Brought Beyond Fear - Winter Introspections on a Christmas Eve

Air travel makes me feel that I contain shades of people from eons back in ancestral times and places, who make themselves felt in a kind of glee that we, here and now, aren't confined to ground travel at any speed, and that we're privileged to swoop away over the curvature of earth with all our great bulk and bags of belongings. I feel it in a swell of tears behind my eyes. Holidays are my yearly excuse for air travel, so I'd have to admit that sheer wistful excitement at the prospect of rejoining daughter, sister or cousins, precious members of a small far-flung family, heightens all my emotion. I think too that even for frequent long distance travelers a reluctance is regular at the prospect of leaving home; after all for reasons unwarned of we might never make it back. But the exhilaration of the hundred-miles-an-hour take-off  implies a rebellion over the heritage of ancestors, for whom soil bacteria, mosses and algae and ancient long-running geological processes made up all the ground supporting each person. We're dismissing the ground at this moment, even though we risk exploding in a rupture of the controlled massive combustion, right on board with us, that's propelling this plunge into flight. The sentiments percolate in the heart, yet in the formidable might of what we're riding we feel invited to close down our consciousness at least for a little while, succumb to whatever's next. This is how I experience take-off in a jet plane.

I've left the bog lands of the Lake Superior watershed for New York City through a cloud mass that gives the plane a shaky course while the last blue light of day dims to blackish. The floor of clouds is characteristically a snowfield with mounds welling up that fade into night. There is a wilderness aspect to the view out the window away from the travelers around me. They are watching wi-fi movies or are napping; most of are hidden from my sight. It's two hours to New York. Before I begin to notice any degree of tilt into our descent I observe white lights and red way below, a small plane at an altitude that means that pilot is just skimming the cloud floor. The lights wink, and there's a blue one too. A plane? Or a snow plow... Are the clouds right at the level of the Adirondack summits, and down there is a plow cleaning off a high piece of road engulfed in clouds? I feel as if I'm the only one in the world to be seeing this sight and trying to figure out who or what that is down below.

When you fly in a jet plane there begins, at some stage into your descent, a relaxation of sound, a newly steady antiphon to the roar that must have been your ascent, ever since your ears themselves have dimmed with changes in air pressure. The plane has settled into a glide. In the grey floor out the window rents (gaps) are opening and lit structures pass glowingly near your feet. We sink into a course that takes in gem-work of night lighting, housing and businesses, all in elegant curves and geometrical arrays. It stretches on and on forward in a patterning that enhances the memory that this is Christmas, but that in the cynical part of my mind suggests infestation of planet Earth by our designs. Lights in this case are about triumphs in all kinds of our commerce; motley colored lights are the emphatic Christmas reminders seen from the air. Down there is wild America taken over; our kind, like all weeds and pests who have mastered their environment admit little or nothing about their own limits. Through more and more of these exurbs we pretend we can go on encrusting more of the ground and slurping more of the water for our civic pride and prosperity. And now that superstructure we've built is off-gassing into intense weather phenomena that ever oftener come back for us in escalating degrees of danger, but we go on making jet fuel and expanding the airports and hyping the economic growth that boosts ever more of the take-over. We have seen our own heyday by and large and we need to adjust to what comes after, which somehow needn't be our utter extinction, most of us trust.

                        Prospect Park, Brooklyn, NY on Christmas Day 2016 - winter imitates spring

Like the skiers of the world and other snow-lovers I'm saying good-bye to winter landscapes, which are not going away entirely yet but are changing to be muckier and greyer and browner. But tradition remains strong in many of us, tradition that celebrates the unchanging look of places, faces and seasons we cherish. On a night like this one, full of a sense of the festive, of a knowledge of precedent and of ways that have worked so long and well, isn't there no end of possibility? That the majority know what will need to stay in place to make way for a livable future? that the same majority will matter, will succeed in the midst of all their places worthy of saving, and that all these thinkers and devotees and protectorates will, united, be enough to enable future generations to figure out how to guard against the deadly temptation into perpetual, impossible growth...?

Looking at my own wall art where I live (including framed photos) I'm inclined to admit that winter for a long time has been the peak of the year to me, whether or not I'd dare to say it's my favorite season. Winter spins off spring, after all, and is the culmination of autumn. It's in my nature to discourage people from dismissing snowy, cold winter as a dread time and instead to see it for its glories--get out there, look long and look close even if you have to do it from a car. Two original artworks are these:


                         March: Red-winged Blackbird over Lake Pepin (Mississippi River) Blufflands 
                            original watercolor framed at 14 1/2 x 17 1/2 inches framed 

      Repercussions  
           original watercolor and gouache 16 x 20" matted

Also on Etsy.com -   Surreal Snow Landscape Boreal Forest Cliff with Gull Collision into Rock Facade....