in flight

I’m sitting on an airplane in Denver, just having arrived from San Fran, and on my way to Atlanta, where I’ll be talking about food politics for the next 4 days. I can’t quite wrap my brain around it all. I planned to come to this conference months ago, when I knew I’d likely be pursuing more work in this field in California….but, as I look around the airport here, I realize that I don’t know the first thing about the food scene in Colorado, and it’s here I”ll be living in less than 3 weeks. Yep. I’m moving to Colorado, y’all. Unless the universe has something else planned for me, I’ll be in a house on a mesa just east of Durango, staring out into La Plata mountains, growing my own food on the 7 acres of property I’ll be sharing. That is, after winter, which, I must remind myself, lasts 5 months. Oh dear. I’ll have to build a greenhouse…

As we flew eastward into the afternoon, the Rockies sparkled with facets of white snow and gold aspens. We turned sharply into our approach to Denver, and I felt as though I might fall out the window. My stomach lifted out of place, and I knew I’d been launched into the reality that, yes, I’ve chosen to move here,..but not just yet. I’m going to Atlanta first.

I sat next to a couple from Denver who were returning from a trip to see opera in San Francisco. It was their 60th wedding anniversary…they had married just after WWII finished. We talked about what life was like back then, with all the men gone. The woman told me how she played trumpet in all the bands because all the men were at war. She said, “that’s the difference between now and then. Now, people go where they want to go; back then, we went where we were needed.”

Well, that may be more true than I know to believe, but I still feel called to do things that are sometimes outside of what I think I want. In fact, I think I’ve struggled for a long time in learning how to get at what I want…it’s been suppressed so far beneath what I think I have to do…or what I think other people need me to do. It’s not like my life has been force-fed to me: I’ve definitely chosen everything I’ve done, but often without really checking if it felt like the thing I wanted to choose. I’m listening now, as much as I can, to both the external call for what is needed, and my internal voice of what I want to do. I know that when both are honored, I find myself in the place just right, resonating, vibrating at a higher capacity than I would if I just listened to one voice or the other. It’s synergistic. It works without work.

Anyhow, i’m now somewhere over Hays, Kansas, and the moon is setting just behind the sun. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this: a red, backwards-c shaped crescent sliver, orangey-red, descending into a sunset. Only from above, I suppose.

Below me, there are scattered clusters of light: homes, farms, small towns on the prairie. I’m flying on Frontier Airlines, and there are animals painted on the wings. on my first flight, I had dolphins out my window. This leg, I’m sitting next to a great horned owl. It seems like a good thing, to have these creatures accompanying me on my journey—somehow, I know I’ll arrive safely in their company.