Big Kite Redux: Photos from Below

This is a quick follow-up on the six-foot-tall kite featured in the prior post.

Several readers wanted to see the kite itself, but we didn’t take any photos of (as opposed to from) it. Today, however, I discovered that my son Liam had taken a 10-second video of it on his iPhone.

Three days after taking the Green Man video, we went to Aries’ Cove, put Liam’s bird kite up — visible in the first photo –, and then launched the big kite with 1,000 feet of string and Liam’s Flip on board.

It was a perfect day for flying and filming, but the camera ran out of juice moments after launch. So we got no video — but we did catch a few moments of the big kite rising.

In the first photo, it’s about halfway out. The second is a zoom view from that same shot, in which the kite resembles the wonderful, ambiguous, grainy images typical of UFO photos.

It was already entering the high clouds on what was, actually, a quite clear day. Moments later, higher, it became just a minute, intermittently-visible ghost-shape. Is that it? No. Maybe . . . Yes! Gone again. . . .

The kite was virtually invisible, but still the string shrilled taut in the remorseless pull of the high winds. After five minutes or so, we wrapped the string around a rock the size of a golden retriever and tied it to another rock so we could relax and look for sea urchins.

“Embodied cognition” is a theory of human thought, self-awareness, and emotion based on the clinically-demonstrated premise that brain and body are not separate but are closely-integrated, dynamic, complex systems that together comprise “self-awareness” and “thinking.” Bodily position, sensation, facial expression, and kinetic activity are closely linked to your thoughts and emotions, and vice-versa.

I mention this because if you have not flown a kite recently, I recommend doing so. In embodied cognition terms, looking skyward has an uplifting effect. It stretches mind and outlook as much as it does neck muscles.

Or, you may simply find magic in feeling the high blue pulling you toward it, toward so much light, space, and elemental power. It is the closest you can come to holding hands with the sky.