Freedom

For once you have tasted flight you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards, for there you have been and there you will long to return.

~Leonardo da Vinci

For a while now, I have felt a deep, inexplicable yearning to fly. I love flying in planes, but this…this is different. More. I look up on a perfectly clear day, and feel joy at the mere thought of soaring through the intense blue of the sky. I see myself gliding with the wind, dancing with the birds, and twisting through the clouds. I would give anything to laugh in the rain or fall with the snow, the crystalline flakes collecting in my hair.
I used to dream of falling…then missing the ground and soaring to great heights with a freedom unseen in my waking life. I can only imagine the joy I’d feel if my flight were reality.

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds - and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of - wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long delirious, burning blue,
I've topped the windswept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or even eagle flew -
And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high untresspassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.
Pilot Officer Gillespie Magee
No 412 squadron, RCAF
Killed 11 December 1941

Oh, that I were a bird...