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

A gentle slide down to the water. When the spray of landing settled, when Puff stopped, I lowered her wheels and followed Jenn, touched the shore rolling up from the beach, and we were home. No problems at all, not In the air, not in the water, not on the land.

Engines idled, and in seconds the engines of the two sisters stopped. Silence.

It was quiet for a minute, and I laughed. This was an altogether new feeling. Now that I wasn’t checking Puff’s instruments, now that Puff had an hour and a half in the air again…everything worked! All these last months, hoping Jim could make her fly. He did. And Dan had said we’d fly together, two airplanes, this afternoon. We did.

Dan laughed, too. Something about having some impossible hopes, not possible when we hope them, yet believing, step by step, they came true. Impossible. True. Funny.

We each sat in our cockpits, a few feet away from each other. “Fantastic, Dan! Puff’s flying again!”

“She’s beautiful, flying. I waited, for this flight.”

“Amazing. Just amazing. When a year’s dream comes true…”

He slipped out of his airplane, touched Puff’s wing. “What did she say, flying again with you?”

“Nothing. Not a word.”

“Not a word? Odd.”

“She told me…her spirit told me, months ago, that she’ll need a while before she remembers who she is, and maybe talks again.”

“Good,” he said. “I believe in Puff.”

There were things to do with her, little things. Install a yaw-string, painted anti-corrosion grease next day on all the new…

“Dan,” I said then, “Jim didn’t use one bolt from the old fuselage, from the wings and tail. Not one! Now I have to coat a million brand new bolts with par-al-ketone.”

“Good for him,” he said.

A day later, Dan and I flew our two airplanes, more water-landings, and climbing out from the lake after her last landing, Puff said,

Hi.

Not a word for the rest of that flight. Puff the spirit was right about her reborn life.

It’s all there in space and time, the crash, news articles around the world, and not a story about us flying once again. No account of the first word from Puff.

That night, a dream, I flew alone with Puff, with my friend Donald Shimoda.

“Will they ever end?” I asked, “Illusions?”

“Of course. The instant we believe we’re separated from Love, we’re in the world of Seems-to-Be, for an instant or a billion years. Every world, every after-world; every possibility of hells and heavens, dance to the music of our beliefs. Far as I know, beliefs play only one language: illusions. Let illusions go, beliefs vanish. Love is with you instantly, the way it’s ever been.”

“You’re not there, one with Love?”

“Nope. I’m a spirit guide, same as you.”

“Same as you? Sorry to say, Donald, I think you may be wrong. I’m a wolf practicing on stilts. I crash often.”

“Maybe. What matters to mortals, is that you finished the story that was so important from the day you and Puff lived the illusion of your crash. You didn’t die, Puff didn’t. You survived it whole, you learned, you practiced the way our spirit changes the belief of our bodies.”

“Well, I had to try it. It worked for me. Is it true for everyone?”

“No. It’s not true when we’re convinced that belief can’t change bodies.”

I thought about that. I listened to the affirmation of my dear friend Sabryna. So many thousands of times I had said it, the last year!

Then I whispered the one sentence of my story that’s forever true for you, dear reader and for me, too: