Flying West. Up, and Back.

~ Live & Learn

Adriane Ayme

Like Kafka in his Letters to Milena, I’m trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones.

Yet, I will try, and yes, here it is again. Deep in the marrow of those same bones.  It builds.

A sabbatical. From hands balled in fists, squeezing the reins, to ceding it all to a clean-cut pilot, his Aviator Hat tilted ever so slightly to the right: “Thank you Sir for flying with American.”

My head leans on the cool aluminum skin of the 450 ton albatross.  500 mph, and standing still. The only sign of Man, the long white breath of an earlier bird, and us, seven miles up.

Down, way down are the Badlands. The salt flats. The arid plains.  The snow capped peaks.

Earth.

The immensity of It.  The insignificance of Me.

It’s inexplicable. That soft pull.  The freeing of the twisted, braided cords.  Release.

The Sun beams through the port hole, illuminating fine particles of dust floating in the cabin. For dust you are, and to dust you will return.

The Bird hits an air pocket, its giant wing flicks left, and then right.  Hits an updraft, and a downdraft and another.  My eyes now closed, my wings stretched wide, I ride the currents, the heaviness falls away and there it is: lightly child, lightly. Achieved!

And in 17 seconds,

it’s Gone.

To Bliss and Back.

The fingers clutch back for the reins. The Horsemen, three here, unleash their long sinewy switches and the Horses, More, Better, and Not Good Enough, lurch ahead.

It was Turgenev, in Fathers and Children who said: “Tell me why is it that even when we are enjoying music, for example, or a fine evening or conversation with people we like, why does it all seem to be a hint of some limitless happiness existing somewhere else rather than a real happiness, the kind, that is, we possess ourselves. Why is this?”

Why is this?

Notes:

 

28 thoughts on “Flying West. Up, and Back.”

  2. I know like you know where it is, how to see it, take it in and savour,..but only if I’m seeing.
    I mean really seeing and listening, yes listening. Seeing not only with the eyes in my soul but hearing with and through the sounds of my bones. They are called “full” moments.
    I know like you know…

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  5. lovely, david. and why, you ask? because it is always within us, and never goes away. we just don’t see it or are too distracted to remember it’s there, only remembering is very short glimpses.

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  7. DK your writing is amazing and thought provoking // Such a gift to be held in recognized destiny…A time to shed: Allowance of surrender to a moment lived fully without limiting expectation….to be in harmony with the air you breath, float within and are engulfed by…immersed in the flow of pure breath…rising above…

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    2. And your thoughts remind me of this wonderful poem:

      Breathing

      I love to feel as if, I’m just another body, a breather along with the others:
      blackbirds taking sips of air, garter snakes
      lapping it up with their split tongues,
      and all those plants
      that open and close and throw up streamers of oxygen:
      maybe that cottonwood that tilts across the creekbed
      is the very one that just sucked up carbon dioxide
      and let me breathe, maybe I should hang a card around it,
      Thank you for the next two minutes of my life,
      maybe some of the air I just swallowed used to be inside the hot larynx of a fox,
      or the bill of an ash-throated flycatcher,
      maybe it just coursed past
      the scales of a lizard—a blue-belly—
      as he wrapped himself around his mate,
      maybe he took an extra b!eath and let it out
      and that’s the one I got.
      Maybe all of us are standing side by side on the earth
      our chests moving up and down,
      every single one of us, opening a window,
      loosening a belt, unzipping a pair of pants to let our bellies swell,
      while in the pond a water beetle
      clips a bubble of air to its shell and comes back up for another.
      You want sanitary? Go to some other planet:
      I’m breathing the same air as the drunk Southerner,
      the one who rolls cigarettes with stained yellow thumbs
      on the bench in the train station,
      I’m breathing the same air as the Siamese twins
      at the circus, their heads talking to each other,
      quarreling about what they want to do with their one pair of hands
      and their one heart.
      Tires have run over this air,
      it’s passed right over the stiff hair of jackrabbits and roadkill,
      drifted through clouds of algae and cumulus,
      passed through jetprops,
      blades of helicopters,
      through spiderlings that balloon over the Tetons,
      through sudden masses of smoke and sulfur,
      the bleared Buick filled with smoke
      from the Lucky Strikes my mother lit, one after another.
      Though, as a child, I tried my best not to breathe,
      I wanted to take only the faintest sips,
      just enough to keep the sponges inside,
      all the lung sacs, rising and falling.
      I have never noticed it enough,
      this colorless stuff I can’t see,
      circulated by fans, pumped into tires,
      sullenly exploding into bubbles of marsh gas,
      while the man on the gurney drags it in and out of his lungs
      until it leaves his corpse and floats past doorknobs
      and gets trapped in an ice cube, dropped into a glass.
      After all, we’re just hanging out here in our sneakers
      or hooves or talons, gripping a branch, or thudding against the sidewalk:
      as I hold onto my lover
      and both of us breathe in the smell of wire screens on the windows
      and the odor of buckeye.
      This isn’t to say I haven’t had trouble breathing, I have:
      sometimes I have to pull the car over and roll down the window,
      and take in air, I have to remember I’m an animal,
      I have to breathe with the other breathers,
      even the stars breathe, even the soil,
      even the sun is breathing up there,
      all that helium and oxygen,
      all those gases blowing and shredding into the solar wind.

      – Ellery Akers

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      1. Wow, Dave what a wonderful poem! Ellery Akers, a 70 year old women of insight. Harvard (BA) and San Francisco State University.(MA) educated. She is a dynamo as her words convey an all encompassing wealth of thoughtful, highly detailed, relational observations. She is an amazing writer and I am assuming here a gentle, compassionate, spirited soul who loves beauty. She has received much critical acclaim.. as noted in the following, two links. By reading those links I learned that “Her work has been featured in former US Poet Laureate Ted Kooser’s syndicated newspaper column, “American Life in Poetry” ” I didn’t know that Ted Kooser is a syndicated newspaper columnist or a former US Poet Laureate. DK thank you for the introduction to Ellery Akers. I learn much from your daily gifts… Someday I hope to have the impact filled, word of writer following my name. http://www.elleryakers.com/ http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/ellery-akers

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  8. “Why is this?”
    We are human beings. Some of us wake up for a moment at a time and can see beyond those constraints. It’s painful, beautiful, fleeting. “Bliss and Back” to be followed by Bliss again soon.
    Another beautiful glimpse into One Human’s experience.

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  10. Wow, Dave what a wonderful poem! Ellery Akers, a 70 year old women of insight. Harvard (BA) and San Francisco State University.(MA) educated. She is a dynamo as her words convey an all encompassing wealth of thoughtful, highly detailed, relational observations. She is an amazing writer and I am assuming here a gentle, spirited soul who loves beauty.She has received much critical acclaim.. as noted in the following, two links. By reading those links I learned that “Her work has been featured in former US Poet Laureate Ted Kooser’s syndicated newspaper column, “American Life in Poetry” ” I didn’t know that Ted Kooser is a syndicated newspaper columnist or a former US Poet Laureate. DK thank you for the introduction to Ellery Akers. I learn much from your daily gifts… Someday I hope to have the impact filled, word of writer following my name. http://www.elleryakers.com/ http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/ellery-akers

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  11. I always wonder how you do it…how you are able to feel so much and put it all into words with all the busyness in your life. I mean, it’s not like you sit around all day thinking about what to write…right? And it seems like you read so much too…how do you do it? Your writing is excellent. I can only guess a little bit about what you are referring to, but with myself, I’ve noticed as I’ve gotten older that there is an underlying sadness that seems to go with me everywhere for some reason, and the moments of happiness are truly fleeting. I need to hold tightly to whatever happiness I can grasp and keep it for as long as I can before the weird feelings of melancholy return. Anyway, I always appreciate your words. Thank you.

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    1. I so appreciate your kind words Carol. On so many fronts. There is considerable effort to try to convey moments that move me at my core. And unlike many, my vocabulary isn’t deep, my training is none (but for reading great authors), and I keep at it. Your comment inspires me to continue on. Thank you.

      As to cherish those few moments, I know exactly how you feel, I’m there. Right there with you. And melancholy washes over me frequently…I try to embrace it with light as opposed to what is my knee jerk reaction. :). Thanks again, you made my day.

      Dave

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      1. David, you have something that has nothing to do with a deep vocabulary or any sort of training. You are gifted with the ability to connect with people’s hearts…and your choice of words as you do this is beautiful. Please do continue on…there are not enough people like you in the world and we are all thirsty for what you have to give. 🙂

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