It took leaving the house to let me feel our vacation had started.  Right up ‘til we were carried away by Hank & Norma (Thank you!), everything had felt like preparing/rehearsing/imagining.  There are many unknowns ahead, but we’re already 8 time zones from home:  a lot for one night of awkward sleep.

 

The plane ride was surprisingly easy.  We left late afternoon, had dinner and a movie, went to sleep and woke up late the next morning, so we have had little trouble adjusting to London time.

 

In the British Airways magazine they mentioned entertaining your kids by reading them the names of English towns.  We later saw what they meant when we got on the Piccadilly train heading to Green Park and the sign said “This train is for Cockfosters”.  Despite (or because of) the sign we stayed on board.

 

Having anticipated for so long the strangeness of foreign travel, England is quite comforting since things are similar enough to be non-threatening and different enough to be shake you into alertness.  Tiny examples:  Jon expected potato chips with his dinner, but they were French fries.  And crossing streets you still have stoplights and walk signals, but looking both ways takes on greater import when you’re not sure which lane the traffic is supposed to be in.

Approximately midnight between August 24-25, Eastern Time Zone.

 

Seven miles above the polar ice-caps, midnight between two 20 hour days, my mind reaches out from under sleeping drugs – and strange connections float to the surface of consciousness.

 

My mind plays a distant memory of my son Nathan and I struggling to bicycle into the next town before dark – somewhere in the wild west of America. At the same time, I am pre-membering Mary Carol and I moving through the rain to reach shelter by some distant windmills.  Does past or future have any meaning here, now?

 

I realize it all as one.  In this melting of time and space what we accept as “normal” is illusion, relative and expansive. I understand not just a connection, but a unification of all which is.  It’s easy to see two sets of cyclists sharing a common experience, but what of those within this flying stage over the top of the world?

 

Are we not also the maligned Caterers, the cleaners who carried away the wastes of the last flight, the computer operators building the instruments who track our flight, letting me know that we have just crossed the northeastern shore of Hudson Bay?  The musicians who wrote the music, which is blending with young children crying outside my noise protection headset? 

 

Within me continues to flow grain grown in fields I do not know, and medicines without which I would not be on this flight.  Thoughts course through my mind, but that is all they are – thoughts, and a mind.  Nothing really. Manifestation of life experiencing itself, exploring itself, reveling in that which is.  Simplicity, without judgment.

 

Even seven miles above a frozen wasteland, is just another concept, another judgment of reality as illusionary as any other.  In another conceptual “reality”, I haven’t moved.  I’m still sitting in a chair next to Mary Carol, having a very short night, and soon to see just how far this illusion will manifest in its many glorious forms.

 

And somewhere within the emptiness arises another illusionary thought … this is going to be a really great, and needed, vacation!  J