Illusions II: The Adventures of a Reluctant Student (Illusions 2)

Three hundred the next.

A quarter-mile.

I began taking the Shelties, Maya and Zsa-Zsa for their walks, a half mile on a rough dirt road, sloping down, slanting up again. I am an expression of perfect Love.

A mile… a perfect expression of perfect Love.

Mile and a half. I am not separated from Love.

Two miles. I began running. I am a perfect expression.

The affirmations were real. Nothing else in the world, except my love for Sabryna, love for the Shelties.

Love is real. All else, dreams.

One after another, the medications were dropped, till at last there were none.

I am a perfect expression of perfect Love, right here, right now. There will be no permanent damage.

It wasn’t the words, it was their effect on my mind. Every time I said them, or Sabryna did, I saw myself as a perfect being, and my mind accepted it for true.

I didn’t care about the appearance of my physical body. I saw a different self, spiritual and perfect, over and over again.

Seeing that, feeling it, I became my perfect spirit, and the spirit did something, some byproduct in my belief of a body, that mirrored the spiritual me.

Do I know the way it works? Not a clue. Spirit lives beyond illusions, heals our belief in them.

My job is to allow its truth, to stand out of spirit’s way. Is that so difficult?

Chapter 11

The best we can do is live our highest right, gracefully as we can, and let the Principle of Coincidence take it from there.

Seven months, Puff had rested in the hangar, bent wings and struts alongside, the wreckage of her tail and hull a still photograph of a crash.

I went to our hangar, not to see her, but to see her body, the way some had seen mine.

It was as if a monster, giant hands fifty feet wide, had snatched her from the air, crushed her, thrown her on the ground. When she stopped moving, fires scattered in the grass, the beast lost interest, stalked away.

She was not hurt, the spirit of her. She was asleep, dreaming of flying.

Puff had done all she could, in two seconds, and she saved my life. It was my turn, now, to save hers.

A man who’s built and rebuilt many little seaplanes, an expert named Jim Ratte, came not long after. A coincidence. His business is not in the northwest, it’s thousands of miles south and east, in Florida.

I was glad he was here, but I was not hoping for the best. Most likely he’d say it was a pretty difficult crash, so much has been broken. Better get a new airplane.

Not a word as he looked at her body in the hangar: saw holes in her hull, the foredeck split, aft fuselage smashed, engine and propeller broken, radiator flattened, pylon crushed, a shower of pieces broken loose from the impact.

I looked into the cockpit. Through the broken plexiglass, Puff’s instruments shattered, the panel was twisted, the controls frozen. The aluminum tubes of the frame were bent, one heavy piece was sheared in two, an inch from where my leg had been.

The fabric of one wing, and the tail, was wadded up, a writer’s page of useless words, thrown toward a wastebasket. The canopy had shattered an inch above my head. Why wasn’t I killed?

At last Jim spoke, in the silence of the hangar. I was steeled for what he’d say.

“I’ve had a lot worse than this.”

I couldn’t speak. He’d had rebuilt broken airplanes a lot worse than this?