Terribly Alive, by Cara O'Brien

Above the Clouds 1, by Georgia O'Keeffe (USA) 1962/63

Terribly Alive
 
I.                   
When the dark cloud looms up just beyond the wing of the airplane, I think of the painting. Above the Clouds is an unusual painting for Georgia O’Keeffe, depicting bare shapes of clouds as seen from above, floating in a blue pool of sky. It departs from the sensual desert flowers for which she’s known in both subject and style.  This sky, my sky outside the plane window, is angrier than O’Keeffe’s. It is swirling and purple blue and the plane banks away from the clouds, trembling in the updrafts. I fly several times a year – sometimes multiple times a month – but I find flying terrifying. On this day, I grip the armrests as my stomach drops out from beneath me.  The painting’s sky is welcoming, or at least benign, the sky equivalent of a small gold Buddha or a sleeping cat. I imagine that O’Keeffe must have loved flying, must have found the loudness and the light and the cloud-tufted sky soothing. 
 
II.
I used to dream of exploring the sky.  When I was a child, I went through phases of information obsession. First, penguins and seabirds like puffins and boobies. I watched videos of emperor penguin babies taking tentative steps out from beneath their parents’ bellies. I learned to identify rockhoppers and fairy penguins, to distinguish the king from the emperor. Then it was marine life; anemones and sea stars. I lingered in tide pools in the Pacific Northwest – where we lived for a time – watching the sway of the anemone tentacles and the darting of tiny fish around tiny coral and unseen predators. Then came space. I stacked and read books full of nebulae and planets, particularly enamored with black holes and the unknowns of deep space. I was certain I would be an astronaut. My uncle introduced me to science fiction and I read all of the space opera I could find, burning through Asimov and Clarke, Bradbury and LeGuin.  I envisioned my adult self as a fearless, brilliant astronaut, solving the grand mysteries of space and time. I loved to imagine myself floating through a spaceship in a mylar suit, the stars and planets whooshing by outside, framed by porthole windows, the Earth a blue marble floating in the deep black.
 
III.
O’Keeffe was in her 70s when she painted her clouds.  Some historians say that, despite an initial fear of flying, when O’Keeffe began traveling via airplane around 1959 she found herself transfixed by the view of the clouds from above. She painted several versions of Above the Clouds each version growing larger and more abstract. The final version was eight feet tall and twenty-four feet wide and could not fit into a museum to which it was sent for an exhibit.  According to a description from the Art Institute of Chicago, O’Keeffe said of one of the paintings, “[s]uch a size is of course ridiculous but I had it in my head as something I wanted to do for a couple of years.”  I wonder whether, if she would have lived longer, if she would have kept painting larger versions, whether she would have ultimately painted something approaching the scale and scope of the sky itself. I wonder if she painted out of love or out of something more like reverence.  I wonder if the painting that I hold in my mind’s eye when I fly was created to quell her own fears of hurtling through the air. 
 
IV. 
Aspirations of space flight run in my family.  My mother, a teacher throughout her career, dreamed of being an astronaut.  The story told in my family is that my mother applied immediately when NASA announced it would be sending a teacher into space in the 1980s.  She too dreamed of floating weightless in a space ship, watching the Earth grow tiny through a porthole window.  She says – seemingly without regret or resentment – that her pregnancy with my younger sister caused her to withdraw her application.  She remains sure she would have been selected if she had not withdrawn.  Ultimately, a teacher from New Hampshire, Christa McAuliffe, was selected to go to space.  In 1986, she joined the crew of the Space Shuttle Challenger.  Seventy-three seconds after takeoff, the Challenger broke apart mid-air. The news coverage of the tragedy is among my earliest memories, perhaps it planted that seed of doubt in my mind whether the sky was safe.  Not so for my mother. In recent years she closely follows the endeavours by various billionaires to send private citizens into space.  She still hopes to spend time among the stars. 
 
V. 
O’Keeffe was 42 when she discovered New Mexico. Disillusioned by both her marriage and her home in New York City, she sought the uninterrupted blue skies and red rocks of New Mexico. For twenty years she spent months at a time there, and in 1949 she moved permanently.  I picture her alone there, among the rocks and sky.  She painted in her sprawling mid-century modern house or on the cliffsides.  She worked in the garage until the nights grew too cold and outside unless the sun burned too hot.  She found home there; she found inspiration.  She said of her adopted home, “[Taos is] a high, wise, sage-covered plain. In the evening, with the sun at your back, it looks like an ocean, like water. The colour up there is different . . . the blue-green of the sage and mountains, the wildflowers in bloom. It's a different kind of colour from any I'd ever seen … The world is so wide up there, so big.” I picture her flying each year across the country, taking deep breaths and deep comfort from the blue sky above, the white clouds below, and the mountain home waiting for her at the end of the journey.
 
VI. 
I once told a lecture hall full of 200 strangers that I was afraid of flying. My last year of college, a psychology professor asked anyone with this fear to raise their hands.  It’s supposedly a common fear, but mine was the only hand that went up. I explained to my entire psychology class that the fear emerged in my twenties after a particularly turbulent flight between Syracuse and Chicago.  I explained that I can somewhat relax during calm flights and mostly cannot relax during turbulence.  I explained to this room full of possibly impressed, possibly horrified, classmates that a cocktail of Xanax and wine seemed to help, some of the time. I felt breathless, my heart pounded, and my voice shook the whole time I was speaking. Telling my story to that giant classroom felt how I feel on an airplane flying through an ice storm.  This fear – then, today – it feels like a failure.  It feels like I, an otherwise independent, successful and intelligent person should be able to get it together, to reclaim the calm I once felt above the clouds. It feels like an incongruous fact about me, one that doesn’t quite line up with the image I otherwise project in the world.  Nearly two decades after the fear appeared in my life, it hasn’t gone away, and I still feel those ashamed, lecture-hall sized butterflies when I have to admit the fear.
 
VII. 
O’Keeffe striking out to the west to find a place of her own has always struck me as terribly brave.  In any era, it is a challenge to leave behind the world one knows to see more of the rest of it, but in the early 20th century, for a woman alone, it would have been especially fraught and lonely. For O’Keeffe, however, it resulted in discovering a home, in finding contentedness.  She said about her time in New Mexico, “Living out here has just meant happiness. Sometimes I think I'm half-mad with love for this place.”  She reflected in later years that when spending time at Ghost Ranch, she felt “terribly alive.”  
 
VIII.
I, too, had to wing west to find a place where I felt “terribly alive” and “half-mad” with love.  I’m a bit farther North than O’Keeffe was, in the foothills of Boulder, Colorado.  I lived in Colorado as a child, visited frequently after my family left, and then lived here again immediately after college in my fledging adulthood.  The mountains are home.  The last time I visited before I began making plans to move here, I cried from happiness and relief when the plane shuddered down onto the ground and the mountains loomed into view, and cried again when my plane took off back toward the East, this time from sadness.  I began making plans then to return.  Part of that effort was trying to absorb some of the fearlessness of O’Keeffe, to set out on a journey that would mean professional risks and the potential for loneliness.  Part of it was a craving, after nine years in the intense culture and dense concrete of Washington, DC, for blue skies and wide vistas.  I wanted to be able to see for miles.  I try to put myself in O’Keeffe’s headspace when I fly; I literally hold her painting in my mind’s eye and try to focus on the calm.  I did the same when I journeyed west, trying to hold O’Keeffe’s fearlessness in my mind, trying to think of the journey as coming home, instead of winging off into an unknown sunset.  
 
IX.
Georgia O’Keeffe started her days at sunrise, watching light pink the sky alongside her dogs and a cup of tea.  After a walk along the paths encircling her property, she painted until the sun set behind her iron red hills. I’ve read that often in the evenings she would take long drives through the desert, winding through the cacti and the cattle. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about ritual.  Rituals transform ordinary acts into prayer.  I have long observed a strict pre-flight ritual.  I arrive at the airport early; with at least enough time to get through security and then have an hour to wander before my flight.  Ideally, I will have time enough for a large glass of wine at the airport bar and a perusal of the books in the airport bookstore.  Somehow, I find those moments truly pleasurable, reading a good book in a quiet pocket of an airport bar with the hum of travelers around me, a heavy glass of wine in my hand.  During that pocket of white noise and calm, I can start to look forward to getting back home; to my long drive from the airport back up into the hills.  
 
X.
The mountains ground me.  I feel most present when I am trekking through the dust and rocks, hiking in the foothills or mountains with just my dogs and the bluebird sky for company.   Sometimes the feeling is directional.  My internal compass and my restless brain are calmed when I can be sure which way is West, because I can see the hulking Rocky Mountains out that way in the distance.  I feel a kind of breathless awe when I sit near the ocean, and a kind of excited, nervous energy when I walk the sidewalks of large cities. Both are environments that I love and long to visit, but the mountains tether me.  I feel rooted and at home so long as I can see the hills from my window, or – if I’m in the mountains – if I can see the lights of the valley splayed out below.  Even while I’m still aboard a plane, banking and trembling on a descent toward the runways, once I see the mountains come into view out the window, my pulse calms, my hands lose their white knuckle grip on the armrests, and I can turn the volume up on the music in my ears and watch the mountains as they grow bigger and the ground as it grows closer, and I can breathe.  
 
Cara O'Brien

Cara O'Brien: "I am a former newspaper journalist and current tech-startup lawyer and writer living in the foothills outside of Boulder, Colorado. I have been writing my whole life, including writing poetry from the time I could write sentences, studying journalism and creative writing at Syracuse University, and these days in my free time and in writing workshops. I am currently working on projects including a collection of poetry and several personal essays. When I’m not writing, I can usually be found hiking with my rescue dogs, Petey and Copper."