WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A BIRD- THE BEGINNING

Even though I look up daily to the heavens and pine for the sky and her calming embrace...somedays your feet need to stay on the ground.

This past weekend was such that we knew we would not be able to fly and yet we made our trek to our hangar at Bermudian Valley Airpark.  We are based at a small grass strip and the rain gods decided to camp out over central PA for quite a few days which left the field knee deep in water.

If you are taking the time to read this you should know from my prior posts that I hunger, dream and simply have a need to be a bird.  It's not such a bad thing if you too have the same affliction, as a matter of fact you might understand my words best.

I am fortunate to be able to fly my Citabria which I call "Girly Plane" most weekends, and then some. This past weekend I reflected on how this happened, how my affliction started while sitting at our hangar, affectionately named the 'barn' by our granddaughter Sammers..

It was him, his challenge to take a lesson that made me jump into our Aeronca Chief with our instructor over 20 years ago. Him being my hubster - Barry who had just received his pilots license and I asked him one day "what is all of this fuss about flying"? It is his fault that I need to a bird!!  It is only him that knows....when I land I can look at him and say nothing and he will say "I know, it was cool, right?"...and I simply nod my head.

It didn't come easy to me, understanding the nuances of flight, tail wheel flying, the E6-B, and the equations schamtions...yet when I sat in her and we floated off the ground I was mesmerized, and spell bound by the sheer beauty of our world from above and scared to death at the same time.  Really!

The day I soloed was amazing, my instructor Steve told my hubster that he was cutting me loose and I will never forget the view from the plane when my instructor jumped out and Barry was running down the taxiway after me waving.....I had finally made the leap and I was grinning from ear to ear....I was finally a bird by myself....just remembering it is a WOW for me...as I'm sure it was for you.

So, for the next year we would trek to the airport while I took my lessons and hubster would come with me and afterwards we would discuss the lesson and I would ask a bazillion questions.  I practiced and practiced because I wanted to be good at this thing called "flight" as any pilot does.

The day of my "check-ride" was unnerving and stressful, take a moment here to capture your memory of your day...we all have that ingrained to never leave our mind.  I always over study, especially for this exam and I can remember asking the examiner on downwind "did I pass" and do you know what he said.....depends if you do one more good landing?? funny AND yes I passed. The day I became a pilot the real lessons began as I was a newbie, cautious and quite scared if there was the slightest wind and worried to death I might get lost.  Here I was, I had a plane and could simply take off to soar around the hills and I stayed in the box around our base airport for the first 250 hours or so.  Then one day, it happened....it clicked, I relaxed and enjoyed just being a bird.

I went onto get my commercial ticket in Girly Plane about 9 years ago and that was so much fun, the drills, precision in depth awareness and focus of knowing your plane and being one...yes I said being one with a plane.....c'mon you know can relate.

Fast forward to the here and now, after many hours of practicing learning and actually thinking now that, hey I actually am an aviatrix...it really is an amazing feeling that I can't quite articulate the emotions of how flying and soaring above settles me, makes me focus on the act itself and I can simple be.  I am fortunate that my hubster and I enjoy the same love of flight along with a few buds, we have made a "home" at the barn, where we prefer to be rather than our "real" home....weird you might say, but, I/WE are SO okay with it.

The most powerful emotion is when you can break people wide-open when you fly with them and they glow.  You can see their face, the broken words of them trying to describe how amazing it is to them.  Where they forget about what is down there and they have escaped to nirvana...this is what I love sharing the most, a pilots nirvana.

The measure of living your life courageously, deeply, artfully, is embracing the fact that each minute, each second should be lived and we should all find our "nirvana" that hits you at the core of the deepest of your soul. 

Wow - I kinda went off the deep end.....it's real and it felt good, it's how I feel.

I leave you with a quote that conjures up what my heart feels;

I have lifted my plane...for perhaps a thousand flights and I have never felt her wheels glide from the Earth into the air without knowing the uncertainty and the exhilaration of first-born adventure.
-Beryl Markham