The Aerial Horizon
Forget where your feet are and simply enjoy the view.
Looming Large
As the twilight recedes into the western sky, the super moon rises through the terminator, looming bright and large in and on the aerial horizon. Caught in this moment, we feel the closeness of our world in the sweeping light and we extend our arms toward the moon just to be certain that it’s still too far away to touch…
A Season of Burning
We cross a sea of smoke dotted with islands made from mountaintops and the gravity of the fires takes hold of us as we observe their ever present grip on the earth below…smoke clutches to mountaintops while seeping into every valley, crag, and hollow, stopped in its upward flow only by the weight of the atmosphere, it spreads and tars the landscape, all the while warming our little world.
Rough Edges
Jagged crests arrest our scan and we find, revealed beneath us, a world defined more by its glorious rough edges than by the soothing greens and blues that color its many faces.
Narrowing Light
A long last flash of molten sun illuminates a narrowing band of daylight as darkness overtakes us. Cruising in the narrowing light, we experience a wash of calm punctuated by moments of elation and ecstatic joy defined by the colors that subtly seep through our windows.
Coloring the Dawn
The sun rises through an atmosphere clouded by drifting smoke…though half a continent away, the fires shape and color our perspective on the approaching day.
Vaporous Streams
Watching smoke rise into the air is at once fascinating and horrifying. Our contributions to a rapidly accelerating entropic process not withstanding, we feel victimized by fire and a profound sense of loss overcomes us as life, hope, and dreams are reduced to vaporous streams of carbon rising into the lower atmosphere. There, it hovers thickly, draping mountains and filling crevasses as the winds aloft drag the veil of tarry vapor across the face of the earth.
Walking on Air
In flight, our minds travel faster than our bodies and in so doing, they soar ahead of our human constraints, propelling us on imaginative journeys where we walk on air and explore unreachable places on earth and in the heavens beyond.
A Momentary Landscape
Watching the growth of a storm is mesmerizing, as though watching the creation of a landscape in minutes or hours…a wonderful abstraction of tectonic motion and the eroding effects of water on an earthly landscape, expressed in vapor and shifting lines of isobaric pressure.
When We Close Our Eyes
When we close our eyes at night…the mission complete or the trip ended…we find ourselves back up there, floating above an earth in soft focus, a million stars above, illuminating the night sky and guiding us toward morning.
Summer’s Motif
Summer’s Motif of thunderstorms and fireworks…find a good seat and enjoy the show as the drama unfolds.
Fireworks – Celestial Light
Fireworks in the evening sky…a natural singularity given of one moment’s perception of celestial light penetrating the earth’s atmosphere.
No Finale
We cruise through a dynamic atmosphere in which we are repeatedly reminded that we are surrounded by and moving through celestial and atmospheric fireworks…everyday…everywhere…they are ubiquitous, yet often go unnoticed on the earth below…in part due to their subtlety and in part due to our lack of awareness and perspective…These fireworks fill us with emotion…a sense of awe in the presence of greatness, a sense of mysticism in their apparent spontaneity, a sense humility in our relative insignificance, and a sense of longing in our recognition of their ephemerality. The miracle of this scene lies in the understanding that there is no finale…the show goes on…keep on watching the skies.
Swelling
A beautiful and treacherous landscape revealed for a moment and then hidden beneath a vaporous sea of cloud.
Moving at the Speed of Heat
Set in stone and immovable, yet racing at the speed of heat toward some ill-defined finish line…time moves silently and invisibly, dragging along with it the noisy furrows of earth cut by wind and water, permanent etchings on the landscape to remind us that all of this is in constant and perpetual motion.
Exploring the Darkness and Finding the Light
We never walk alone as we wander along the way…exploring the darkness and finding the light, experiencing despair and illuminating hope, fearing isolation and finding common cause, and in all things discovering the beauty that binds all things together. Peace, Virginia.
A Bedtime Story
Along the rough edges of the night, the sun flares in a brilliant last hurrah like a match suddenly ignited and, in its futile attempt to hold off the night, the fire cools and dims like a smoldering ember of the day. The bedtime story complete, we sit back, relax, and enjoy the flight…nestled warmly in our cabin, we drift into sleep as the aircraft barrels on into the night.
On the Edges
In the quiet moments, we look toward the shadows, pondering the future, yearning for details and specificity…but on the edges of our days, the shape of the darkness foretells the coming experience and we accept the reality of our “now” without fretting the details of what comes next.
The Routine of the Irregular
Distance and familiarity, routine and irregularity, displacement and satisfaction…With a casual scan of the horizon, we see rhythm and patterns, while looking more closely, we see details and human organization…rolling irregular ridges of ashen soil and rock, at once chaotic and rhythmic. The people living below see only the hills of home as they set about farming and ordering their landscape. The occasional earthen flows fill the valleys and swell the hills, refreshing the earth and, in the long view, making a routine of the irregular…and still they work to order their landscape and share in the abundant riches of the soil.
Bridges In Between
To pass this way again seems an impossibility, as if this singular moment in the heavens could be replicated in some practice of celestial alchemy, yet it is forever inscribed in our memories and relived in our dreams. When I contemplate “passing this way” I often think of building bridges, leaving something behind to ease the journey of others…and in this moment, as I watch the fading contrail dissipate and drift through twilight, I realize that our memories are like bridges between our realities and our dreams, providing solace and comfort when we travel through more turbulent skies.
One morning over the Gulf of Mexico.
Welcome Home
In the fading light of day, we return home, down the river, into the heart of home…and the light calls to us, inviting us to absorb the glow, asking us to reflect the beauty in our faces, broadcasting to the world… “Welcome home weary travelers.”
Lift the shade and look outside; you never know what messages await in the world outside.
The Aerial Horizon – Photography
The Aerial Horizon 