Where is Paradise?

I'm sure scholars, philosophers, and perhaps architects have written about the link between our view of the horizon and our awareness of the spiritual world around us.  I have seen a vast ocean, and I have looked upward at the limitless night sky. Always my idiosyncratic perception of the heavens was that Allah's paradise was "up there" or "out there" somewhere.  City skyscrapers always made paradise seem, to me at least, even further away, as if the height of the buildings themselves demaracated the material and spiritual worlds.

The single-story compound I visited in the Moroccan countryside had an unexpected effect on my own perception of paradise.  I  stayed in a family compound.  On all four sides of me, there were 10-foot high walls.  Beyond those walls, I could see nothing of the level farmlands,  other nearby structures of similiar height, nor the mountains in the distance.  As far as I could see, the material world stopped at the top of those walls. 

In this circumscribed world, it seemed to my spiritual self as if the breadth and height of paradise began at the top of those compound walls.  Paradise was sitting just above my head.  I could almost touch it, or I could be crushed by the weight of it.

I had not thought, when I went to  visit a family in rural Morocco, that the trip would have such a profound effect on my own  spirituality.  But even the passage of time there was affecting as night came, and the midnight blue of the sky was highlighted by stars.  Then fajr came, and the sky was cobalt blue, backlit from the rays of a sun still too far away to bring the colors of the dawn.  Shades of paradise just above my head.