My children are learning Chinese, and they tell me the word for America is “beautiful country.” I like being reminded of this, because it doesn’t often feel like it nowadays.
Today I awakened many hours before dawn, and about as many hours since I had gone to bed, and I flew across this beautiful land. And since I figure many of you might share my occasional need for a reminder of what is here, and who is here, I thought I would share some of the photographs I took from the sky, presented here in order.
What I always forget on the ground, and always remember in the air, is that this is an especially big country. I don’t simply mean that it takes six hours to fly across, although that is very big by world standards. I mean that it contains not only a diverse people but such a profoundly diverse landscape, range of livelihoods, relationships to authority and systems, histories with the weather, ties to animals, senses of community, fears, desired levels of proximity, distances from water.
It’s the most obvious thing in the world, and yet it always takes getting back up there. The country is in a bad way. But it’s a big country trying to choose things together, and it encompasses a pantheon of ways of seeing. It helps me to remember that.
Maybe you, too.
