The Aerial Horizon
Forget where your feet are and simply enjoy the view.
Slipping Back into Night
In a moment when our only perception of time comes from the widening band of light on the horizon, we ease through the calm and serenity of our space, contemplating the coming dawn, before turning our gaze earthward and slipping back into the night.
Slipping Back into Night
In a moment when our only perception of time comes from the widening band of light on the horizon, we ease through the calm and serenity of our space, contemplating the coming dawn, before turning our gaze earthward and slipping back into the night.
Feeding the Calm
Creatures of inertia, we remain static, floating in a state of balance, following stable courses along a predictable paths…and we are happy and stress-free. But there are forces in our world that transmit their heat, their stress, their energy, to anyone who passes nearby…like a contagion…causing a swirl, darkening the skies, and upsetting the equilibrium. We face these challenges by looking up and into the thinner air and sunlight above, we value lightness, we rise through the turmoil, and in that space above the foment, we feed the calm.
Abstract Landscape: Footprints
The wind tiptoes across the desert leaving swirls of her footprints on the earth as twisted dunes, each unique, yet harmonious like synchronous waves on the sea.
A Rising Tide
A rising tide in the morning sky…multiple planes of vapor, shadow, and light converge on the fringes of twilight over Monterrey and recast an illuminated undercast as a rolling sea of red following the night as it recedes toward the aerial horizon…a momentary world relegated to dreams as its last traces fade with the rising sun.
Sweeping Away the Night
The sun penetrates an overcast layer in streaming rays of light, strafing the landscape with their broken beams. As clouds give way to the building radiance, the dawn sweeps away the night.
Delaying the Dawn
As the dawn washes the New Mexico landscape in warm early morning light, Sandia Peak casts its long shadow westward, delaying the dawn and leaving Albuquerque in a prolonged state of darkness.
A Touch of Yellow
The Aspens color the visible edges of Rocky Mountain tops, presenting a preview of the season as Autumn seamlessly creeps down the mountainside.
Dangling
Over the little Colorado river
Asking my last bit of sunlight
And all the Arizona told me
Arizona told me…
So, I asked her if she wanted to fly
Yup, maybe she needed a ride
To go anywhere at all”
– “Adelaide” by Chadwick Stokes
Some music sticks with us, ringing around the dark corners of our minds in a soft and unassuming din that fills the void of momentary silence…while others create auditory connections between places, objects, and stories…Each time I pass south of the Grand Canyon, crossing the Little Colorado River, this song rings in my ears. The place is not so famous as its neighboring canyon to the north, but its discrete and irregular path stimulates our curiosity, complementing perceptions of a place imagined in song…cue the music…as we envision Adelaide dangling her legs over the chasm in the late afternoon sun.
Discerning Relevance
When the world shifts out of focus, the lights that shine most brightly may distract us as we seek to comprehend their relevance, but the colors define the bounds of our world and help us discern the way forward from the uncharted hazards lurking in the darkness. Our world becomes more clear and we press onward into the night.
Separation
The elements that define our world collide and disperse in the moment of transition from black and white to color. As the shadowy veil of night lifts and separates from the earth, the broadening light illuminates the streams of water vapor trapped in the cool hidden contours and we begin to define the landscape…familiar and awake in the light of the dawn.
Dissolution
We leave only vapor trails as our legacy in the heavens. So real a part of our world that they lend us a sense of belonging as we write our stories on the cloudscape and look for the tails of those who preceded us. With the passage of time, we witness the effects of the atmosphere’s constant motion, made visible only by the wind-born dust and the cycle of water…and somewhere in between we come upon a singular cloud, asking ourselves where it falls in the scheme of things and how it was formed, only to realize that it is the dissolution of a story that was written before we passed this way, now caught in the moment of its belonging.
Striations in an Evening Sky
Thin layer of smoke linger in the atmosphere, striping the heavens with narrow striations as the setting sun catches and reflects on the many colored particles hanging in the air.
Never Forget – Memory, Focus, and Resolve
We are in the business of being unemotional. Not that we are without emotion; we don’t let emotions intrude on the performance of our tasks. We are likewise in the business of ensuring the well-being of those people, both friends and strangers alike, who buy a ticket and put their safety and their lives in our hands. We uphold a sacred trust each time we suit up and walk onto the flightdeck. The events of September 11th, 2001 introduced a tarry cloud of emotion into the well-ordered world we had previously known. The sudden, violent, and tragic events of the day violated our very sense of purpose and left us angry, adrift, and hopeless for a time. Our vision was clouded as though hurtling through a dark sky, unable to bring the world back into sharp focus.
Trees now grow along the edges of earth made fertile by the remembrance of the souls consumed by the vacuum of the shrinking towers and we try to remember how many years have passed since the world came crashing in on our once protected existence…Now the memories pass into dreams and the horrid sleepless visions of the days that followed September 11th seem blurry and less real…but we will never forget.
After the attacks, it took me the better part of a week to return to Boston from Los Angeles. When I did, it was as though I were returning from a different world to an unfamiliar home…Though the streets, like the skies, were still largely silent, each and every overpass seemed to be adorned with an American flag…not professionally hung, but twist-tied and knotted to chain link fences by plain folks who knew that these symbols were what we all needed to see woven into every scene. More than anything else, I remember the empty skies and those flags that signaled a collective sense of unity and resolve.
We learned that we are not invulnerable while the rest of the world witnessed the unity, the fury, and the resolve with which we faced that realization. When we have been willing to challenge ourselves, we have also learned that we are not infallible and that there is always time to make a course correction. We must resolve to be better, to unite in peacetime as we unite in war, to eliminate our enemies by diminishing their causes and grievances, to abandon the delusional conspiracy theories that seek to divide us at our core, and to make this broken world a better and more beautiful place…Wabi-Sabi.
Sunshine and Labor
Happy Labor Day and thank you to all those who have dedicated their professional lives to promoting fairness and safety in the pursuit of our profession. For all of my brothers and sisters who find themselves laboring today rather than relaxing in the sunshine of a holiday weekend…May your travels be swift and safe…May you care for your charges and deliver them safely…May the sun shine upon you, but never in your eyes…And may the wind be always at your back. I’ll see you along the way and listen for you on the air.
Drama
No matter where you sit, the sense of drama is unmistakeable. We seek to avoid drama…dramatic people, dramatic scenes, and even dramatic weather all take their toll on us, drain us, and rob us of the energy to meet the demands of our days…but when we have the opportunity to view dramatic weather from a safe distance, detached as though watching a theatrical performance unfold from the comfort of the balcony, we relax and enjoy the chaotic beauty of the building storm as it unleashes its energy back into the surrounding atmosphere.
Definition
Racing to the window in the aftermath of a storm, we look to the sky for a rainbow, thinking only of its colorful curvilinear path through the sky, as though it were an object with strictly defined properties…in flight we pass over, under, and through them…We recognize that while the meteorological conditions are similar in many ways, the circumstances of each event are wholly unique, as though each occurrence were painted by a different hand…and we come to understand that the wonder of the rainbow is not in how they seem to magically appear, rather the wonder is that each rainbow is singular in its beauty and detail as it assumes the essence of an ethereal watercolor painted on a constantly varying vaporous canvas.
Meandering – Random Paths
Lost in the details of myriad peaks in the North Cascades National Park, we follow the jagged ridge lines as they meander, giving no signal of directional flow, only a reminder that some paths seem random but fill us with wonder, none-the-less. An appreciation for that seemingly random path is like possessing a secret formula for a life of grace…we may not exercise control and our force of will may not seem to have an effect, yet we turn and twist along what may seem at times a torturous path only to find the beautiful, the dramatic, the positive, and the hidden way that overwhelms our senses and leaves us grateful to be alive.
Separation
As we slide along the edge of night in the face of the approaching dawn, we experience the spectral separation of colors as the earth’s shadow lifts away from the landscape. This striped horizon divides a world of black and white from a world of color, the narrow band of refraction intensifying and fading as the colors merge into bright white of daylight, the terminator retreating. This conjurs the thought that perhaps separation needn’t be associated with disconsolate emotions, instead, as we find comfort in a dark world suddenly filled with color, it becomes a source of beauty in transition.
Striving for the Undramatic
Reading a storm on the horizon is like reading a teasing dustcover description of a novel…we understand that a story will unfold, it’s internal dramas revealed, as we wade into the work. But that is where the analogy ends, as our work is avoidance and we seek to understand the storm from a safe and comfortable distance…our perspective develops and constantly shifts as we advance along our path, reading the edges of the storm while allowing our radar to penetrate the vapor and paint a more solid picture. We strive for the undramatic and give the weather the widest berth possible to achieve that result.
The Aerial Horizon – Photography
The Aerial Horizon 