Earth has no sorrows that earth cannot heal, or heaven cannot heal, for the earth as seen in the clean wilds of the mountains is about as divine as anything the heart of man can conceive. I do not think a day passes in my life in which I fail to look with fresh amazement at the miracle of nature. It is there on every side. It can be simply a shadow on a mountainside, or a sunlight on the leaves of a tree. I have always especially loved the water.
I think that one may contribute (ever so slightly) to the beauty of things by making one’s own life and environment beautiful, so far as one’s power reaches. This includes moral beauty, one of the qualities of humanity, though it seems not to appear elsewhere in the universe. But I would have each person realize that his contribution is not important, its success not really a matter for exultation nor its failure for mourning; the beauty of things is sufficient without him.
Your wings have atrophied. Distraught, you go hopping among the men. They approach you with great suspicion. After all, you are a dangerous bird, a pilferer, a jackdaw. A jackdaw that dreams of disappearing between the stones… alone… like Franz Kafka.
“if you wanted to drown you could, but you don’t because finally after all this struggle and all these years you simply don’t want to any more, you’ve simply had enough of drowning and you want to live and you want to love” David Whyte
My travel, my experience ,nothing I have ever done has given me nearly as much satisfaction as this bit of land . I take deep pleasure in going out every morning and seeing the miraculous changes which have happened, and which are happening, and which will go on happening until the end of our lives.
”After this era of great pilots is gone, as the era of great sea captains has gone — each nudged aside by the march of inventive genius, by steel cogs and copper discs and hair-thin wires on white faces that are dumb, but speak — it will be found, I think, that all the science of flying has been captured in the breadth of an instrument board, but not the religion of it. One day the stars will be as familiar to each man as the landmarks, the curves, and the hills on the road that leads to his door, and one day this will be an airborne life. But by then men will have forgotten how to fly; they will be passengers on machines whose conductors are carefully promoted to familiarity with labelled buttons, and in whose minds the knowledge of the sky and the wind and the way of weather will be extraneous as passing fiction.” Beryl Markham
One of the most challenging aspects of float flying is glassy water landings where the smooth, reflective water surface makes it difficult to judge altitude. The conventional method of overcoming this lack of reliable reference is to establish yourself on a gradual, constant approach with a consistent airspeed, descent rate, attitude, and power input that can take you all the way to the surface where you can then cut the power to idle and apply appropriate back pressure as the plane slows to a near stop on the water.
Just like consistency is crucial to a glassy water approach and landing, consistency can be a crucial part also in more fluid reflections on keeping a solid center.
“Where are your dreams? …(…) What have you done with those years? Where have you buried your best moments? Have you really lived? ”― Fyodor Dostoevsky, White Nights.
« Une des caractéristiques de l’art de Vermeer, comme peut-être de tout art, parvenu à un certain degré de noblesse, est de peindre des choses, et non des événements. Le monde que perçoit Vermeer n’est pas celui, muet à jamais, des événements insignifiants, mais celui de la matière, éternellement riche et vivante. L’anecdotique, pourrait-on dire, y a chassé l’anecdotique : le hasard d’un moment de la journée, dans une pièce où rien d’important ne se passe, apparaît comme l’essentiel d’un réel dont les événements apparemment notables constituent au contraire la part accessoire. De ce réel saisi par Vermeer le moi est absent, car le moi n’est qu’un événement parmi d’autres, comme eux muet et comme eux insignifiant. Il n’y a d’ailleurs pas d’autoportrait de Vermeer, et la biographie du peintre tient en dix lignes anodines. Cependant Vermeer semble bien s’être peint une fois, par un jeu de double miroir : dans cette toile sans nom précis, aujourd’hui appelée L’Atelier. Mais le dos, comme un peintre quelconque, qui pourrait être n’importe quelle autre personne occupée à sa toile. Rien, dans le costume, la taille, l’attitude du peintre, qui puisse être regardé comme signe distinctif, rien donc qui fasse état d’une complaisance quelconque du peintre à l’égard de sa propre personne. Dans le même temps cet « atelier », comme toutes les toiles de Vermeer, semble riche d’un bonheur d’exister qui irradie de toutes parts et saisit d’emblée le spectateur, et qui témoigne d’une jubilation perpétuelle au spectacle des choses : d’en juger par cet instant de bonheur, on se persuade aisément que celui qui a fait cela, s’il n’a fixé dans sa toile qu’un seul moment de sa joie, en eût fait volontiers autant de l’instant d’avant comme l’instant d’après. Seul le temps lui a manqué pour célébrer tous les instants et toutes les choses » . Cl. Rosset, Le réel et son double.
I’ve never been certain whether the moral of the Icarus story should only be, as is generally accepted, ‘don’t try to fly too high,’ or whether it might also be thought of as ‘forget the wax and feathers, and do a better job on the wings..(…)….The destruction of this planet would have no significance on a cosmic scale: to an observer in the Andromeda nebula, the sign of our extinction would be no more than a match flaring for a second in the heavens: and if that match does blaze in the darkness there will be none to mourn a race that used a power that could have lit a beacon in the stars to light its funeral pyre. The choice is ours. ― Stanley Kubrick
The reinforcements are in place: the sand, the cement, the stones, the water to bury the archives are missing. Behind, all around, between two cracks, thrive, from left to right; a piece of steel from the collapsed World Trade Center, a piece from the damaged Pentagon in DC and a rock from the crash site of UA Flight 93 (Shanksville PA). The past shines like never before, without witnesses.
Flying takes me a little far away, then, quietly and without words, i find myself on the edges, darker than the hills. If it were possible, I would transform every day into a different form of animal or vegetable life. I would, from time to time, be all varieties of flowers or mountain shrubs at the mercy of winds; or I would be a melodious singing bird. I would wander through mountains and seas! Live in the intimate substance of existence, like a naive plant.
Selbstwehr 
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