Climbing to 30,000 feet appears to be the only means I have to escape, long enough to write, the earthly concerns that have so occupied me this month. So it would seem appropriate to write about matters less terrestrial than I otherwise might. Plainly put: when awake with both feet on the ground I’ve been overwhelmed, and my mind has no desire now to dwell there when my body doesn’t have to. As Morpheus advised Neo, “Free the mind!”
This is easier said than done. Maybe the conference that LL and I are flying to, a conference on Mind-Body Medicine, will help. But letting go—allowing my thoughts to rise above such matters as upcoming patient visits, our baby’s sleep poop laughter growth and development schedule, or the forest fires consuming eastern Washington, to name but a few items—is as difficult as it is necessary.
When I advise patients to meditate I give them something to focus on: I have them breathe slowly in and out and say the number “one” on every out-breath. So perchance I must give myself a focus. Something not of the earth. Something up.
What is up? Trees, of course, though these are bound to the earth, and immediately I think of Gandalf, Bilbo and the dwarves awaiting treetop rescue by eagle from the goblins lighting fires underneath, and from there I go to the aforementioned fires scouring the arid West in which I live, while pumps siphon off snowmelt to feed neon lights and artificial fountains from Spokane to Phoenix, and then I think that we must be the goblins in this story. This will never do! What is above trees?
Sky. Wind. Clouds. Ahhh…forest-fire smoke. Radio towers interrupting sandpiper migration patterns and jet-fuel trails from unmanned drones marking dubious targets. Higher, higher!
The stratosphere. Ozone depletion and satellite junkyards falling into the Pacific, even as ever more machinery is commissioned by multinational corporations to zero in on the untapped niche market of left-handed preschoolers who don’t yet own iPhones. Higher yet!
The moon…1969 landing, one small step, American flag. No good. Mars. Land Rover. Pluto. Voyager, Carl Sagan, whales singing ad infinitum into the void.
It seems that even leaving the solar system I struggle to be free of the tedium of human preoccupations. Is there anything else out there?
Closing my eyes and breathing for a few minutes in the noisy, crowded airplane, I am transported, not to nirvana, but to a place of focus amidst similar chatter. I am in college again, in the café on the top floor of the Wesleyan Student Center, my nose pressed into texts on Chemistry and Physics. At the other extreme of the scale, I burrow into molecules and atoms and the even smaller bits that make them up.
The parallels to the cosmic are actually striking. For starters, everything we can see or smell or touch is made up of particles that are themselves 99.9% empty space. The more we try to zero in on the actual “stuff”, the less it looks like matter and the more it looks like energy. Predicting the outcome when bits of these energies collide is expressed in matters of probability. The ability of such interactions to coalesce into clusters of existence that taste sweet on our tongues or bounce off our soccer cleats into a goal or grow from a seedling into a sequoia is no less amazing than the ability of clouds of dust and gases to coalesce into a green and blue planet.
Seen from this level, the idea of something as complex as life itself is absolutely, mind-blowingly staggering. And retracing my journey into space in the face of this miracle, humans and our concerns seem no more and no less important than the named types of the smallest subatomic particle, the quark. We can be quite strange, and we can be all charm. We can be top or bottom, or just plain down. And we can be up.
