Floating in the Sea Sky

Landing the Cessna 172

The moment I sink below the ocean’s surface for the first time, the liquid sea sky, an embarrassment of riches, melts my body into its depths, and I feel awakened to a brand new world I’ve never even seen in dreams. My link to life is strapped onto my back, with only enough air for an hour, although this is a place I could spend lifetimes in. Life teems and darts from every direction, while I stare into the face of the origins of life as we know it on this planet.

Describing what it feels like to float above a world far richer than I could have imagined is impossible, as it is to describe what it’s like to see the world from the air sky. Although my 172 Skyhawk is a bulky machine, weighing close to a ton, just like my scuba gear that becomes weightless under the ocean, so does my place when sailing across air currents by the city and lakes and streams below me.

The outside world moves in such sweet slow motion when I am diving, driving, or flying. This was the lure that fed my insatiable hunger to tour with rock bands in the past. Somehow out on the road, life becomes suspended, and home is nothing more than a distant memory dangling precariously at the edge of oblivion. There are never any worries about tomorrow because my schedule was completely taken care of for me, including my accommodation and my meals. It was true and pure bliss, leaving me untethered and without a care.

Even the beauty of Mother Nature gushed out on all sides, spilling out through raindrops, slivers of sunshine, and moonbeams caught out late at night. I felt boundless and weightless, and in the process, created the world’s most uninteresting photo album due to my insatiable penchant for snapping pictures of every landscape, every mountain, every field of red clay, every old tree, cornfield, barn, neon sign, and anything else I could capture from the tour bus window. I couldn’t help myself; ‘surreal’ always seemed to be the norm, and a silly grin would take such a hold of me, that I wasn’t quite sure I’d ever be able to chase it away.

In these moments, I want to dehydrate everything I see, packing it up in my pockets so I could take it all with me wherever I go, adding water and watching it grow before my eyes, back into the majestic beauty that ceaselessly sprawls before me.

But, whether any of it will it be enough for the body to never beg for form again, is impossible to answer. I often wonder if the gauze that enshrouds these wounds could be cleverly cloaked in the guise of paradise, splayed in directions too numerous to count, making me believe that the dream has truly come to fruition in such laziness and reflection, when, in fact, there is no true solace, only momentary diversion. So I wait, and explore, and revel in all I am and hope to be for now, until a better idea or death comes along.

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