I'm Adali Mone and this is The Slowdown.

As the spring brings more travel for readings at universities, I find myself staring out

of plain windows more and more and contemplating the world from 30,000 feet in the sky.

I love to look down on the rivers, the rooftops, the squares up houses and pasture, woods

and roads.

There's a strange sense it all makes from above.

Because of my love of the view, I didn't entirely mind-flying before the pandemic.

I didn't love it, but didn't fear it too much.

But now it feels a little harder, something to get through as opposed to experience.

Luckily, I have one superpower, my ability to sleep on a plane, sometimes I am asleep

before we even take off, sometimes I wake from strange and vibrant dreams that feel

as if I've entered another world.

And so I didn't know who he was at the time, I sat next to the drummer Parker Kindred,

who played in the band called Antony and the Johnson's.

I slept soundly from JFK to O'Hare and never stirred.

When I woke up as we landed, he laughed about how hard I was sleeping.

He said, I thought to myself, wow, she must be really tired.

But I don't think it's even that I need the sleep.

It's more that I'm transporting myself somewhere else than a plane.

I look out the window, I see a few clouds, and then I close my eyes and let my mind take

me somewhere else.

Today's poem is a brilliant example of the way the mind can wander and even conjure when

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