Silver Lining

SILVER LINING

----------------------------------

I found my silver lining in the confines of a Plane at 33,000 feet ...in the year 2010.

Strange... because I have always hated Flying. The mere thought of 'IT' would make me shiver, feel incredibly claustrophobic, make my palms clammy, sweaty and my heart beat erratically ! NO. Not because of some nameless fear. Or some bio-illogical OCD. But because of a near miss air accident as a Child while on holiday with my Parents, which we miraculously survived and lived... for me to tell this tale.

Since then, every time I boarded a Plane after that fateful journey... every flying experience was a literal torment...a fervent wish for 'can this be over soon pleaaasseee" ?? I remember feeling suffocated, unusually tense, and on the verge of 'something terrible is about to happen ANY MINUTE". The mere sight of an Aeroplane, induced acute emotional palpitations, at the naked thought of tons of gargantuan impersonal metal ripping through my fragile, fatalistic body.

And so..... most of my Flying time, would be a forgettable one,... with moments of vague lucidity, when I actually remember doing something normal ... like drinking water, or stretching my feet, or just staring at the back of the seat before me with the plastic white food tray latch... in stupefied moronic silence. And Always... in abject surrender to the inevitable finality we all worry about at the back of our minds.

Our own overriding Mortality.

And the image in my mind would loom so large [damn my capacity to visualize in such detail!] 

...in case ...Just in case...the Plane dove unexpectedly into a downward spiral and I felt myself thrown through the air helplessly, like an abandoned feather ejected from an angry Silvery Bird ... and loosing consciousness as I hurtled through Space into the eagerly waiting palms of Death and the afterlife ... in the certain knowledge that I would never get to experience the joy and splendor of this beautiful world we live in.

Every wakeful moment on a plane thus became a Living death and every step on terra firma after each journey like this, became a rebirth of sorts.

But that particular day in 2010 was different somehow. I was on a Plane to a *somewhere* for a *someone* who I would willingly give my Everything for. Death was no longer something fearful. Death was just a transition from the physical body into the spirit one... 

because when Love is more powerful than your Fear... you can transcend dying as a price for it.

But I knew I had to live. I had to live ... to carry through the commitment to someone so dear to my heart. 

Someone so close to my spirit. Someone for whom i would give my life. 

Someone to whom I had given life. My first born child. 

An oxymoron yes ... but a Someone with whom my responsibility indivisibly lay.

And so i mustered all the courage I had within me, to dare to look out the window at 33,000 feet, 

for the very. first. time. Ever.

To see what I had all along, been too petrified to See.

My eyes were awashed with a vision so breathtakingly ethereal, it melted all my fears away and debunked my apprehensions forever.

The night sky was a sprawling carpet of inky blue darkness, hung over with a velvety cloak of clouds, wispy trails of grey blue smokey pathways of light and dark ... and shimmery stars which seemed to twinkle at me, like happy little faces of light. I remained suspended in that vision for the longest time, as I felt a blessed Peace well up within me in waves of champagne bubbly. And for those subliminally glorious moments, I experienced the 'no gravity space', between my Mind, Heart and Soul, uplifting my inner spirit to a gossamer light weightlessness.

I took a conscious moment to whisper a wordless prayer.

And... With my head in the Clouds and the Earth just a speck, John Lennon's words 'Imagine there's no Country, It isn't hard to do, nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too'...became a no gravity reality space, uniting my Being to the star light and to myriad slivers of Day just breaking, where the World for a few suspended kaleidoscopic hours...lived as One.

I have never been scared of Flying since .