Tag Archives: perspective

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.

 

Normally I Wouldn’t Fly

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THIS CLOSE TO a wilderness mountain ridge.

I can see the smile of my first flight instructor, all cool and unconcerned, pulling the throttle to idle and saying, “By the way, where do you plan to land when the engine quits… as it just did?”

“I guess we’ll have to put ‘er down on the little pointy white place,” I’d say.

But really, between you and me, and if you tilt your computer screen just right, you can see the valley beyond and a field down there that’d be not so hard to slip into and land, get out and stretch our legs, rest a bit from flying.

Like so many threats in our lives, a ferocious foreground distracts from our background security .  It’s fun to be scared, sometimes, but never to fear that our true life can be lost, nor in the slightest danger.

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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Interview: Iran

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THIS INTERVIEW is still in the midst, I’m still thinking and editing even after answering the questions, treating a quick talk as though it were a chapter in a book.  Here it is, mid-process, still changing.  For some reason the edit feature has gone a little squirrely, so please forgive the strange formatting, misalignments, etc.

With Alireza Bahrami, www.thinkplus.ir

Dear Mr. Bach, this is my first question:  Use three sentences to introduce yourself.

>> 1)  Hi.
     2) Please call me Richard. 
      3) You’ll recognize me as a mirror of yourself, having made different choices in the belief of time and space to express the shared truth of our spirit and of the love that binds us beyond space-time as indestructible Life.
Question #2:
Which one do you like more to be known as, and why:  Richard Bach, the writer, or Richard Bach, the pilot?

>> I’ll pick Number Three. please: Richard Bach, temporary mortal, permanent spirit.

I Love It When I Solve Ancient Mysteries

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THE CONTROVERSY began in the 14th century, I believe, and it was a big one.

How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?

To the best of my recollection, the heads of pins were somewhat larger, seven hundred years ago, but the question raged even as the area of a pinhead’s real estate decreased.

It raged in me, till this evening.  I hadn’t personally wrestled with the question since 1976, but my secret problem-solver never gives up on a case, and she just tiptoed into my study, set the answer on the corner of my desk, and tiptoed out, a glad little smile at the corner of her mouth.

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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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Zsa-Zsa, on Her Walk

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EVERY MORNING, every afternoon, Zsa-Zsa the Sheltie and I go for our walk.  If it weren’t for that little sheepdog, I’d probably drive.

But she takes her job as Personal Trainer seriously, and now that Lucky is researching his different dimensions, it’s ZZ’s bark that tells me it’s time to close the computer and get a few miles under our paws!

She’s convinced that a walk’s our cure for every physical ill, for loneliness, for thinking too much, which is not dog-friendly activity.

She’s had an up-hill battle on that subject with me: thinking too much.  Actually not an up-hill battle, today, but a down-hill one.  She caught me lost in thought on our walk this afternoon, so when she barked to say what a beautiful day! I realized I had come to a stop, looking at the ground.  Here’s what I saw at my feet:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Do you notice anything revealing about that photo?  I didn’t, and then the ZZ barked again, “Look!” so I blinked, and saw this:

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Rarely Asked Questions: Did _Illusions_ Really Happen?

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Yes, it happened.  No, it didn’t.

The book Nothing by Chance is a straightforward non-fiction account of a summer in the biplane (with photographs), flying through the midwest, hopping passengers from small-town hayfields, three dollars the ride.  A few years later we flew the adventure again (with more biplanes) for a documentary film of the same title.  All of that “happened,” that is, we can find records here and there to confirm that others noticed, were changed and affected by the flying machines and the cameras and the crowds coming to watch.  There are photos in newspaper archives, pictures in scrapbooks through Nebraska and Iowa, Illinois and Wisconsin and Missouri.  Land in those fields today, you’ll see the scrapbooks for yourself.

Into such events flew Donald Shimoda, nominated Savior of the World, who found the work not so satisfying as he had been led to believe.  Turned in his keys, quit the job.

To the best of my knowledge Shimoda has never had a body in our space-time.  That will make him, to many, someone who never really lived.

He really lived to me!  Anyone’s real who changes and affects the way we think and act and run our lives.  No one can prove that Jesus the Christ had a body in space-time, or King Arthur…are these two dismissed as unreal?

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Rarely Asked Questions: How have you been affected by celebrity?

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WHAT IS the stuff?

What’s celebrity?  What’s fame?  I so need definitions!

How have I been affected.  How would you be affected, if you were me, someone calls a friend at a book-signing:  ”Ellen, you won’t believe it!   I can’t believe this!   It’s Richard Bach!”

And Ellen looks at you, courteous but drawing a blank, “And you are…who?”

To one person, you’re famous.  To the person alongside you’re so-what.  How does that affect you?

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