Jamie Tao is an art director, designer, and illustrator (among other things) based in Miami. She has a bunch of lovely and imaginative work on her website, such as this one from her batch of personal stuff.

© Jamie Tao

One of my favorite parts of her website is the opening page.

Under what looks like a Polaroid snap of Miami’s man-made grid of lakes, quarries, and a land ripe for strip malls and subdivisions, taken from a descending airplane, Tao writes:

I usually sleep from take-off to landing. I was coming home from one of my recent trips and never really appreciated Miami until I saw it from an airplane. This is home. Welcome.

I agree with Jamie: Miami from an airplane is a sight to see. A flat land divided up into squares and rectangles with various other shapes occasionally dropped in to the grid to break up the pattern. Whether flying in from the swamps of the west or the beaches of the east, Miami from above is a sublime visual spread.

I read Jamie’s passage over and over again as if each reading revealed something I, too, knew but never wrote down or realized. What I realized was this: I never really appreciated Miami myself — my hometown and, for better or worse, the place that helped me become the person I am today — until I saw it from eight hundred miles away.