Flying (Jenny)

It's just getting off the ground, really, that requires concentration and practice. I refuse to take the easy way out, to throw myself off an edge and let gravity and adrenaline slingshot me into that other realm.

No, I want to attain that state of grace by my own efforts.

I want to become entirely, fully present, feeling the blood pumping, feeling my skin responding to the air, cooling and shrinking, or expanding and flushing, every breath flowing cool filaments through the myriad branchings inside my lungs. All colours brighter, all edges sharper, all sounds more intense and more beautiful at once.

When I am fully there, alive to every tiny sensation, deeply connected with myself, through myself to something deeper, larger, more blissful, a Leviathan of warmth and power and beauty, when I thrill in every particle of my being from the bliss that is being alive, only then can I float free of the Earth's firm grasp.

By then, of course, the bliss of the present moment is so intense that I don't want to move, don't want to change a thing, just want to hold myself there in that pregnant everything-nothing space and let everything-nothing course through me in wave after wave of ecstatic sensation.

Sometimes, I just hover there, millimetres off the ground, my flight imperceptible to all but the most observant - usually fliers themselves, traditionalists like me, who can not only see the subtle postural shifts as gravity releases her hold, but can also feel the visceral ecstasy radiating from me, and recognise it instantly from their own experience.

We're a very small club, us traditionalists, but we know know that we are on to one of the great secrets of the Universe. While any fool can fly, only a fraction of a percent will ever know flight as we know it.

Just flying itself is great, of course. The rush of air against my skin, through my hair, the swirling inner sensations of diving, turning, and peaking in that moment of almost-zero gravity - not to mention the sights. Sydney is so beautiful from above.

But those who leap straight into the air from a great height are missing the real joy of flying. The swooping and darting about is fun, and feels good, and the sights are spectacular and interesting, but that's all there is to it at that level.

Anyone can jump off a bridge, and don't get me wrong, it's still a great experience.

But when you are already in that amazing, blissful, completely connected state, and you add the sensations of flight - that is a whole new world.

A world where flying is not a way to get from A to B, or a source of cheap thrills, or a way to pass the time, or a distraction from the problems of life. A world in which flying itself is an approach to the Divine, a communion with the deepest forces of the Universe, a sacred movement in which all separateness is drowned by an inpouring, outpouring, swirling flow of pure embodied Love.

It takes concentration, and practice, to attain that state. But once you have known it, you will never want to go back.