Tag Archives: learning

My Rorschach World

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SOMETIMES ON A DOG WALK, I wonder what’s happened to my dogs.  We walk in a wilderness place that they know well, so they take off for while and I’m all alone on the path.  When I stand outside myself, or float a few hundred feet in the air, I look down at me and ask, “What’s that guy doing, the only soul in sight?”  And then I smile at the answer, “He’s walking his dogs.”

Yesterday after they abandoned me, I had a chance to notice the last of the snow on the ground, scattered patterns here and there.  This patch looked like a lion, that like a spaceship, that like an angel with three wings.

I laughed when I noticed that I was using the snow for my personal Rorschach test.

Then I wondered; instead of ink-blots or snow-blots, what if I use the world around me for my test?  This stack of massive logs, I saw it first as a barrier, an obstacle, “Don’t Go Here!”  then shifted it to be a ladder, easy to climb for a clearer view of my landscape.

The path itself, does it represent my own path, I wondered, hard going up hillsides sometimes, curving later around peaceful glades?  Why of course it does…that path is my life!  I’d been walking the same physical road for years, unaware that it stands for my destiny, whenever I choose to see it that way.  Rocks, trees, sky, city, cars, people — the physical expressions, they’re pictures of my mental and spiritual surroundings, as well.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By the time the pups came dashing back to join me, I saw them as travelers with me along our way, not talking but setting an example: what’s wrong with running your path sometimes instead of walking, what’s wrong with letting the destination take care of itself and simply _being,_ for a while?

Pretend every so-called external thing stands for something internal, and what all of a sudden do we understand about ourselves and about our spiritual choice to visit this planet?

If the pups could talk, I’d ask them.  Yet if they could talk, they’d probably say nothing and let me figure it out for myself.

 

If You Build It, It Will Fly

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YOU CAN HAVE the world’s best toolkit, but when there’s no patience there, you’re probably not going to build anything that makes you much happy.

For this reason, and although I wanted to build an airplane, I knew it wouldn’t happen.  Wouldn’t, that is, until the ultralight flying machines came on the market.

They seemed so simple!  Simple aluminum tubes, simple steel cables, you pop some fabric on the wings, wheels on axles, engine on mount, you’re done!

That’s pretty well the way it worked out.  I don’t remember how many hours it took to assemble my Pterodactyl Ascender, but it didn’t feel like a whole lot.  One day it lay in brown cardboard boxes, long coffins on the garage floor, the next day the boxes were gone and there was a great deal of unrecognizable odd parts on the floor.

Next day it was all still there, me at the kitchen table reading the manual of how it was all supposed to fit together.  Before I knew it, I had finished reading the first chapter of the manual.  The parts were still on the floor.  They stayed there as I began Section Two, “Assembling the Wing.”

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It Isn’t Often,

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THAT WE FIND someone out there who speaks our language perfectly, hums the same spirit, thinks the same thoughts we’d think, if we were them.  Is that truest family, does that make one feel a little less lonely in the world, or what?  Answer — It isn’t what.

Found it at http://dixiedynamitecoaching.com/free-to-a-good-home-dreams/

Asked permission to reprint here.

Got it.

It follows:

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What’s It All About?

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EASY TO REMEMBER, the time in my life when that was a towering question.

Yes there were beautiful places, lovely days, but there were storms and depressions, too, solid things torn from the earth and scattered by winds.  One pretty sunrise, and then another storm!  What am I doing here and if it’s supposed to be for the love of God, why don’t I feel that and why am I on this God-forsaken planet?

Those were the days when I was doing exactly what I needed to be doing, asking that life-turning riddle, tested as I recall by not just one but about three thousand events that I perceived as Negative, all in a row — menial jobs, low pay, rejection slips, the car repossessed.  Oh, wait.  There was the pretty sunrise.  Fourteen hundred disasters, one fine sunrise, sixteen hundred more disasters.

The disasters weren’t all violent (some were), they were most of them barnacles grown on my sleek hull, cutting a few tenths from my cruising speed, then a few tenths more, empty So-Whats piling one on the other till I was dead slow in the water.

What I was missing all that time, simple thing that the one sunrise offered, was perspective.

I was seeing this:

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Rarely Asked Questions: Still skydiving?

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NOPE, NOT any more.

One summer, typical obsessive me, I decided to overcome my fear of heights (in fact, my fear of falling great distances and meeting the ground at high speed).

Because I always like getting through the Newcomer phase quickly, I made seven jumps that first day of training, out of static-line phase into free-fall by sunset.  In the next few months I made 51 jumps.

I was still shall we say alert, standing in the wind on that last step outside the airplane as we approached the drop zone, as though aware that I had not chosen the world’s most forgiving sport to romance at that point in my career.

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A Different Family

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THE PHOTO BELOW is the front lawn of Russ and Lou Ann Garner’s house, fronting one of the thousand lakes in central Florida.

Once a year, the Garners host an event, inviting a swarm of light seaplanes to descend first to the lake and thence to the lawn, pilots and spouses most of them long-time friends, getting together to fly and to talk about their adventures and their aircraft.

The Garners’ Landing Splash-In is a type-club splash, where all the aircraft are a single kind, a dozen or more amphibians, all of them SeaReys  (well, there was one Lake Amphibian, way out on the beach, flown in by your reporter).

A first-time visitor, not even a SeaRey owner, I was warmly welcomed, as would be anyone who said what I said: “What a pretty little airplane!”

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That Which Makes Me Happy

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THIS IS A STORY of so-called good and pretend evil.

You don’t have to be a chess-player to study the picture and know it’s a battleground. You know by the nature of human beings that our games require winners and losers, the victors and the defeated.  So many of our sports are meant to be showcases of skill, tests to display the beauty of superior skill.   They do this, yet almost always there’s a final scene, half triumph half disaster.

Knowing this we can see that the game above was not going well for White.  Look at the row of its captured pieces, lifted off the board, at the far side of the photograph.  For proof, instead of holding its own, White has taken only three of the opponent’s pieces, and is being ravaged on this side of the board by Black, who has swept down to dominate the game.

And yet, when we look way in the corner at the far right side of the board, we see that White has pulled off a miracle.  His Queen’s flown to storm the very bedchamber of Black’s King, who cannot escape, and the game is over.  Victory goes to battered White.

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Francais-faux et moi

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I LOVE languages.  I speak none of them.

It took me a while to realize that my American is a bit quirky to others.  I can get along in the language, pass as American, but when I start talking freely I lapse into Writer, splash about in colors instead of the better-understandable.

I’m careful, in some quarters, to say, “My, it’s foggy!”  instead of the more natural, “It’s breathing marshmallows!”

Even when I write, there’s a voice: “Careful now.  Don’t push words too far.”  You can imagine.  Just the words to make me grab my paint-pot and set off running.

My high-school Spanish failed me in Madrid as I found that “Quiero te’,” to the waitress is preferred to, “Te quiero.”  But instead of killing me, she laughed.  I learned a volume from that laugh.

Better learn French from just plain reading the language, figuring it out, I thought, instead of the agonizing declensions memorized, scores and hundreds of them.  And look there; my machine doesn’t have keys for the subscripts and superscripts, as if I knew what they are and where to put them.

So for the longest time I was stricken dumb by my conviction that whatever I said, I’d say it wrong.

Enter my Epiphany of the Day and thanks to the waitress:  Who cares?

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When school kills (it does), and when it dies (it will), where’s education?

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I COULD PICK any country, but I’ll pick the United States of America, because I’ve flown over it most of my life.  But this flight, your permission, I’ll do something different.

I’ve fit my flying goggles with these Mark IV Education Lenses.  Invented by me.  Look through the glass and see a quick green line for every person on the ground who has a college degree, a brown line for every other person, the un-degreed.

We see farther as we fly higher, of course, so let us cruise super high, for a biplane, way up at 11,000 feet.

(I hear the airline pilots snickering: “ ‘Way up at eleven thousand.’  Oooh…that’s really high! Snicker-snicker.)

Very well, you with the gold stripes on your shoulders, this is a thought-experiment, OK?  Just sit there in the front cockpit for a minute and look out through your Mark Fours.  I have something to show you!

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Interview: India

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EMAIL INTERVIEW with Life Positive magazine:



You have been one of the most influential of New Age writers in the world. Looking back, how much of a change do you see in the world around you?

>> Thank you for that first sentence. It makes all these rejection slips so much easier to bear.  Most of us would agree, I think, that there’s been an enormous shift of consciousness through the last century toward a wide recognition of the value of the unseen, toward an understanding that we are much more than we appear. I don’t think that’s ever happened before, in history.

Do you believe in a New Age? A time when man will live in total harmony with himself, others and the environment?

>> 
We’re already there. We’re already living in total harmony with ourselves, with others and the environment. The appearance that we are not, the belief that we’re mortals clad in physical bodies, trapped on a dying planet in the prison of space-time, that’s a stage with which we are not only in harmony, but which we have created and chosen for the dramas of our dreams of lifetimes. The planet can explode, and not a single life will in truth be lost. But what a thrill for us, this theater in which disasters seem so real, and we can change outcomes by action!

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