night flying

"Ahhhhh" is printed on the key card that let me into my Americanized, but deliciously comfortable room. Relief and satisfaction, after waking up at 430 only to have my early flight delayed, miss the connecting flight, and wait 9 hours to take the late flight from Atlanta to Alajuela. But, with all that in the past, I'm simply glad to be in Costa Rica, though I've seen no more of it than a mob of eager taxi drivers who crowded around passengers exiting the airport. So, I thought I'd share a moment of reflection from the flight.
Unlike a lot of people I know, I love flying, especially when I can grab a window seat. It changes your perspective so drastically, you're forced to think a bit more deeply than you do when peering out the car window at familiar blurriness. Forgive the similes--sometimes I get carried away with scenes like this.
Leaving the city at night is a beautiful experience--the cars on the highways appear like trickles of fireflies or funereal processions with pinprick twin candles. The stationary twinkling of the city is laid out in grids and looks solely two dimensional at night, like a starchart or a glow-in-the-dark battleship board, a map undecipherable to anyone but pilots. Of course, the fantastic, surreal vistas of cloud-tops vanish at night, but I hope we'll be able to see the moon at some point--light extends farther in the sharp air above the cloud layer. Then the soft expanses of cumulus shimmer like water, the moon like a second sun, illuminating the crests of gentle ripples and swells in the fabric of the sky. And now, thought there's no significant moonlight that I can see, the layers of air below us still seem like an ocean. Patches of soft luminescence float up, dappling the black ocean like phosphorescent plankton and algae that I have heard make the sea (in some regions) glow eerily at night.
The networks of cities seem so trivial and fragile from up here, connected by thin, shining filaments, spreading out at the ends, at the "downtowns", like neurons almost. You can see the dendrites, these delicate tendrils reaching out waiting to be touched and awoken to communicate. These technological and engineering masterpieces feel almost insignificant and pitifully diminutive from this perspective. Yet, they sustain (and contain) so many thousands, millions even, of little hivelings, grown dependent on their own accustomed habits and set routes. I don't mean to belittle urbanites; it's just interesting how one feels removed and detached from all that. Rather, it's kind of awe-inspiring, curious to realize that we've made these webs that mirror (to some extent) the same brains from which they were coaxed into existence.
I'm falling asleep, so buenas noches. Prayers and love to all who read. In Jesus Christ. Amen.