The Airplane Fast ends

Can you believe it's been a year?

A year of no flying. A year of sticking fairly close to home. A year of settling, grounding, growing roots, growing a bit of moss.

I began the fast because I could no longer pretend that the benefit to the earth, life and the future of my flying was equal to the cost. In other words, I was out of integrity. I was a hypocrite. I was a fat-footed Western Boomer exercising the privilege that comes with being white, educated, American and still somewhat in demand.

I also began the fast because I realized I was now unaware of what needs were being filled by flying, but knowing my identity was somehow tied up in getting up up and away.

I wanted to be down and here. I wanted to know myself without the dazzle of travel. I wanted to belong where I am, be part of someplace and not just a someone, anyplace.

After a few self-conscious months of twitching and itching as the identity of traveler flaked off I stopped completely thinking about what i WASN'T doing and enjoyed ever more the finer things in life. Finer as in seeing finer details of the life I am in - the growing season, the neighbors, the village, the buzzing of the community, the morning light and winter skies, the plays and events. In doing that, I also seemed more settled in myself, seeing deeper in with the surface a bit less roiled. Mind you, "settling down" for a person whose life metaphor is 'on the road' was never appealing, but I had no idea that letting the surface settle would reveal in so much alluring detail the contours of the infinite facets of a single day.

One beautiful long meditation on Orcas Island centered on the classic spiritual question, "Who am I?" The deeper in I went the more I was aware of a self-congratualtory and incessant narrator who is constantly interpreting and evaluating and delightfully chatting and theorizing about my life. I stopped to listen and, like a thief caught red handed, the voice skulked away. In its absence I became aware that I am quite thoroughly a figment of my imagination. That I am nothing, and that nothing is the doorway into being "it all". I became a big motherly surround holding everything within my embrace effortlessly. Who, I asked, do I think is listening to my merry chatter? Who am I trying to impress? For whom am I reshaing through words my raw self into an entertaining persona? For hours I could shuttle back and forth between ecstacy and ego. It became crystal clear that relinquishing ego wasn't good, wasn't virtuous, earned me no brownie points in heaven. Surrendering what isn't real (though entertaining) is the ticket to heaven. What a joke! (of course that voice loves blogging - if you ever read this it has secured it's greatest pleasure... someone listening).

I think who traveled was that voice - the entertainer seeking an audience. I was looking for the echo of myself to know I am somebody. This year has been like a vacation from the demands of the public self so the private self could hang out and have a good time. I'm not fundamentally different, only I am more aware of myself, living at a deeper layer of myself and not so into myself. jeesh. what a joke.

The airplane fast has certainly not been limiting me. Instead it's been limiting a habitual behavior so I could live more in reality. I don't know if the fast did this, but I am more aware, as i appreciate life's finer things, that I am now in the autumn years. I've definitely rounded a bend. Cancer whipped me into the curve and in this year - the fifth since diagnosis - I've slowed enough to make it around the bend. The tasks of the Autumn years are so different and delicious. In my Summer I couldn't imagine how what interests me now would be any fun. What's here, though, is a concentration of the juice of my life, a simmering to blend the flavors of all the many adventures, an asking, "What is this really that I've been through? What are the tasks now? What does it now seem I landed here to learn and have I learned it? What do I do, if anything, with all I've accumulated?" I call myself a "baby elder" because I sense I'm in preparation for another phase and quite awkward in this new skin.

This year has, as well, been productive and challenging. I took on to rewrite Your Money or Your Life and helped produce the second global conversation week and found myself, by the end of the Summer, on a fast track to being out in the world again with the update arriving just as the market finally lost its footing and began to tumble. Looks like my five years of cancer and healing, my five years of getting planted and rooted in self and community, my five years of becoming a thinking feeling body rather than a head with something hanging off it, my five years of fitting back in to life after a big wild ride out there as a 'player' - those years are done and i'm again saddling up and riding out.

My year just ended with a flight at the end of November (last flight was November 2007) to SF to, in part, meet with my colleagues on this new edition of Your Money or Your Life. And in January I'm on the road for real speaking in Denver, Minneapolis, Atlanta, Portland, Vancouver, San Francisco, Seattle and environs.

It's good to belong where you are before being somewhere else - and now i'm ready.