Flying

At the top of the document where this piece is saved on my laptop, I wrote that it was written in the 1990s. That’s not very helpful when looking for planetary alignments, is it? It’s a longer piece than my more usual offerings and it was written looking back at a dream I had at the age of 17 (is that when the planets aligned, perhaps?) There was the Uranus/Neptune conjunction in Capricorn in the 1990s and those were the years that I first got into some serious astrological exploration. And I birthed my third son during those years, and got married for the second time…

I recently read an article by Andrew Smith talking about the fixed stars, Vega and Altair, entitled, ‘The Eagles of Consciousness’ - and what stood out for me were the words: “…learning to fly is a necessary process if our soul is to navigate the dimensional realms of the multi-tiered astral worlds…”

So, on that note, I share the following with you:

It was springtime when he came (I was ten years old, I remember) – the man whose hair shone brown and gold in the sunshine. There was a look in his eye that made him instantly recognisable – I’d seen it before somewhere (in my mind’s eye, perhaps). And he talked to me (and yet he didn’t) in a way that I haven’t heard since – nor had I heard it before (if you can call it ‘hearing’ at all) – in silence.

He knew, you see.

He knew all things and he was beautiful.

Just another day at school, I’d thought that morning (Great Aunt Melissa was coming to tea, I remember – not much to celebrate there. “Be on your best behaviour and watch mum kow-tow to Great Aunt Melissa!”) – but that day has seemed to stretch out and resonate through the rest of my life. There was a time, though, when I thought I’d lost it. The magic wore off, it seemed, and I died a little. One does under those circumstances, you know. But you would, wouldn’t you, because you have those eyes as well. If you didn’t then you wouldn’t be reading this…

(I side-track a lot, but the thread’s still there if you’re following it.)

And there he was all of a sudden, it seemed (yet he said he’d always been there – it just took me some time to see him) – and he glowed somehow – with delight! And I glowed too, resonating with his glow. It was then (if it could be narrowed down to a moment in time, that sort of experience) that he taught me to fly.

He flew with me at first (of course) and helped me to let go of my fear (you can’t fly if you haven’t moved through your fear, he told me – and I understood that somehow – how could you?) It was exhilarating that first flight, but the most exhilarating was his presence and his hand holding mine and the truths he imparted to me. Great truths which have never left me (except of course when I went back into the fear and died a little – but you’d know about that too, wouldn’t you?) Time seemed to melt away then and I knew myself in a different way – through him it seemed. And when I got scared that I wouldn’t be home in time to lay the table for tea with Great Aunt Melissa he took me home (“enough lessons for one day”, he said) – held my hand whilst we flew up the road where I was living then. From up there the house and the people looked so small, so unreal, somehow. (I didn’t know then that I was learning to live a new reality.)

I was always a little scared of Great Aunt Melissa, but more awful was the thought of how she affected my mother – ‘impossible to live with!’ was an understatement. Tense, irritable, touchy – all those words. You know how mums can be! This particular day, however, his voice stayed with me (or was it his presence?) and I knew without knowing (if you see what I mean) that she (I mean my mother of course – Great Aunt Melissa would never have allowed herself even the possibility of seeing such beauty!) had also seen him. It had been a long time ago, of course, if you’re thinking in days, weeks, months and years – but to him it had merely been the ‘twinkling of an eye!’

It amused me to think of him talking to my ten-year-old mother only a moment ago! (“I wonder what she was like then?” I remember asking myself.) The sad part for me was knowing that she’d allowed the fear to creep back in again and that’s why she’d forgotten how to fly, he told me. And Great Aunt Melissa (“her hugeness” I used to call her in that secret place in my heart) was a representation of that fear. It sounded rather strange to me at the time, I remember, to think of Great Aunt ‘M’ as a sort of ‘cartoon’ that my mother had created (I think I understand the concept a little more clearly now).

I made up my mind then – on that day (which has melted into so many other days), that I wasn’t going to let the fear creep back into my life. And in my childish enthusiasm, I was going to teach my mother how to fly again. Tell her that I’d seen him and that I knew she had seen him too. And weren’t we going to have fun together when we’d banished the spectre of Great Aunt Melissa from our lives…

However, I was to discover that you can’t make a decision like that for someone else (I wonder why he didn’t tell me that part?) – and if they choose not to fly you can’t make them. And then you have to watch them die a little every day of their lives…

Photo by Florian Savatry on Unsplash