FLIGHT PLAN

Photograph by Bob Gentry 8/5/99

A Thought for Today

Those willing to listen to us will always inspire us to listen to them.

The regular daily Flight Plan will be suspended for a few weeks while I'm away helping Webmaster Ken Blackie work out the design and content of our upcoming STANYAN HOUSE web site. I hope you'll continue landing here ever day though because Jay Hagan and Melinda Smith have chosen two poems from a different one of my books for every day that I'm gone.

So, something new will be here every morning. The Thought for Today and the Notable Birthdays will continue. See you soon.

Love, Rod

Two poems and the preface from "Watch for the Wind."

Author's Note

Love is seldom carried by the wind - and life, less so. What the wind is best at is rearranging seasons, cycles, weather coming, weather already here. Though wind can be a part of weather and its make-up, it is always more. As the sun is not merely the chief property of a sunny or sunless day, but stays with us always - seen or unseen - so too the wind remains.

Few winds are cosmic, truly large enough to change each life for ill or good - capriciously or to suit a special need to themselves. Even flags, wind-chimes, and windmills could attest to that. Most winds, unless they tie up with a hurricane or travel with tornadoes, are personal by nature. As rain is nearly always regional, winds most often have their starting place just out of sight... around the corner, down the block.

I have loved the wind - when it brought blooms and blossoms, smells through an open window, when it changed the rain's direction, when I caught it on the quietest of days rearranging and playing with a crowd of clouds... when it caused tall trees to rustle in their highest branches and shower colored leaves upon a still green lawn to signal Summer and then picked up a single sheet of paper and carried it in an arc across the sky like some magic carpet with a destination every bit as definite as a course set by Aladdin.

As I ballooned the Valley of a Thousand Hills, setting down in black villages where magic still surrounded such an apparition coming from the sky, or traveled up above the California meadows topping trees and skimming lakes, I must have known the wind would always care for me. However playful it became to shove and push my craft off-course or on some mornings stubbornly refused to help me move at all, it was not a comfort knowing the wind was there.

So, long ago the wind and I, we made a truce, to not look forward or look back on what we might have each done to offend the other. It must have started when that first kite I went running with got tangled on a wire. I didn't curse the gust of wind that wound it there any more than I blamed lightning for a charred and burning fence it lit a match to or cursed the blue-white shaft that struck and halved a favorite tree.

No. While winter winds and those of other seasons still surprise me, I like surprises. The wind is an advantage and not an adversary. It clears and cleans more often than it heaps up havoc, and sweeps the dust away more often than it leaves it.
   
Parallel we go our ways, the winds and me and when we cross each other's path or course, we do so with a nod of courtesy.
   
I toast the wind. A giant - gentle, given half a chance. I have seen wind bring life and stir it. And love, that mystery of all mysteries, has floated and flowered for me, hatched by a single seed or puff of pollen that arrived by wisps of air so slight that none but me would know the courier that carried it was wind.

The wind of want. The wind of worry. The wind of change. All winds are friendly to the sailor in me, the sailor too, and I term every breeze a love wind.

R.M. June 1982, N.Y.

                                    - Chosen by J.H.

After The Rain

Last night
the wind stopped
pulling at me
and it rained.

It pattered and played
outside my window
like a child crying
gurgling
talking to himself.

Once on a rainy night
                   long past
I opened my eyes
         and saw love
and the rain stopped.

Last night
all the rainy nights
of a lifetime returned
... and then you phoned.

                                         - Chosen by J.H.

Unprepared for Autumn

For Carol Baron

We never learn. Even after several hundred seasons, none of us prepare or are prepared when fall falls into place. It is as though we each expected summer to last beyond the calendar. And when the long and bulging arm of frost reaches across the land, some of us pretend that Autumn is still some miles away... a few more kilometers down the road. Why ? Because if you're alone in autumn, you'll be alone all winter long.

                                         - Chosen by J.H.

Islander