Gulfport RePost- Day One: "There were houses here."

12/17

our plane left the john wayne airport at an alarmingly steep incline at 8:30 this morning, careful not to awaken or otherwise disturb our orange county neighbors. the flight was generally quiet and comfortable as we made our way from southern california to the houston stop-over, but i was anxious. partly because i'd only slept about a half hour before leaving for the airport, but i think mostly because i was anticipating something i had no notion of. what, exactly, do i think i'm doing?

looking out the window of the plane (past robyn, who had gotten no sleep the night before and was making up for it with open-mouthed enthusiasm) i could see patches of partitioned land beyond the heavy cloud cover, but i had no idea where i was. somewhere between irvine and houston, i knew... somewhere over the southwestern portion of America. somewhere far enough over that the borders and cities and townships couldn't be distinguished, and everything just looked like land.

i started thinking about Om, the sacred syllable which both Buddhism and Hinduism recognize as the essential and universal sound of life. Supposedly, if you stand in the middle of a bustling crowd of thousands and pull back enough that you're hearing, not words, but just a collection of sounds, the sound you'll hear will be Om. is this because all the world, all of consciousness, sings Om whether they know it or not? or is it because Om describes this sound? which came first? from tens of thousands of miles above ground, i could imagine that the whole country was one entity, if not vibrating on one wavelength, at least singing in harmony. no lines except for the streets and the lazy meandering of rivers. we landed in houston (aka the George H. W. Bush Airport), and the first airport store we passed was the Fox News Store. awesome.

an hour later, we were in Gulfport, Miss. we were greeted by a charming lady named Martha Lee (!) who took us on a tour of the shoreline before we got settled in for the night. "There were houses here," she said. "Anywhere you see nothing, it's because there used to be something there."