When The World Feels Too Big
Tex on a blustery afternoon
This is my alleluia, when, fighting for my life, I did not throw up on the turbulent 40-minute flight from Salt Lake to Junction. When I caught the horizon and all those earthly wrinkles of the Colorado Plateau in the corner of my eye and thought, hold fast. And, it is well with my soul.
Which is to say, prayers, one tumbling after another in my mind like a cylinder of rocks, wearing down the hard edges of my thoughts. And worries. And fears.
Not prayers because I thought the plane would crash—who cares if it does? I had a good run. And if it went down right now I’d go out, at least, in the landscape of my improbable desires. No, I just didn’t want to make a mess with the way my stomach rose and fell with the aircraft. I didn’t want to make a scene.
And because I was really enjoying the tiny body of the plane and the way I now come home carried in the belly of something as small and delicate as a wobbly 50-person plane, just a couple thousand feet over the folds of ancient canyons.
For so long, I could have been anyone, lost in the great mass of people that civilization attempts to organize. For so long, the shadows racing under the clouds were like phantoms—cloaked hoods—all pomp and circumstance.
This is my alleluia—that when I arrived and had the great privilege to depart the plane right out there on the warm concrete tarmac, a woman had the profound consideration to stand at the terminal holding the heavy glass door open saying, “Welcome to our beautiful little town. I hope you enjoy your stay.”
At baggage claim, I stood at one of three carousels and could see them all. And I didn’t worry where my bag might emerge from (the pilots don’t even bother announcing it as you depart the plane) because you can see them all right there, in that one room. In fact, I saw the workers pull my magenta duffel right out of the abdomen of the plane as I walked into the terminal.
What I’m saying is the world has gotten too big for me. 300 people on an airplane, 40,000 feet off the ground, a hundred carousels in which to locate your tiny parcel of belongings, an industrious production that you never see with your own human eyes but instead refresh on the screen of an app. How do you all keep up with it? And why?
Where are your alleluias when you are swallowed by the immensity of what the world is now permitted to ask of you?
I glimpse a new acquaintance already posting some long, meaningless monologue on LinkedIn and snap my laptop shut, slowly reopening the two halves of the PC like a split orange to ensure I haven’t cracked the screen in my hasty disgust.
How does a person go from wind chimes on a blustery evening in their own backyard, where the hummingbird mother has returned to her nest for the third year in a row, to these noisy landscapes of production that only know how to build one rigid system after another, with you or me lost in the great, repugnant heaving of this shameless machine?
Alleluia, I didn’t throw up on the plane. And now I am in the soft, floral sheets of the desert of Western Colorado. I am in the soft sheets of a wind advisory, where the power waivers as a reminder that the immense influence of industry can be annihilated in the face of a stiff breeze. I am in the soft sheets of coming home and being known and exiting a plane where one singular person can individually welcome all of us.
This is what I can manage to hold down. This is all I can stomach.
