chronicled & illustrated

soft landing
Originally uploaded by nuanc

I don’t want to write about writing today, so I picked out this photo from my flickr site to inspire me.

Maybe the title spoke to me more than the photo itself. A “soft landing” implies what went on before. If I’m landing, that means that something somehow got me up high enough that I needed to get back to earth.

What possibilities does that bring up?
An airplane
A hang glider
A parachute
A para-sail
A strong gust of wind
A huge kite out of control
A very big and friendly (or unfriendly and hungry) bird

Other than the airplane which is scary enough—but a necessary and therefore acceptable risk—I’m not likely, given my personality, to leave the earth by any of those means. I do have wonderful dreams of leaving the ground, but it is never exactly flying. It’s more a sudden ability, a defiance of gravity (what a great phrase, eh?) that catches me by surprise. Suddenly I am like a man on the moon. I jump just a little and instead of coming back down, I begin to float. If I do it ‘right’ I can stay aloft and guide myself through whatever setting I’m in. It’s a controlled, suddenly simple feat and that seems to be the best part of it: I find am capable of gliding through the air. No problem with the landing, either. I just lose altitude and settle down on my own two feet as gently as can be!

Of course, the need for a landing could be from being in a tree. THAT idea I really like. As a child, I used to climb trees whenever I could find one big enough. It was the 50’s. Most of the neighborhoods were new and the trees put in by the developers were saplings. But I had one friend who lived in an older house, and out back was a huge live oak tree. Those are the ones with the low, spreading thick branches. We’d climb up easily, taking up our paper and pencils and paper dolls and nestle into the crooks of sturdy limbs. I remember it as such a lush hideaway and other-worldly time-apart.

Getting our feet off the ground, especially if we can do it without scaring ourselves more than we like, is a treat for sure. But what we’re really after is the soft landing, the relief and sense of connectedness of coming back to earth. With our feet firmly on sand, grass, dirt we know that we’re where we were meant to be, gravity and all.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 23rd, 2007 at 6:20 pm and is filed under photo prompts, memoir, essays, writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.