Flying Without Fear

I was perched on a cliff several hundred feet up from where the Columbia River collides with the Pacific Ocean when this feather came floating up on the Air currents.

It hovered for a very a long time.

Undulating with the fluctuating columns of invisible gases.  As if the Earth was breathing its flight.  In and out.  Up and down.  

Hypnotic. 

The Cormorants and Gulls were gathering on a large rock outcropping below.  Completing a never-ending circle of flight.  From the hunt, to the nest.  To feed their young.  A flurry of dark and white. 

Their very revolutions of life. 

The feather reminded me of just how perfectly Birds are constructed to fly – even their feathers can fly independently.  Rising on the thermals. 

I lunged and grasped and missed. 

The feather dancing about my hand.  And then I watched it sail away above the open waters.  How long it would fly above those turbid Ocean waves I would never know.

One can find a meditation in every aspect of Nature. 

Circadian Rhythms. Cadent Perfection.

As I hike on, my mind wanders to all of the analogies.  Our lives are little different from these living, breathing flying machines.  These particles in flight. 

Our patterned existence. 

We are part and parcel of this Earth.  Our Mother.  We are so bound that to cut Her is to cut ourselves. Yet we have been given such Freedoms. 

The Power to Dream.  To Create.  To Manifest.  To Love.  And to Experience the “Wemi Tali” – the “All Where.” 

The totality of all Creation.

We are not aeolian – sediments blown about by the wind.  We are not constrained within the boundaries of space and time.  It is only fear that can hold us back from these many gifts bestowed upon us.  We can all Fly.

I’m on my way . . . Flying Without Fear

In Metta

Photos: The feather is that very one I watched fly across the Ocean.

The later pic, above, is me from a number of years ago. When I was young and felt even less constrained. I played a game of climbing rock spires and then jumping down them. In rhythm, I raced across these pinnacles of limestone. And Flew.