Flying into the Dawn

Flying into the Dawn

by Teri Ong

I arrived in London yesterday at 8:30 a.m. I left Denver at supper time and arrived in London at breakfast time the next day. There is a sense that it feels like a time warp– like traveling into the future.
It is a very strange sort of sensation if you take the time to analyze it. You get on a plane; in a short while you are served dinner; you entertain yourself after dinner for a few hours; you attempt to sleep for an hour or two; they turn on the lights, and serve you breakfast. When you land, you are well into the activities of a new day– anew existence in a new place.
On the plane, they ask you to pull the shades down through the very short night. But as soon as my little trip map on my TV screen shows that sunrise is near, I can’t help opening the shade and watching. Flying east is inspiring to me. At first you see only a thin line of light in the midst of utter darkness. Because you are flying at 675 mph into the east, the sun seems not so much to rise as to explode upon the horizon. It is very dark, and then, all of a sudden, it is light.
I have seen some wonderful things at 30,000 feet. Did you know that you can see the propellers turning on windmill farms from that height? The little towns in west Texas look like  bright little galaxies in a black universe on a moonless night? Ireland covered in snow looks like an antique white plate with a crazed finish? Snake Rivers really do snake? Northern lights are even more “phantast-ic” than from terra firma?
Flying west for a long time through the afternoon and evening feels as if you are flying into an eternal sunset. Twilight seems to almost last forever. When my body is telling me it is getting late, but the sun has not yet gone down, I get caught in a funny sort of suspended animation– not quite ready to shut things down for the night. But when I fly east, my body desperately wants to shut down but never really gets a chance to do so.
When I get tired, I get “the wiggles.” I can’t get comfortable unless I can get prone. Usually I start by shifting my feet– a lot– and then I have to flex my back and hips– and then cross and uncross my arms. The longer I go, the more uncomfortable I get until I am in a state of misery. Then what relief it is to lie down! The relief is instantaneous for me; I don’t even have to get to sleep to regain my sense of ease. When my father would get very tired he had the sense of needing to get out of his street clothes and get ready for bed. My mom would just say, “Dad needs to get out of his clothes.”
When I fly east through the night, I have sometimes worked myself up into that miserable stage. The non-stop Denver to London flight used to leave Denver at about 9 p.m. I was almost miserable before I every left the ground. But this time we left early enough that I didn’t get the wiggles until about an hour before dawn. And just about “misery” time, the sun exploded upon me and I was served breakfast to begin a whole new day.
I think that is what it must feel like to die– to fly into the utter east.
One of my good friends died early this week. She had an inoperable cancer. At the end she could not take any sustenance by mouth and had to have fluids drawn off in a hospital procedure. By that phase, I’m sure the “wiggles” had turned to misery, and that by the end she was ready to take off mortality and put on immortality so she could lie down and sleep in Jesus. But as soon as she went to sleep, the dawn exploded and she began a whole new day in a whole new place.

Sunset is like hanging on to the last of earth. I think dying will be a dawn!

The beauty of the new day in the new place

The beauty of the new day in the new place

The beauty of the morning flying east

The beauty of the morning flying east

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