John & Anne Wiley

Picture yourself in a boat on a river. The water is serenely moving to your right, and not far on the other side is a small cove with trees dangling down to the quiet water on either side of a grassy bank where your picnic awaits. As you leave shore, without thinking you point the boat slightly to the left of your inviting destination. You’ve made a course correction. Further out into the river, the speed of the placid river subtly increases and again you turn slightly more to the left of your idyllic goal. Another course correction.

Basically the same thing happens when you’re flying, except it’s air moving over the ground rather than water moving over a riverbed that you’re reacting to so as to fly a straight line to your destination. Another sort of course correction we’ve made in our flying adventures has to do with changes in our destination. In the river analogy, it could be that you see the picnic being moved to another cove so you change course to go there. Or perhaps a large bit of flotsam or another boat drifts into your path, so you turn right or left to go around it. Maybe someone arrives on the shore you just departed, so you return so they can join the picnic. We’ve made far too many course corrections to count on our various flying adventures. So it is with life, when we set out to do something and end up doing it sooner, later, differently, or not at all.

Well in case you haven’t already guessed, last night we made a major course change for our MerriTimes Adventure. We’re not going this week. That means we’re not going this year, because weather is already getting marginal on the most northeastern part of the route: the leap of faith we contemplated from Nova Scotia to Newfoundland. That hop would involve about 20 minutes of flying over open water beyond reach of land in the exceeding rare event of a sudden and total loss of power. Rare as such things are, it’s also rare that I fly anywhere there’s not an open flat field or road within gliding distance to land. To increase the glide distance, I fly higher when good areas are more distant (1,000 feet altitude = 1.5 mile glide). Since the “Newfy” hop is over water my plan was to climb until Tripp lost her lovable eagerness to go higher (probably 16k’ or so), to minimize the “no option but water” portion. Flying that high means I’d want few if any clouds to contend with, which in turn means reaching that part of the Adventure in mid-September. Not happening.

There’s an even bigger factor in this course change though, related to our Inner World. If you’ve read much of this blog, you already know that I often wander off into the realms of psychology and consciousness. In fact, I’ve done that often enough and far enough from the academic interpretation of “Psychology” that I’ve just now renamed that Category on the blog. Everywhere I used that tag in the past, it’s now changed to “Inner World.” I like this better, because for me it evokes an expanded and integrated sense of studying the psyche (psych-ology) to include what some might call spirit, trans-personal, or consciousness.

So this inner course change is a major detour into an exploration of all the things that have been moving us off course for our early September launch into the MerriTimes Adventure. This stuff is very powerful, and very deep. Last night and this morning we’ve already taken an epic inner journey into impressions, thoughts, feelings, needs, and behaviors related to that delayed departure. We’ve touched some beautiful inner shores that reach back to childhood, navigated some scary rapids, paddled flat out, glided lazily downstream, and endured some daunting inner weather. There’s clearly a lot more to come on this journey, and maybe Anne will share some of her experiences along the way too. Meanwhile, we’re flying closer to home for a while in the outer world.

Speaking of which, anyone still reading might enjoy as I just have, a few more memories and pix from our latest short flight: Santa Paula. Maybe you’ve already seen the larger version of this one on my Photo Page, but I had to share it here because it just takes my breath away every time I see it.

1060 Santa Paula Beautiful

I love that there’s something so beautiful and so different from all the other beautiful places within an hours’ flight of SBA. One of these days we’ll need to venture out to that “red barn” farm (bottom-left) from the airport that’s at the base of the mountain on the right just beyond that white horizontal strip (you can probably make out the runway if you click to see the large version). This farm is in what seems to be a red barn area that had a fun looking pumpkin patch in another of my photos, so maybe they always have some diversions for the public. Here’s another angle on it with a closer view of the “color code.”

1063 Color Code

What I mean by that is the various-sized patches of bright colors give me the impression of a code. Like those collections of colorful little pins that each signifies something on the chests of generals. Or the carefully arranged symbols of some extraterrestrial race, that our earthly farmers plant as they do without knowing what moved them to choose those plants and arrangements. Is some subliminal code the reason I seem endlessly fascinated with such fields, or is it just that from this relatively intimate height in the air they remind me of a carpet or blanket I drooled on as an infant?

1068 Baby Blanket

Climbing out of SZP (the airport) on the short hop back home I saw another reminder of childhood in this rural estate.

1071 Miniature

I used to imagine myself alone in a small plane when riding my bike along dirt paths in empty lots. The weeds were trees, and everything else would take on that scale. An empty beer can became a large propane tank, and a finely-crafted doll house like the one above would have invited a “landing.”

Within a couple of minutes we were passing Ventura framed by the Santa Barbara Channel Islands on the horizon. Such an incredibly beautiful place – how could we have imagined leaving this on a MerriTimes Adventure?!

1086 Ventura to Anacapa

Say, does anyone else have that old Beatles song running in their head now from reading the first sentence of this post?