Creativity Exercise

I'm sitting in a bagel shop looking down Murphy Canyon to the south side of Mission Valley (well-known landmark in San Diego). I can also see the edge of the Tierrasanta mesa, where I live, across I-15 and atop the eastern side of the canyon. I feel this location in my mind and imagine myself comfortably oriented. But what if I try to feel farther, farther than I can see?

Just below my view of Mission Valley runs I-8, the road east to Phoenix and Tuscon, where I feel connections to friends. And the other way lies the deep, dark Pacific Ocean. South is Baja, Mexico. I've been to the tip, but only as far north as San Francisco. That's about a thousand miles in both directions. I stretch my feelers out farther, to the places I've been abroad, locating myself on the earth. I have to visualize a globe to grasp the fullness of distances, reaching from here to Sydney, to Paris. Seems to leave half the world uncovered.

Still, I can feel myself, my location. I'm grounded. Because it is almost noon, imagining the earth's orientation toward the sun is also fairly easy, and the vernal equinox just passed, so the tilt of the planet seems within grasp. I lose it as soon as I consider my reference point (am I looking at the earth from the sun or from some other point in space?) Dizzy, spinning, the solar system whirls about, out of control. Stop! I tell myself. Come back to earth.

This is where I always fail, trying to find an offworld viewpoint. Visualization and feeling end as I imagine plunging into the depths of space--or is it flying higher and higher? I would go mad trying to travel outside our solar system. Another notion ... space orientation sickness, perhaps an element for a science fiction story? It could be something like nitrogen narcosis (the diver's disease) more romantically termed "rapture of the deep". Hmm, rapture of deep space ...

[creativity]