The View From Above (And How It Shaped How I See) - Brand New Poem
The Matchbook | 12.19.25
A dozen or so years ago, I bought the worst house on my favorite street in the town I grew up in. I remember standing on the deck while I waited for the realtor to arrive and show me around, I remember staring out at the city sprawled out in front of me, the storm blowing in over the mountains to the West. I remember seeing forever, and right there, before she even arrived, deciding I’d put in an offer.
When she finally did show up, before she could even unlock the little lockbox that held the house key, I told her I wanted to put an offer in. “Don’t you want to see inside?!” I told her No. I told her I could fix the inside, but that view, it was that view I had to have.
I remember my first night inside the house once it was mine. I remember walking out of the bedroom at 3am and seeing what felt like a million lights glowing and twinkling in the valley below me. I remember staring, for over an hour, and not quite understanding how I came to be where I came to be. I still remember.
Today’s poem, completely unreleased anywhere until today, is only kind of about that view from this house, only kind of. The other day, I was standing at the bathroom window, the highest level of the home and therefore the most elevated above the city to the North, on a morning we’d just woken to a wet snowfall that stuck everywhere but the roads.
I saw those road lines extending on forever towards the horizon, towards the mountains that border this sleepy little city. It felt like I was some giant farmer, and I was towering over my fields, freshly planted. The streets, the highway, the little connector roads, all looked like rows and rows of freshly planted seeds, carefully chosen for their heartiness, carefully tended for their survival.
I think I saw all of us, in that brief moment of strange clarity, as inextricably connected, as linked, as all part of one great soul. I saw each house as a seed, each person I’ll never know another, I saw us all huddling together, as I know someone even higher than I was looking down at me, too. I saw us cold, I saw us warmth-seeking and light-craving, and I saw us hopeful.
Then, in the wet grey of all that asphalt that separated out the world below, I saw us so divided. I saw these rows and those rows and I realized so many only see that division, and never the bizarre unity that we secretly share.
I think I knew, again with a sorrowful certainty, that so many of the problems we face today, come from so many who live so high above the rest of us, that they see us only as a world in miniature, only as worthless seeds in soil that they can’t be bothered to take care of. I realized that they aren’t cold, not like us, and they don’t understand what it is to seek sunlight and even a half-second to stop shivering.
I saw myself, just hazily reflected in the early window pane, and realized I am not those that live above us, though my house was built on mountainside higher than most. I realized that as I looked out, as I stared down into this model-sized miniature world, I was overcome with a warmth that spread and a deep and honest feeling of tenderness. I asked myself, immediately, why on earth would I ever, ever, wish for all of them, all those seeds planted in rows on rows that reached for the edge of all things, anything else but growth?
That’s this poem, that’s the heart of it. This understanding, this idea, that it matters not how high or how low our homes sit, or if we even have them at all. It matters not the quantity of our bank accounts or contents of our closets. None of that matters, none of it. All that matters, all that really adds up to anything of a lick of consequence in the end, is that we spend all the hope we have, on life, on warmth, on joy, on growth. For them, for ourselves, for everyone.
Just this. Nothing more.
Here is the spoken-word audio recording of me reading this, as my brain heard it. Some of you say you like it, though why that is will remain a mystifying mystery to me.
I love you all.
Be good.
Beautiful poem, beautiful idea.
The shift from “me” to “we”
Michael Collins , an astronaut on NASA’s Apollo 11 mission in 1969, was one if the first American astronauts to give a personal perspective to viewing earth from afar, what is now called “the overview effect” . He said that "the thing that really surprised him was “it [Earth] projected an air of fragility. And why, I don't know. I don't know to this day. I had a feeling it's tiny, it's shiny, it's beautiful, it's home, and it's fragile".
Astronaut Edgar Mitchell (Apollo 14; 1971) wrote and spoke about this effect extensively; describing it as an "explosion of awareness" and an "overwhelming sense of oneness and connectedness... accompanied by an ecstasy... an epiphany".
Given that our daily view of our world is normally looking out into a limited and defined space (other than up into the sky), it is not unreasonable to expect a different impression when one sees the same live-able spaces from far above, whether flying in the air or high on a mountain top. We only need to remember our first ascent into a tall building, looking out below with a sense of awe, fragility, and wonder. It’s easy to understand how such an impression, when we rarely encounter expansive natural landscapes, could shift our sense of self from "me" to "we".
Your poem illustrates that experience citing a personal and overwhelming sense of oneness, where our view of this world changes from a small plot of land to a collective home. One, where walls, fences, and unnatural borders fade away, exposing a shared destiny and a certain unity in the human experience. We need such reminders that looking out the small windows of our homes is much more limited than what the rest of the world sees looking back. Well done!