Flying...An Escape into the Parallel Universe

Friends:
Flying…
An Escape into the Parallel Universe

“…a little while, and my longing shall gather dust and foam for another body… a moment of rest upon the wind, and another woman will bear me…”
The Prophet, Gibran

The engines roared and the jet turbines screamed, breaking the serendipity of the day.

They ingested the air in a lustful hunger for testosterone sufficient to escape the hold of earth. Slowly at first they moved, then faster, faster, faster over the runway, itself the route to the beginning of life in the Parallel Universe, or to the end of life on the earth. Tension mounted as sufficient rotation was achieved…then an auditable release of nerves as man’s sleek flying machines lifted into the supporting resistance of air…the principle of gravity was broken once again.

“Many men would take the death-sentence without a whimper to escape the life-sentence which Fate carries in her hand.” T. E. Lawrence

Blame it on the Greeks, these heavenly looks of man and this urgency to escape. Icarus, exiled and imprisoned on the Isle of Crete, longed for escape. With nerves of steel and wings of feathers and wax, he leapt from the rocky escarpments into the ethereal air of The Parallel Universe. Higher, higher, higher he soared into the sublime sphere of the heavenlies, drunk with freedom’s elixir. Alas, too high, too high he soared, too near the sun…with melted wings he plunged back onto his former world…gravity suspended, but not superseded!

The Parallel Universe, where sense of movement is slowed, where silence is broken only by the terse tentacles of radio waves, the last link in earthly connectivity. It’s where man rides on currents of cushioned air, dancing with sunbeams, playfully dodging nimbo-cumulus marshmallows, the playground of angels gathered in a celestial display of magnificence. Freed temporarily from the edict of Exile issued in Eden…The Curse upon the ground, where thorns and thistles grow and sorrow prevails. Yes, a glimpse of heaven itself.

“Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth…trod the high un-trespassed sanctity of space, put out my hand, and touch the face of God.” John Gillespie Magee, Jr., Aviator

Welcome to The Parallel Universe, the “Twilight Zone,” a brief encounter with eternity, where laws of nature are transcended by quarks and quantum physics, and where the speed of light is exceeded.

I myself was born again into this world on September 14, 1968. My birth certificate hung with the shredded shirttails of hundreds in a tableau of colors from the wall of an Epps Hangar in Atlanta. My “aeronautical mother”, if you will, was of the Cessna family, a sleek, young 150 hottie, who bore me into the heavens on my first solo flight. Into my ears of dust she spoke, “Fly, my son, fly,”

“…and (her) word was in my heart, like a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I grew weary with forbearing and could not refrain…”. Jeremiah 20:9

From hangars, terminals and tarmacs the windsocks blow, and rest, and blow, and rest…the spirit of the heavens again stirs our primordial proclivities, and we can refrain no longer. Such is the life of aviators. For though we know that “dust thou art, and unto dust thou shall return,” yet we have tasted that Parallel Universe, and our spirits are restless until we return. For, like Kubla Khan,

“…for (we) on honey-dew hath fed,
and drunk the milk of Paradise. Coleridge

And in the end, we will all join in the old Gospel chorus,

“Some glad morning when this life is over,
I’ll fly away.
To a home on God’s celestial shore,
I’ll fly away…….”


Bud
August 21, 2008