream of warmer places…not without its own hazards or impediments, the sand drifts and flows endlessly across the Mojave Desert leaving sculpted lines, furrows, and stippling that reflect the motion of wind, water, and sand…not unlike the temporary textures of the snow to the east…And if you look closely at the sand dunes, you may see a face crying out for an escape from the mire of sand.
Rolling into the Night
At a point just below the aerial horizon during the final moments of the day, the cloud deck flows away from the horizon, rolling into the night…The deep blue of indigo at the base of the gloaming seethes and buoys like the tide receding into the darkness as we float along tethered to the sunset.
In a Sea of Stars
Approaching from the Atlantic, the lights of Wilmington emerge as a dotted glowing arc on the horizon amid a sea of stars. The ocean absorbs the light pollution into the depths of its dense blackness, while the atmosphere clouds with the artificial gloaming from the lights of land until, eventually, the stars fade out of view.
Marked by the Journey – A WordPress Anniversary
Another year has come and gone for the Aerial Horizon, experiencing the joy of passing through the troposphere, twisting and turning over the landscape, finding inspiration among the clouds, and sharing the perspective. Looking down at the maze of experience, I realize that the journey is less about where we are going and more about how we get there…It is the path that we follow through the seeming void of space that defines our experience…sometimes a straight line, sometimes meandering, smooth at times, and bumpy at others…each landmark, each mile, each gust of wind, each choice, each decision, and each lesson mark our path with colorful lines and patterns forever emblazoned in our memories…The destination, whether due to a plan or a mid-flight diversion, is a place where we come to rest, but it is in the space between those points where we truly live.
WordPress Community, thanks for sharing your creativity and encouragement with me throughout my first year…I’m glad that I landed here.
A Postcard from the Past
We remember the recent past in black and white snapshots of ageless people in places whose faces have evolved…yet when we dream of the ancient past, we imagine colors and a distant world of which we have no recollection but whose spirit we sense in the echoes of the landscape…A black and white postcard of the Grand Canyon seems to bring these memories together into a single moment.
Back Country – Abstract
This is a land of dreams and the hue and texture of the Navajo Nation harken us back to a time where different rules and principles governed the people who wandered these lands…The Navajo back country in abstract, its colors are reminiscent of Frederic Remington’s pastels that captured so much of the spirit of this region. It is a joy to pass over these lands, imagining a different time and getting lost in the colors and patterns of the earth.
A true image. Color saturated and pixels smoothed.
Floating in a Sea of Cloud
Red rock islands floating in a sea of cloud…A temperature inversion over the Tzelena Canyon traps a layer of cloud on the canyon floor and transforms the desert scene into a storm tossed sea lapping against the red cliffs above.
Curling Away from the Paria
Along a fortuitous flight path, we round the Vermillion Cliffs in the afternoon sun and their colors show in true form. Curling away from Paria Canyon, their red, orange and umber striped ridge echoes the crevasse of Marble Canyon as the Colorado river flows through it toward the Grand Canyon.
The Hindered Path
The path of the Colorado River through the high desert was hindered by the erection of the Glen Canyon Dam in 1964. We see the fan of its concrete face as the river turns toward Page, Arizona. The flow of the Colorado was slowed by the dam in order to flood Glen Canyon and form the massive Lake Powell, forever changing the landscape. Meanwhile the nature of the river remains unchanged as it continues to meander, winding and looping its way through the terrain on its westward path. In its wake, Antelope Island formed at the junction of two flooded canyons, changing the character of this ancient slice of land.
Abstract Inversion – The Grand Canyon
Find a new way to look at a familiar sight, freeing yourself from preconceptions and framed memories, liberating your imagination from a sense of up and down…look deeply into the scene as if seeing it for the first time…In so doing, we unlock the multi-dimensional grandeur of the scene that was obscured by our linear perception. Forget where your feet are and simply enjoy the view.
Wandering into the Dawn
Our paths are natively drawn toward the dawn, meandering through the landscape of our experience, seeking goals best defined by the force of the currents pulling us toward the horizon…As we choose to believe that our journey is a straight line between two points, we can’t foresee the twists and turns and we resent their distractions…But in the confluence of streams our paths are reshaped, strengthened, and redirected and we continue along our serendipitous paths barely pausing to comprehend the forces that have impacted our journeys.
For Want of Water
In a place where the balance of earth and water can best be seen in the fossil record and the tracings of once watered paths along the desert floor, for want of water, we find the yin and yang of life in the desert… An exhausted lake bed transforms into a salty white flat and curves away into the Mojave while water from a seemingly enigmatic source follows a thin curving line toward the California coast. Though their physical relationship seems out of scale, they represent a delicate balance between man’s need for resources and that which the earth can provide as its environment perpetually changes.
Snow in the Dunes
Snow clings to the ridges and fills in the valleys between the dunes of the Great Sand Dunes National Monument in the San Luis Valley. As the dunes’ ripples are accentuated by the snowfall, we are reminded of their origins as the sands were deposited in flooded valley as the glaciers retreated out of sight beyond the limits of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.
Out of the Wilderness
Wordless, Silent, Rising up…Out of the wilderness, the Spanish Peaks erupt above the plain…Snow-filled veins and ridges lead us from the low hills before the front range into the heart of the Rockies as we follow our course through the mountainous terrain of Colorado.
A Singular Moment
A shooting star flashes through the atmosphere and vanishes into the rising sun, hidden behind a winter thunderstorm over the Gulf of Mexico…At the backside of the storm, the angle of earth’s terminator intersects with the wall of cloud and fans out in the predawn spectrum of color that fades into the night beyond. Amid flashes of lightning from the storm, the lights of New Orleans, Louisiana illuminate the cloud deck beneath us…All in a singular moment…and then the day begins.
Snow on the Purgatoire
Snow accents the terrain of the Purgatoire River rendering the essence of a creeping vine clinging to the plain.
Layered Curves of the San Juan
The San Juan River gracefully winds through colorfully layered terrain of Comb Ridge…A silver vein embedded in the ochre and red earthen rivulets of the ridge line, it leaves the ridge in a dramatic circular motion that it imparts to its scalloped banks as it makes its way through Utah before joining with the Colorado River at Glen Canyon.
Day Overcomes Night
Above the tightly spaced ridges of a stratiform cloud layer over the Gulf of Mexico, we travel through smooth air on the edge of the earth’s shadow…from our vantage point in the darkness, we witness the advancing day overcome the night, driving the shadows westward…The cloud deck beneath us that seemed dimensionless in the dark slowly takes shape as light bestows contrast; ridges and troughs appear in alternating stripes of light and shadow.
Illumination on a Winter’s Night
On a bright winter’s night, the snow-covered desert becomes a perfect reflector for the full moon and the landscape shines through the darkness in great detail, revealing the striped sides of Havasu Canyon and the Grand Canyon beyond.
The Aerial Horizon – Photography
The Aerial Horizon 