Spectacular. Magnificent. Incredible.

I wish I could throw my body in the air to punctuate each of these words for you.

I am home after 2 weeks in Denmark and a brief visit to Iceland. I was sitting on a plane yesterday, a few Icelandic documentaries under my belt, when I peaked out the window to see something soul-screeching amazing.

When you fly west out of Iceland, bound for Seattle, you fly over Greenland and over a body of water called the Davis Strait. At this time of year the body of water separating Greenland from the uninhabited snowy fjords of Northeastern Canada is made up of giant sheets of fractured ice. For hundreds, even thousands of miles, jagged indigo veins thread their way through milky plates of ice. White cliffs jut curiously up from the sea and not a living thing can be seen. Nothing breathing, nothing photosynthesizing, nothing moving to the rhythms of the strange and stunning landscape. On this trip we were quite close to the North Pole, so we traveled for 8 hours with the setting sun. The light on the shattered landscape was breathtaking- everything awash in pink and gold, purple and blue. As I snapped a few photos out the window I felt my heart leap for joy. Leap.

For a moment I looked around, wondering what we ought to do. I considered promoting a collective dance. Or a subdued squeal. Something.

Instead, I just said thank you for every possible thing I could think of. I gave thanks for the plane and the pilot and human flight. I gave thanks for the sun and the moon and for the quirky bus driver who invited us to “stare into the darkness” when we arrived in Iceland, etc. etc. Like most people, most of my days are filled with the humdrum of daily decisions. I navigate life with unconscious consciousness. But yesterday I was given 30 minutes of magnificent.

It's amazing what 36,000 feet and a puny window can do for your soul.