LILLIPUTION IN PARADISE

Many times after an especially memorable flight I’ve stepped from the sailplane with a peculiar sensation of feeling two feet tall, the vastness I’ve alighted from dwarfing my own physical and mental dimensions. Just think, moments after navigating the near heavens I can wallow in grass like a happy puppy. Far from belittling, it’s a glimpse of cosmic singularity, the central truth of all, PARADOX.I have long seen the living of life, whether exalting or profane, an artistic endeavor, vowing as a child that my path would not replicate others’, but be original. Along the way I learned that the (r)evolutionary function of art is sacrament - or can be if we let it. After that nothing much matters, you live and die like everything else. It’s sacrament that keeps us human.Key to the sacramental is finding what intrigues your curiosity or inspires you, and committing to that. Sacrament lies not in possessing any certain thing or performing some arbitrary act. It comes with pouring yourself into mystery as water into a pool.Also, sacrament can be solitary or social. Early in life, an avid musician, I was always glad to play alone, but loved playing with others even more. Where going solo is truly a sacrament, joining in harmony elevates the experience, arousing deeper satisfactions. A kind of psychic lovemaking you might say.Then I discovered soaring and interest in music quickly faded. Why? I guess because hurtling bodily through the sky is just more visceral than hearing or making mere sounds, however brilliant they be. Soon, soaring came to occupy these same creative spaces in mind and heart, but with fuller actualization. Soaring creates non-virtual realities the ground-bound can scarcely conceive. Rather than stand beneath the day as before a concert stage, we actually plunge up into it, splash all around and guzzle, not sip its glories. We may climb a mountain, zoom to its neighbor, frolic there and return before city folks can find their way out of town!And again, soaring with others only amplifies our joy. Once floating in air became my sacrament and sharing it a higher one, there seemed no better way to spend the remaining time than showing fellow groundlings they too can learn to levitate. And that’s how I got this way.THAT SAID…Some soaring pilots believe if they don’t put up dazzling numbers their flight and the time invested are a pointless waste. That may be true, but only if they make it so. Have they let huge terrain and candy store weather dull their appreciation of subtle wonders equally present in ‘ordinary’ places and times?For me it’s all magic. A flight need not be illustrious to be worthwhile, nor conditions optimum to be splendid. For thousands of years the truly wise have shown us that each point on every continuum is itself complete and perfect, whether we understand this or not. So too every moment of flight, however commonplace, can be lived as a moment in heaven. Yes, a sacrament!