heights and edges

fascinate me. Fill me with joy and exhilaration, at the largeness, beauty, magic, of the world.

They're the place where different elements meet, flow into each other. Formless kisses form. Ether laps against the solid and material. Sky touches earth touches sea touches air. When I stand on bridges, rooftops, clifftops, I have this strange certainty that I could launch myself off them and fly. I've had dreams of flying so real, so strong, I woke with a sensory memory in my body of weightlessness. A precise sensation of how it felt to move and turn, to loop and dive, to backflip and lazily somersault, through air.

This morning, I recalled clifftops I walked a few weeks ago. Below us, the sea, a carnival of stars, spumed silver into the golden sunlight. Above us, a sky that went on forever. I remember thinking, as I breathed it all in, like champagne, of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, of Annie Dillard, the two writers whose work brings me closest to that sparkling, dazzled state of wonder.