When I was about six years old, coloured television sets began to miraculously appear in my neighbours’ homes. The family that lived directly behind us got a big maple retro-colonial console with a built-in turntable and hi-fi stereo. This was perfect timing, as after a three year hiatus, NBC was just about to air Peter Pan and my friends and I were all beyond excited to have him fly back to us in living colour!
The night of the production, in my baby blue Dr. Denton’s and pink foam hair curlers, I scrambled over to our neighbours’ house through our adjoining back yards. Sprawled out on the living room floor, about a dozen of us neighbourhood kids arranged ourselves in a semicircle on the hooked rug in front of the new TV.
Peter Pan explained to us that if we believed we could fly, we could. And I believed. I was thoroughly convinced that given the correct set of circumstances, I, too, would soar like Peter Pan and the Darling children. I had the exact same pyjamas as little Michael Darling and my mother’s talcum powder was very similar to Tinker Bell’s fairy dust. I also had a plastic yellow and red striped beanie with a battery operated propeller and red PF Flyer sneakers that I was sure would get me up and away.
By the time I was eight years old or so, I began to reaIise that these props alone were not enough to allow me to defy gravity. But to this day, I actually have dreams of levitating in the grocery store aisles and swimming through the air high above the shelves of corn flakes and ketchup.
I don’t know why we would choose to fly into this life. I wonder if at some point in our existence we were like the Darling children at their bedroom window taking a courageous leap of faith to head for Neverland.
Someone like Peter Pan must have offered us a very persuasive deal to come here, because Earth is not like Neverland. To be sure, we have our pirates and crocodiles, but all living things here are subject to the laws of physics and the turning of the seasons.
It must have seemed more than worthwhile to give up ultimate freedom for unending work and the unimaginable trials of life on this planet. Why else would we separate ourselves from the very essence of being to squeeze into space and time and an ill-fitting and leaky raincoat of a body, through which interminable sensations and emotions seep in and out? Why would we opt to trudge along the surface of the world when we could be floating freely above it? Why would we exchange our wings for hands that must always be busy doing and get slapped and burnt and broken in the process?
Perhaps it is because we believed. And, like the Darling children, it is when we stop believing that we lose our ability to fly. We clench and cling to memories, opinions and possessions that fill our hearts and heads and pockets and weigh us down like tiny, wet birds. We become tight fists grasping water.
Maybe we are here to clasp the eternal with the everyday and to experience a new definition of flying. Each morning, to feed the cats and make the tea and let the dogs out, we must unfurl our fingers like so many wings.
in flight
(kaivalya)
I have flown with my Flexible Flyer,
Careening along the icy, snowy slope that tumbled into my father’s slumbering garden.
I have flown with my horses,
Galloping along the earthy trails that meander through this dark forest.
I have flown with my Shepherds,
Running along the paved, narrow road that unwinds itself down to this blue ocean.
I have flown with my heart,
Soaring headlong into the unknown territory of this eternal love.
And when the Great Horned Owl appeared so near to me in the early, encircling dusk,
I took wing with her.
Every breath has been only a fluttering of feathers.