Hi all,

One of my dreams came true this past weekend. How often in life do we
get to say that? "Which dream," you ask? I got to fly. "Big deal," you
say? "What is so great about flying? Crowds and security and airports.
Yuck." No. None of that.  I got to F-L-Y like Peter Pan. Indulge me,
as I have to start this story at the beginning. When I was a kid I
loved building model airplanes. Oh, I built the occasional car model
here and there and the odd ship now and then (and believe me the
Bismarck never looked odder than my glue-encrusted replica) but it was
airplanes I loved, and not the big bombers but the little one and two
seaters, military and civilian. Some planes I hung from my bedroom
ceiling but I usually could not resist playing with them and
eventually my Piper Cubs and Spitfires suffered severe damage making
further flights dangerous to the little plastic man inside the
fingerprint covered cockpit. As I grew older my enthusiasm for model
planes gave way to other enthusiasms like girls, and, well, I think
that was the only other enthusiasm at the time.  Whatever the reason,
I stopped building models. What I never lost, however, was my love of
flying. To this day I am likely to be the oldest guy on a commercial
flight with my face pressed against the window on takeoff and landing.
Richard Bach's books captivate me as much for the clarity of his
personal description of how each airplane he flies feels and moves as
for the clarity of his metaphysical understanding. If asked, until the
other day, I would have said that I am fascinated with flying.  I now
know what real fascination, or perhaps obsession, with flying is all
about.

At this point I have to introduce a cast of characters beginning with
members of my family. I have a stepsister. We didn't really know each
other as our parents married when we were both grown and living on our
own. But I have gotten to know Laura and her husband, Tracy, over the
past few years. Tracy is "Ra, the Sun God" to men who build
experimental aircraft. He built the first one using a Mazda rotary
engine rather than an airplane engine. Actually, it would be closer to
the truth to say that he built the first one that really worked, in
the same way that a lot of guys got airborne before the Wright
brothers but had problems with landing. Mazda, as you may recall,
makes cars and once upon a time made them with unique, cheap, and
efficient motors. Or so I am told. Anyway, Tracy, the Sun God, keeps
making improvements to and creating new parts for his rotary driven
airplanes and once a year he invites all the folks like him to a
fly-in at his place. He has his own grass airstrip, "Shady Bend." It's
located just a few miles outside of nowhere in the middle of Florida,
you can't miss it. Actually, as one mangled airplane dangling in the
clutches of a forest of vines attests, you can miss it. He and my
stepsister live in a home constructed above the hanger where Tracy
builds and welds and cackles madly all day long. Picture a room
resembling Grampa Munster's laboratory, stacked to the ceiling with
weird wires and liquid filled gizmos bolted to the wall, things that
look like they were heisted from a hospital operating room. In the
middle of this room sits an airplane, albeit without wings. Icarus
flew with wax wings strapped to his body whereas Tracy starts from the
inside designing the engine before the packaging. The current
recipient of all the "ooohs and ahhhs" is a three-rotor motor, the
first of it's kind. The big difference between two and three rotors,
as I understand it, is that there is one additional rotor. That's all
I know.

Every guy in attendance had built or was in the process of building
his own airplane. Some had wives with them who long ago had come to
the realization that loving her man meant understanding and accepting
the winged other woman in his life. These men don't assemble their own
airplanes; they create them from scratch: every panel, bolt, and flap.
Most of these pilots have spent years on their not yet perfected pet
project, a project they climb inside of and take way up into the
atmosphere. It's not like you can say "Oops" at five thousand feet,
step outside, and pop the cowling (just thought I'd throw in a little
airplane terminology to show I was paying attention). They design,
test, and tinker. They build the wings and body panels. They wire.
They buy epoxy by the drum. They make new parts where no parts have
gone before. They are all fascinated with the idea of (a) using a car
motor to run an airplane and (b) doing everything as cheaply as
possible.

One of their revered icons is a man known as "The Junkyard Reverend"
who apparently is a real minister who built his plane primarily out of
material from guess where? Another flyer, Ed, with his one good eye,
bush hat, and bushier mustache looks every bit the uncle of Indiana
Jones. He spoke to the assembled group about a writer who referred to
their little band as "the hairy-chested heroes of aviation, who, every
time they fly put their lives on the line in the name of exploring the
frontiers of flying." He laughed and went on, "If I have any doubt I
don't fly. If you can't clear the trees nothing else matters."
There's a greater truth in there that I need to chew on for a while.
While this may be a different band of merry men they aren't crazy.
Okay, perhaps some of them are a little bent, but they sure are smart.
Not one of these guys was impressed with the fact that just last week
I hung a double towel rack in my master bathroom using only a hammer,
two screwdrivers and a level.

Envy is not an emotion to which I am prone. A full measure of divine
creativity is poured into the mold of every being and I have certainly
been granted my share. It is not the mechanical expertise of these men
that I envy, nor is it the esoteric language they speak full of
seemingly random words strung together like, "Rest stand flex point
fuel flow static balancing." At least that is what I think the
gentleman with the Austrian accent said during a riveting presentation
on single rotor motors, specifically the RES 12 Excenter shaft. I
don't even know what any of that means and I am sure I got it wrong,
even after taking notes. I don't envy the odd sense of humor these
pioneer pilots share even though several times everyone in the room
burst into laughter as I, known for having a good sense of humor,
stood by without a remote clue as to what was funny. I think maybe
nothing was humorous, they were all just messing with me. I don't envy
the comraderie they share, these individualists gathering together in
mutual support and admiration for their odd obsession in a culture
that measures travel only in terms of speed, cost, and convenience in
getting from here to there. Almost any time these men feel a deep
stirring inside, be it curiosity, contentment, or something undefined
they climb into that tiny cockpit, unblurred by glue covered fingers,
and in just moments they are airborne. And it is not even this that I
envy. What I envy is much more significant.

I sat just behind Tracy as he banked his tiny airplane over the tree
tops and swooped along the track of the legendary Suwannee River. We
weren't going anywhere in particular at a dawdling 102 miles per hour.
"Just carving holes in the sky" was how Tracy put it. "Do you want to
do a loop?" he asked. I did, I did, I did. "Life is not measured by
the amount of breaths we take", wrote an anonymous wise person, "but by
the moments that take our breath away." As I hung upside down in the
sky the world tumbled slowly below me.  My heart was in my throat, not
from fear and not from the effect of gravity on my inverted body but
from the overwhelming sensation that the plane had vanished and I was
suspended in a perfect moment between earth and heaven. I had no
vocabulary then or now for such a timeless moment of grace and so I
must borrow from one who expressed it far better than I ever could:

"Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings"

So begins one of my favorite poems, "High Flight." Since I read those
words the first time I knew that one day I would have the experience
described by the author, an 18-year old American pilot who enlisted in
the Canadian Airforce in the early days of WWII. He wrote his brief
poem on the back of a letter to his parents, noting, "I am enclosing a
verse I wrote the other day. It started at 30,000 feet, and was
finished soon after I landed." Three months after writing his simple
yet profound prayer of gratitude for flight, he was killed in a midair
collision in the skies over Great Britain. Today, I understood what
John Gillespie meant when he concluded "High Flight" with these words:

And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

And that is where my envy appears. In the end it isn't about knowledge
or engines, rotary or otherwise. Late in the afternoon, George, a
Vietnam veteran whose airplane took four years to build and took up
the spare bedroom in his home, turned to me as the sun began to set.
He gestured at the clouds. "When I am up there, do you think I am in
any hurry to get down?" His quiet smile answered his own rhetorical
question. Neither was I. A part of me is still up there and always
will be. As my first flight came to an end and the canopy opened,
there stood my stepsister. She grinned at me and exclaimed, "Oh my!
You are glowing!" Things like that will happen to a person who has
just reached out and touched the face of God.

Until next time,
Matt

P.S. My private practice number is 770 317-7558. I am available for
individual and couple counseling and as a speaker for educational,
church, and social organizations. You can learn more about me and my
practice by visiting my website at matthewparvis.com. Have a great
day.
--
"Rather abide at the center of your being, for the more you leave it
the less you learn." Lau Tzu