Pre-Landing

 

Do any of us really "get" that we're travellers on a massive sphere (relative to our size) that spins in an elliptical orbit around an even larger mass?

When I look out an airplane window, I begin to grasp this fact. Pilots and sailors know - looking at maps - that they're never traveling in a straight line, but in an arc.

How do we destroy so much ineffable beauty on this orb? I look out a window from a tremendous (relative to my) height at clouds, mountains transitions from desert to valley, all the while others of my species are blowing each other up, arguing ove their falsely assumed "ownership" of an earth that is indifferent to them.

"My God", "my country", "water isn't a right", "if they're poor, it's their fault"; these are some of the inanities that we spout aloud without the merest second's thought.

 

The clouds move quietly, silently. Out of combinations of moisture, oxygen, the mix stirred by the planet's rotation, condensed by altitude and sunlight, the sky is a vast crucible. The cooling rains that feed the rivulet rivers below, that aid the earth to bring forth tree, plant, and crop for the animals that don't use tools and those that do, falls on all equally.

Yet there are those who would own aquifer, reservoir, lake, and river. They would profit by selling to some and withholding from others. What madness is this?

I look at a vast ocean of clouds. Depending on cloud cover, some areas of the globe seen from the satellite that orbits it, would be white; where there are gaps in the cloud cover, we might see the brown on green and indeterminate umber shades of the land masses. From a farther distance, the planet would be a blue-white marble.

What wouldn't be seen would be the filth poured into the water nor bodies strewn across the land nor species eradicated nor genocides that take place over years and decades. We may hypothesize that these events are unpackable and analyzable as they broadcast out into the solar system, the galaxy, and beyond as sound travels through the vacuum.

We air our dirty laundry to the universe. No word comes back. Why would anyone want to associate with such ugly, stupid creatures?

 

From the plane window, looking up (which is really looking further out into space), a counter-thought, a tempering observation obtains; our species isn't absolutely horrid and horrific.

Some do get how precious and beautiful this sphere is; they probably do feel its roundness. They no doubt don't hold others' stupidity in contempt and perhaps even decry something worthy in those who would conquer, subjugate, impoverish, and slaughter other human family members and other beings who share and make up the biosphere.

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