I took this photo from the middle aisle of a 787 on the way to Rome. I'd been tracking our progress: Chicago, Michigan, Toronto, Montreal, Nova Scotia, and then this. A brilliant full moon over what I knew was nothing but miles of ocean. A full moon that dazzled the eye of the plane window. A moon and nothing else but black sea below.
But I knew the direction we were heading - the plane was flying to Rome - East, directly toward the rising sun. The moon wouldn't last long. We were leaving it behind.
It's always that way. The sun is always rising somewhere even when all looks black where I happen to be. Today, I get to catch up to it and hold it almost in my hands, possessing its power to turn the world bright and hot again.
The way home, which I took in a little over three weeks, holds the same sun in stasis for hours, like it did for Joshua at Gibeon, daylight getting neither shorter or longer, until we land back in Chicago after ten hours in the air, but at almost the same time of day.
The world is big and round and we could, if we wanted to stay in motion, experience a constant rising sun, a world of unextinguishable hope and possiblity. All we have to do is stay above the surface, gliding along it at the same pace as the globe is turning, and we never have to leave the brimming daylight behind.
This is not a practical possibility, of course. We have to live a life somewhere in the process, but it can be a sustainable state of mind. We can, if we want, remember on our darkest days that the sun is still rising somewhere.
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