Responding to LO30347
Alaska to North Moreton, you're coming in loud and clear!
Of these five elementary sustainers of creativity, I'm coming more and
more to appreciate art-expressing and game-playing. Andrew, you're such an
exemplar, I laugh with pleasure again.
My 17 year-old niece, Kari, returned home -- from an accidental traveling
adventure which landed her in North Moreton -- bursting with new layers on
layers of meaning, inspiration, and understanding. I just laugh with
pleasure. That garden in North Moreton, and the walkingtalkingtable where
Priebe and Minnigh stood before...I've never ACTUALLY been there, but I
KNOW from Kari, it's a magical spot.
There were a few years when I was 19-21 years old, I was flying mostly
right seat in a DC-3, hauling freight around Alaska, and sometimes salmon
from villages in Bristol Bay, Bering Sea. St. Exupery was one of my
favorite authors.
We flew long (too long) hours, often on a route that would take us over
the Alaska Range. If we weren't flying empty, we were flying a thousand
or two thousand pounds over legal gross weight, sometimes just on top of
the clouds, as high as we could go, 12-13 thousand feet above sea level,
sometimes barely a thousand feet above the mountain tops, themselves
peering over the clouds.
If the evening sun was just right a sundog (a circular rainbow) would be
formed on the tops of the clouds below us. Sometimes there would be two
concentric sundogs, and sometimes they would frame the vivid dark shadow
of our plane in their center. On a spectacular full-moon night, we would
get moondogs, stars above!
If things coincided JUST RIGHT, we would end up descending through the
center of the sundogs into the clouds. Descending, the rainbow colors
would get bigger and bigger, and increasingly vivid, our plane's shadow
growing in the middle, until SUDDENLY, in an instant, as airplane
collapsed into shadow, EVERYTHING outside the cockpit would disappear into
the dark white vapor.
Exupery wrote: 'And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: it is
only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is
invisible to the eye.'
Flying into a sundog was like entering a space-time warp, and one felt it
might be possible to end up anywhere. I always felt so lucky. If someone
were to do that again, I imagine it would be equally as possible to end up
in Andrew and Anona's garden as on, say, a little planet growing a single
rose. After all, it seems this is what happened with my niece.
I think maybe knowledge and information is like this, too, as Exupery
said,
"You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed." Isn't
creating knowledge something akin to taming information?
Grins and best wishes with special thanks to my friends, Andrew and Anona,
and all of you who contribute so generously to the learning-org garden
planet.
Dan Chay
Alaska
--Heidi and Dan Chay <chay@alaska.com>
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