“At two o’clock in the morning, if you open your window and listen,
You will hear the feet of the Wind that is going to call the sun…” Rudyard Kipling from The Dawn Wind
Once, I was flying to Russia in the middle of the night and I woke with that dry-mouthed start you experience when your blood sugar drops. I had drunk too much wine from the dinner cart, and I was dehydrated and stiff from being folded into a seat which did not accommodate my abnormally long, hip-to-knee ratio.
I was sitting in a window seat, and the person next to me was asleep (as was everyone on the plane, including the flight attendants). I pulled the small bottle of water out of my seatback pocket, took a sip and slid up my window shade, expecting to look into the vast, blackness of sky between Heaven and the Atlantic Sea.
Instead, I witnessed a pulsing lightshow – green and purple – so unexpected, my jaw actually dropped open. I looked around as if I were guilty of something, or as if I’d been the only one to witness an angel or a demon crouching on the wing…
And in some regard, I was seeing the spectral handiwork of God. The Aurora Borealis, named for the Goddess of Dawn and the Greek word for North Wind, was something I had seen before. I went to college in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan after all. But to be rocketing through it, hung-over and without companionship, was the loneliest thing I have ever done…
When I was a child, on my first airplane flight, I remember thinking,”Where are the pearly gates? Where are all the harp playing angels?” And because I was a weird, questioning, suspicious child I began to doubt what I could not see…
As an adult, and particularly as a sober adult, I have begun to regress in my thinking, question a bit less – trust a bit more.
I know now, there are angels. Angels dressed in green and purple, pulsing with terrifying profundity outside airplane windows. Looking in at the small, lost faces looking out. Whispering, “We are here. Do not be so afraid. We are here on the feet of the wind, ready to call the sun to a brand new day…”