The Wide Angle View

Yesterday the flight into Phoenix from Los Angeles was one of those smooth, clear flights that make me love flying. The sun was shining just the right amount onto everything I could see out the window as we took off, and Los Angeles from the air looked sublimely lovely. The cars moved along in a steady stream on the freeway, as we went further and further up in the air the houses became smaller and smaller dots, and then we were over the ocean where I got a clear view of Catalina Island, and the other channel islands with just the right amount mist around them to give them a mysterious, fogged in aura.

Usually my perspective of Los Angeles is limited. If I stand on the corner of Aviation and Rosecrans I can see the Trader Joe's where I go for food, the Barnes and Noble, (a significant spot in my life these days,) and the Office Depot where I get printer paper and the gel pens I've become attached to using. Just a few blocks south of that is the school where I teach. To the north about a half mile is the airport. That's the extent of my world when I look at it from my ground level position on the corner of Aviation and Rosecrans.

Up in the sky yesterday my perspective was much wider. The corner where I live my life on the ground wasn't even visible then - a tiny speck at most. I got this rush looking down at all of it, like "Wow," the city is so much larger than I usually notice.

I imagined what it would be like to shoot up into space even higher over it all in a rocket ship and look down at the planet from even a wider view. We've all seen pictures of Earth from space and even from the pictures there's that same sublime sense of "Wow."

Fortunately we don't have to get in an airplane or a space ship to get the wide angle perspective. We have our own internal launching pad within us all the time. It's a matter of sitting still in meditation, and yes, it works better when we are in the woods, or a park, someplace naturally beautiful, but it is always with us, this ability to hook into what's real, to shift our perspective from ground level over to the truth of what's happening.

It occurred to me that when I looked at things from the wide angle view I might become depressed; after all if where we usually are, for me that corner of Manhattan Beach, is so tiny, we must be insignificant. Actually, the opposite is true. The more I meditate, the more I hook into the large, eternal nature of everything, the more I realize how vast I can be when I allow myself this larger sense of awareness. The hook up is comforting, the hook up is healing, the hook up makes me feel limitless.

Now is an opportune time to get a larger perspective, to hook right in to what is true and real and accurate about where we are and who we are. It's incumbent upon all of us to do that as often as we can.