may the force be with you

The plane bumps along like a wagon on a cobblestone path.  I look outside, expecting to see nothing, the plane swathed in clouds, but the sky is perfectly clear. Just perfect cobalt blue, interrupted only by wisps of white and, far below, little marshmallow poufs of clouds.  I can feel the pilot negotiating the wind, the flaps raising and lowering to compensate for anemometric forces that challenge the massive aluminum body of the plane.  It's amazing to me that an invisible force can shake an airplane, thousands of pounds of passengers, luggage, and equipment, a miracle of engineering.  Outside the window, I can see no obvious obstacles to a perfectly smooth journey -- and yet the wings rattle and the plane stutters in the sky, and my stomach lurches as I casually rifle around for a barf bag, just in case.
The wind is invisible, but I remember the day before sitting in a room on the sixth floor of Mohn Hall watching this epic thunderstorm pelt the building with waves of rain, sheets of water.  The wind blows buckets straight in through the cracked windows and then in the next second throws all its weight in the other direction.  Confused swarms of raindrops race every which way over the parking lot and it looks like a war in the sky, one school against another and the wind against the buildings.  If it wasn't raining, though, I might not be able to see it at all.

The pilot tries to avoid another punch from the wind, tilting the plane at a terrifying angle.  I can feel my stomach flip to reorient itself with the core of the Earth, so I check my drink to make sure it's not about to slosh over the side because of the angle.  My cranberry juice is completely straight in the cup -- the meniscus is parallel with the lip and with the floor of the plane.  It didn't occur to me that airplanes had fake gravity, but it explains the odd feeling of stretching toward two differently-oriented grounds when the plane tilts to a 45-degree angle.

I can't see gravity either.  My fellow passengers and I defy it and find ourselves in the same moment enslaved to it.  Despite all our incredible feats of modern engineering, we can't escape the invisible forces that dictate our lives.

Sometimes I am sure that I will be blind in the future, and I like to prepare myself for that day.  I imagine what faces will feel like under my seeing fingers, and I appreciate bright colors and contrasts and walk with my feet instead of with my eyes.  I become painfully conscious of how much our society relies on sight and I try to imagine what it would be like to live here without it -- simultaneously realizing with a leaden stomach that I can't imagine it at all, loving my sight and hating my dependency.

But the wind is invisible and I feel it every day; gravity is invisible and I use it every day.  When my eyes are closed and I imagine myself a blind poet, I wiggle my toes into the dirt, feeling them inextricably tied to the earth, and let my goosebumps rise to greet the wind tickling my skin in waves.  There could be colors to those sensations, but when they beat the plane they are the same color as the clearest, stillest sky.