god’s country

God’s country, I wrote, is simple in its grandeur. Rolling landscapes of green and brown cut suddenly steep by jutting buttes a million feet tall, or so it seems, one foot for each year on this rock, a billion light years from nowhere. Clouds misshapen unfurling to the blue, leading nowhere, leading to us; the changing colors of everything we inhabit luminous beneath the star responsible. It’s difficult to breathe at this altitude, well over a mile above the Florida swamps, which don’t exist from here. They can’t exist. The Earth is a ruin, a controlled burn, a series of bloated mirrors. It’s difficult to look out over this expanse of beauty, this treasure for the senses, and not believe in some kind of god, in something greater than all of us, in the ability to traverse it all, forward and reverse, as the earth slides soundless in the void.