It was night when I flew into Wilkes-Barre, PA last Tuesday. As we were beginning our descent and came down through the clouds, the stars magically 'popped' into view and twinkled (actually and not 'clicheishly') like diamonds!! So many beautiful, crystal clear diamonds - the most flawless, perfectly cut! And what made them even more stunning was that the night sky was so dark - like driving on a road outside 'civilization' .........somewhere in Montana or the Ozarks or New Mexico or (as I now know) in the mountains of northeast Pennsylvania.
I realized at some point as we were descending that despite the absolute blackness that surrounded and 'supported' the plane, I was not frightened. Wow! I really wasn't afraid or freaked out or nervous at all. Why would my thots go there, you ask?? (I'll answer that - even if you weren't really wondering!) I have always, always been frightened by dark water - really any water that I couldn't see through. I've had nightmares about sinking into dark water, about something getting me in dark water, about being swallowed up in dark water. I don't know where the fear originated - whether from something I actually experienced or maybe something in connection to a scary movie that I watched or a frightening story that I heard and then magnified in my over-the-top, worse-case-scenario-always, what-happens-in-the-movies-could-happen-in-real-life imagination......so here I was 'surrounded' by darkness - darkness that looked like dark water - and I wasn't frightened.
In fact, I was using my hands and my nook to try and block out the lights from inside the airplane cabin so that I could really see the darkness, the stars and -- wait, what are those flashing lights? Were the stars really twinkling that much?? No, wait the lights were moving...one up there.....oh, and one over there....and one down lower....and one close to the front of the plane. They were the lights of other planes - very cool to see them 'winking' at us from their place in the darkness! Very 'grounding' to know that there were others on similar aircraft just like me, just like my companions on United flight 5953, flying through the dark sky.
Occasionally, there were 'ponds' of light in the darkness - perhaps bioluminescent pools like the area around the Tree of Souls on the moon Pandora in the movie Avatar. They were scattered here and there in the night sky - eerie and beautiful at the same time. I wished I were able to step into them as the Omaticaya did - using them as lighted pathways to guide me through the darkness. (In reality, I know they were the lights from cities below us reflecting through the clouds.)
I wish you could feel what I saw..............
