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"Below me I was not conscious of the morning haze. Through depths of clear transparent air, I looked down and saw those myriad bright shells on the floor of the sea. (Buoys newly painted and drying on a dock were scarlet lobster claws. Pier-heads were pegs in the mud.) For the objects scattered below me bore no resemblance to those I had been living with. They bore no relation to life. Rootless and impermanent, they seemed strewn there accidentally, washed up carelessly by some great tide of the sea; and left, limp, shining, detached, for me to pick up and arrange in what patterns I might choose . . .

"One could sit still and look at life from the air; that was it. And I was conscious again of the fundamental magic of flying, a miracle that has nothing to do with any of its practical purposes - purposes of speed, accessibility, and convenience - and will not change as they change. It is a magic that has more kinship with what one experiences standing in front of serene Madonnas or listening to cool chorales, or even reading one of those clear passages in a book - so clear and so illuminating that one feels the writer has given the reader a glass-bottomed bucket with which to look through the ruffled surface of life far down to that still permanent world below...

"And if flying, like a glass-bottomed bucket, can give you that vision, that seeing eye, which peers down to the still world below the choppy waves - it will always remain magic."

*ANNE MORROW LINDBERGH, From "North to the Orient"