On the ninth floor of an office building of ten floors, achieved by riding an elevator that's refurbishment is the one cosmetic defect in the well-retained remembrance of its art deco origins, there is a comfortable room in which the proverbial wise Jew sits across from the proverbial couch and listens (more or less intently) to the dilemmas of my existence. These days, the themes of my narcissistic hour--those selfish fifty minutes--revolve around my body and its defects, the impacts of aging and disease. Change. Loss. Sadness. Regret. The central idea of these musings is always limitation: what I could do and cannot, what I will never do again, what I wish I had done when I was able.
Feet on the floor, hands folded in my lap, my eyes looking past my shrink and out the window, I experience my body as cage. I am not my body; I am the entity inside it. This dark thought defines me. If my eyes find the eyes of my therapist, will I cry?
I am searching the angles of the steeple across the street. It is higher. I am looking up at it. I am looking up into the fickle sun. The protestant architecture is sensible, but--in its way--dramatic. It is older. The tower rests on the rock of the world, granite slabs that remember a quarry up the gorge. One imagines the workmen a century ago, the firm touch of their calloused hands. The tower holds its head up, a proud profile against the edges of the sky, the clouds that allow my eyes to linger, the blue of my irises bleeding into pools where the sun has torn the gray cotton.
And at the peak of the steeple, back-lit, impatient, a bird stands, for a moment. He dives. He glides. He pumps his wings twice, glides. His extended wings bend again; twice more they flap, the feathers finding a firmness in the air. He pushes. He glides. Then he lands on the window sill, enters through the crack, hops. And in seconds, in a flutter of eyes and heart, he is beside me, next to my head standing on the back of the proverbial couch. He cocks his head. He burns me with the black fire of his stare.
And flies away...
There is no separation between body and mind. It is best to take flight for granted; movement is made of intention. One sees the world (and its possibilities) from where one sits. One feels those possibilities like the beating of one's heart, one's wings. Body and Mind. I am the gestures of rest and preparation. This is the moment the steeple begins to crumble under me. I pump my wings. I dive. I glide. A mind informed by a body, a body tethered to a mind. I glide. I pump. I glide.
I am
flying.
