On this nine hour flight across the Atlantic ocean to the Rocky Mountains it strikes me how this plane is just a chunk of metal shooting across the sky. A powerful human source of engineering that allows people to travel across continents, move across whole oceans. How crazy is that!? A flight - another step on the journey to all the adventures ahead. 9 hours and over 4000 miles away from home.
Maybe in a few years I'll forget the food I ate this morning, the bus I took to the airport, the coffee served with a friendly smile.
Maybe I'll forget the unexpected bluebells I stumbled across yesterday - the wide open green space so close to the airport. The grateful steps I took through this park after a long day of coach travel. The bliss of stretching your legs after hours of stillness.
Maybe looking back, all this will just be a distant memory. But now it all feels very and extremely real.... and exciting and thrilling and scary and exhilarating and all sorts of other feelings. Because I have the ability to be this free. To take these steps. To breathe the air of new places and to focus the eyes on new horizons. To take steps on different lands and feel and experience strange mountains beneath my feet.
Right now I'm here in the sky - a tiny dot so insignificant in the vastness of it all. The world is below me and the world is huge. There is so much possibility. I can't even begin to comprehended how much. There's so much world. So much time - so little time. It's all connected.
I don't know where I'll be in 10 years but I just feel like this year is part of something - something bigger. Experiences and opportunities are humbling me beyond measure.
Stepping out of my comfort zone. Seeking unknowns - New situations, new experiences, new memories. Not just dreaming but growing and being. Searching for something more. A returning and a strengthening. The next step...
It takes time returning to yourself. Since my injury last year there's been something missing. Something I can't describe. It's been stuck in my head. What happened to my strength? When I lost my physical strength, it felt like a part of my mental strength died too. But now I am awakening to the fact that I can be strong again. I'm growing, I'm strengthening. I'm becoming. Becoming what ? - I'm not sure but I'm just enjoying the discoveries I make along the way. 21 years old can feel so impossibly young sometimes. There is so much I have to learn. So much I have yet to be. Patience is key.
I don't know an end goal. I don't know who or where I want to be in 20, 40, 50 years time. All I know is that I want to be happy. I want to have lived adventurously and courageously and humbly and kindly and in all other manner of ways.
Life is connections - just like the way the plane connects us over oceans. Life is connections with other people. The communities and families which surround us. They hold us up. They make us so much more than we could ever imagine. They hold us up to the sky - to bathe in the shining rays of sunlight.
Just look up. See that above you? That's the sky and it's huge. I imagine all the people who have ever helped, inspired, grounded or touched me in some way as a glowing sky full of sunlight.
Gazing out of the plane window right now I can see all of your faces. At the front and largest of all are my parents. They are my biggest inspirations, my biggest supporters, my biggest reason for my happiness rooted deep inside - I'll be forever in debt to them. In my sky I can see all your faces. Family and friends - all the people who are in my life somehow, someway or another. You are all there and you are all smiling. Guiding me, willing me onwards. Onwards towards the great unknown. Just as I am a face in your sky - willing you onwards too.
Let's hold each other up.
Up to the sky.
Continually.
That's the thing about the sky... It's always there. No matter where you are.
Yours in excited anticipation of footsteps underneath the Colorado mountain skies...
Touch down in America!
Bye for now
Heidi x
