and you will know, too, when
you lift yourself high enough
to see beyond
horizons.
11
You are
never given a wish
without also being given the
power to make it true.
You may
have to work for it,
however
We had landed in a huge grazing place next to a three acre horse-pond, away from towns, somewhere along the line between Illinois and Indiana. No passengers; it was our day off, I thought.
"Listen, he said. "Don't listen. Just stay there quiet and watch. What you are going to see is not a miracle. read your atomic-physics book. ..a child can walk on water."
He told me this, and as though he didn't notice the water was even there, he turned and walked out some yards from shore, on the surface of the horse-pond. What it looked like, was that the pond was a hot-summer mirage over a lake of stone. He stood firm on the surface, not a wave or ripple splashed over his flying boots.
"Here," he said. "Come do it."
I saw it with my eyes. It was possible, obviously, because there he stood, so I walked out to join him. It felt like walking on clear blue linoleum, and I laughed.
"Donald, what are you doing to me?"
"I am merely showing you what everybody learns, sooner or later," he said, "and you're handy now."
"But I'm . . ."
"Look. The water can be solid," he stamped his foot and the sound was leather on rock, "or not." He stamped again and water splashed over us both. "Got the feel of that? Try it."
How quickly we get used to miracles! In less than a minute I began to think that walking on water is possible, is natural, is . . . well, so what?
"But if the water is solid now, how can we drink it?"
"Same way we walk on it, Richard. It isn't solid, and it isn't liquid. You and I decide what it's going to be for us. If you want water to be liquid, think it liquid, act as if it's liquid, drink it. If you want it to be air, act as if it's air, breathe it. Try."
Maybe it's something about the presence of an advanced soul, I thought. Maybe these things are allowed to happen in a certain radius, fifty feet in a circle around them . . .
I knelt on the surface and dipped my hand into the pond. Liquid. Then I lay down and put my face into the blue of it and breathed, trusting. It breathed like warm liquid oxygen, no choking or gasping. I sat up and looked a question at him, expecting him to know what was in my mind.
"Speak," he said.
"Why do I have to speak?"
"For what you have to say, it's more precise to talk in words. Speak."
"If we can walk on water, and breathe it and drink it, why can't we do the same to land?"