Every day, WordPress emails me one writing prompt. Today’s writing prompt is:
A Map As Your Muse
Are you tired of opening dull, white, empty tabs to surf the net? Want a pop of colour? Then maybe give the Earth View extension for Chrome a try. Every time I open a new tab, Chrome greets me with a birds-eye view of a random part of the Earth. It’s a pleasant way of spicing up new windows, and you can download your favourites to your computer. I, for one, now have a collection that I use for my desktop background.
The map above is the first tab I opened after reading today’s prompt. The picture is from the south-end of Saudi Araba, in the southern part of the Al-Ahsa Governorate. The state is populated by 30 million palm trees that produce five tons of dates every day.
Of course, I read that off the Wikipedia page. The extension itself gives you the name of the country and not much else. After all, this extension is made for aesthetic reasons. It shows you an overview of a particularly interesting part of the world that looks nice. It’s fairly simple, so why do I like these images so much?
Have you ever looked out a plane’s window and stared in awe at the white sea of clouds basking in the sun? Or the odd curves and grooves of the land as you sail by? They’re almost otherworldly, not pertaining to our real. But even after we land and settle into wherever we’ve transported ourselves, those places are still there. Even now, no matter how grey and cloudy it is where you are, up above your head, there are white plains of cloud that are usually only seen by the sun and moon.
Those rolling pale hills look so solid like you could step out the emergency door and walk on them. Obviously, you can’t, but we’ve all wanted to try, right? How lucky birds are that they can glide and crest those waves at will. But they’re not waves; they’re condensed water vapours swirling in the atmosphere.
My map is, too, otherworldly. It’s an alien cosmos of tiny red islands crested by foamy waves. But I know that if I set foot there, it would appear totally different. I’m guessing those blue parts aren’t water at all, merely a trick of the light: it’s just more sand. Walking on that land would bring me back to reality.
But despite that knowledge, the image still astounds me. When I look at that map, I’m not thinking about Al-Ahsa or Saudi Arabia or the 30 million palm trees with their five tons of daily dates. I imagine forgotten shorelines, a fantastical land untouched by the human footprint. When I look at the tops of clouds, I fantasize surfing upon them in sky-ships, with whale-like creatures breaching the surface and floating along our path.
These images are magical if we allow them to be. Even the overhead photos of culdesacs and cityscapes explode with unbridled creativity as they weave amongst rivers and curve inexplicably. One image that I’m particularly fond of I entitled “Vulture Island”, as the strip of land looks like the skull of that scavenger bird.
I could go and find out the information about that island if I liked, if it is an island at all, or I can leave it unexplored. It can remain a fantasy world, a portion of the world map entitled “Here be dragons,” if I so choose. That is a spellbinding way to look at it, right?
[17 minutes]
Some of my other favourites:
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