Head in the Clouds, Fingers on the Keyboard

If you’ve ever flown before (and unfortunately I mean the kind of flying done in airplanes, with the confines of metal, seatbelts, and red-lipped stewardesses insisting that you accept the free bag of pretzels-I’d love to experience flying done properly with wings, but I doubt you’ve had the chance to, either) you know the feeling of absolute unreality that comes over you when you look out the window.  Of course, you have to be one of the lucky ones seated by the window, or else you have to settle for awkwardly peering over your neighbor’s shoulder. But the fact remains that when you look out the window and see tiny, doll-sized neighborhoods, ponds, baseball parks and factories dotting the landscape beneath you, you can’t help but be wowed by the intangibleness of it all.

[Side note-Recently, I had the opportunity to participate in an incredible, life-changing mission trip in Antigua.  I definitely plan to post about it later, but it seemed much too dense a topic to be blogged about right off the bat; something lighter and fluffier like clouds seemed much more appropriate.]

Anyway, on the flight from Shreveport, Louisiana, to Atlanta, Georgia, I managed to score a window seat (props for me).  As I peered through the smudged glass to the receding ground, I admired the way that the tendrils of clouds wrapped around the unreal scenes below, lending even more of an air (get it?) of insubstantiality to it all.  I wish I had snapped a picture to document the view, but maybe it’s better that I didn’t. Ethereal images like that don’t deserve to constantly be bound in the solid, undeniable nature of photographs. I prefer to think that it is much better if they persist as fuzzy-around-the-edges pictures in the viewer’s mind so they stay true to their nature. Writing about them almost intrudes on the borders of tethering them to reality, but words are different. For each reader, they create a different picture in the mind’s eye, so the integrity of the original tenuous image is preserved.  But back to this particular picture.

As I was admiring the view, my budding writer’s mind kicked into gear. I started thinking of ways to describe the scene, the clouds, the feelings they evoked. And then I had the idea of starting a blog where I could share whimsical thoughts such as those. And I acted on it.

So this was the inciting event that led to the post you are reading now. At the moment, I don’t have any more to add about the image I viewed from the security of the clouds. It simply served its purpose again as an introduction. I hope I do that proud introductory image justice with the chapters that follow, which I intend to range from my trip to Antigua, to my thoughts over books I read (Go Set a Watchman and Paper Towns are up next, in that order), to the joys and challenges of being a big sister, to the adventure of moving 15 hours away from home for college (see About Me for details), to anything spontaneous, beautiful, or life-changing that happens in between. So here’s to the start of a thrilling new ride, folks. Thanks for tagging along with me.