I wrote Blue Planet several years ago, just after I had moved from upstate New York to the Atlanta area. This essay was originally published as part of The Oasis newsletter, in email format, before we moved to the web. Blue Planet is now included in my ebook, A Sense of Place, and I thought it worthwhile to make it available again here:
Blue Planet
Many of us know about the wonderful benefits we gain when we are involved in a stable, long term love relationship with a partner. But we sometimes forget that other relationships, with our friends and even with our pets, have valuable, health-giving effects on our lives and the lives of those we love. Above all, we remain the most alienated and lost in our relationship with the natural world.
Sometimes it takes removing ourselves far away from our environment before we can begin to grasp how precious the natural world really is. Astronaut Laurel Clark, while aboard the ill-fated space shuttle Columbia, wrote of her awesome view of Earth below, "lightning spreading over the Pacific, rivers breaking through tall mountain passes…a crescent moon setting over the limb of our blue planet."
I recently moved from one of the most lovely places on earth, the Adirondack Mountains of northern New York state. Here in a Georgia suburb, I despaired of ever again losing myself in beautiful surroundings. But today, as I stood in my backyard while my four year old played, I watched enraptured, as turkey vultures rode the wind against a startling clear blue sky, at times their great bodies swooping so low I could hear the late winter air rushing over their wings. Three of the vultures, with their red faces reminiscent of primitive masks, settled in the top of a swaying pine, the green needles in stark contrast to the bleached bone finish of the tree limbs, the bark having been worn off long ago by the stropping of the big birds' beaks.
Suddenly, as if on cue, the three vultures launched themselves once more into the air, flapping upward in big lazy circles to catch the spiraling updraft. One by one they found the invisible current and each bird stretched her long wings upward in a V to suspend herself in the sky, no longer needing to expend her energies. The trio circled overhead, ever upward, finally vanishing from sight.
The vultures, who had once seemed so alien, so primitive, so essentially other, had become a mirror. I returned to my writing refreshed and renewed, knowing that my efforts will carry me only so far. I have faith that at some point I can just relax, spread my wings and soar, trusting that the winds of the invisible current will carry me skyward.
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