I read this great passage the other day in The Enchanted Life by Sharon Blackie—so good it stopped me in my tracks. Someone was explaining to her the difference between gliding and riding as it relates to the sport of hang gliding.
Anyone can glide, it seems. It’s a simple matter of letting the wings of the apparatus do their job, carrying you down to the ground relatively quickly and safely.
But, he said, “if you really want to fly for hours at a time, to explore the world of the birds, the mountains, and the clouds, you need nature’s help. You need a thermal.”
He explained the scary and tricky part of “catching a thermal”, finding one and then getting into it so that it could carry you up higher, and you can ride much longer. Apparently, that’s the hardest part—navigating that hellish in-between roughness where you’re getting thrown about by this upwardly rising air current that isn’t easy to find and isn’t easy to get into.
What if that is the invitation COVID is giving us—to be a thermal that will extend our ride on this great earth? What if this loud and scary disruption we’re experiencing in our “normal” blue sky day is a potential moment of great uplift if we can all get inside it and let it carry us upward. What if we’ve all been gliding down with gravity pulling us and calling that living when we could really be flying higher and longer than we even dared to imagine possible?
Want to know what these daily verses are all about? Read here to learn what inspired this practice on my birthday post, November 1st.
