Circling

Looking out the window from my airplane seat, I anticipated seeing the familiar landmarks of the valley city below—Phoenix, Arizona—as they came into view during the flight's descent. It was one of my first trips home since leaving the state to start medical school. The flight seemed unremarkable up to that point. To my surprise, as I looked out the window, expecting to locate known terrain, the scene from the window, effaced the familiar. Instead of mountain ranges with a city below, we were in a cloud. Was it fog? Was it a rain cloud? I don't recall the flight having been turbulent at all. In retrospect, the burnt-orange hue of this particular cloud should have raised alarm. This particular cloud was given its strange hue from the sunlight reflecting off the sand saturating the surrounding cloud, and the sandstorm was about to make our landing perilous.

The plane assumed the familiar position right before landing: the nose tip up, the wheels jet out, prepared. But then there was a sudden change into the unfamiliar. The body—my body—has a way of communicating when it's thrown from the familiar, dislodged from regular rhythms. I quickly felt disoriented. A second later, as my mind caught up to what my body already knew, I started to worry. The plane rolled. The left wing dipped toward the ground, and the right wing went skyward. And then I felt the left wheel of the plane bounce on the tarmac. Jostled and confused, I felt my angst amplify as it became clear that the plane was now ascending skyward.

In the (re)ascent, each individual's seemingly solitary world gave way to a collective sharing. Suddenly we were all very aware of one another. It felt like all of us—together—became one body unit, contained and situated within the rattled fuselage. The sense of a collective synchronizing of breath, a collective shudder, a collective silence. Once we were at a new stable altitude above the sand cloud, the pilot came on the speaker and said, “Well, we're going to circle