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 Stop Flapping and Ride Your Thermals
Staggering day any way you look at it. And what a way to look at it, standing on the north side of Molokai, atop the world’s highest sea cliffs, gazing across the azure Pacific and feeling so alive I can hardly contain myself. The unkempt grass of the pasture marches on a few feet beyond where my own are planted and quivers there at the cliff edge, blown by stiff winds from below. I take a half step closer. The edge seems to pull me. I can feel its intensity. Quivering, I take another half step..... Whoooaaa!!! From out of nowhere an apparition -- so startling I almost tumbled backward. Wait, it’s not an apparition, it’s real. A Frigate bird, huge with black wings motionless, rising like a Harrier jet straight up from below the cliff edge, levitating into my vision and consciousness. For one breathless moment his gaze meets my own. Then the wind sweeps him higher. Higher and higher they soar on that indiscernible funnel of air. Did I say indiscernible? Not for them. I watch the subtle movements of their wings. Never a full stroke, simply tiny adjustments to bring them back to the place of maximum lift. Higher and higher… without struggle. Finally they are just sable specks among the clouds. Then as if to some inaudible command, they trim their wings, break their upward spiral, and set a course for the island of Oahu some 40 miles distant. It’s clear they’ll make it without a single wing beat. I am thunderstruck. I fall into the grass with a force that reminds me only too clearly that I do not have wings. I sit staring into the sky where the birds have been. It was much too powerful not to have meaning. Slowly words coalesce in my head, words that make me smile, “Quit your flapping and ride your thermals!” Oh, how true! Quit my flapping and ride my thermals! How I long to do that in my life. First, I guess, I have to believe there are thermals -- those hidden paths which, Now before me Mother Nature not only confirmed that thermals existed, she showed me where to find them -- at the edge. The edge: In yoga it’s defined as the point of intensity before pain. The point of maximum aliveness and attention. Indeed, the edge is the central issue of this discipline, to stay there with consciousness and compassion -- and to follow wherever it leads. The Frigate birds knew. They came to the edge of the island because they knew that’s where their thermals waited. They knew the lift would be there to sweep them into the clouds. They found their thermals and they followed, paying complete attention to the feedback the air was giving them. Dip a wing here, curl a feather there, no flapping, just tiny adjustments to stay in the flow, in the thermal -- higher and higher. Knowing that those thermals are there, perhaps I can, in my photography and in my life, come to my own edge and look for them. Not to sit in security and boredom far back from it, nor in pain too far over it, but to stand fearless right at the edge. Then to stop flapping long enough, And if I’m attentive enough to catch that updraft, then to ride it with complete cognizance, making those subtle adjustments to keep me in the flow. No flapping, no flapping, just...soaring. The Frigate birds are gone now. The sea is quiet, the clouds hang motionless. The only movement is the grass at the brink, dancing in the breeze from below. The edge beckons. I don’t know about you.... but I’m going. © Dewitt Jones Productions, 2001 |
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Another takes his place, then another, and another until eleven have soared past me. All in silence. All without a beat of their wings. All without effort, rising on the invisible turbulence beneath them.
when I’m on them, make everything effortless. I have felt them. Occasionally I have experienced a “thermal”. But I never knew where they came from or, when they were gone, where they disappeared to. 
and to trust deeply enough, to be able to find my thermal.