by Richard Bach
My body had lost a lot of weight. I was starving without noticing. Muscles were non-existent…how had I lost so much of my body so quickly?
I had to build myself all over again, with no power to walk, if I knew how to do it, no food, no wish to learn what the hospital wanted me to do.
Yet somewhere, a spirit guide whispered that this is as bad as it could get. It didn’t mention that I could die any time, from the drugs or a lack of them. It told me it was all up to me, now. I had to scrape up the will to live and do something with it.
The bed was my gravestone. The longer I laid there, the weaker I’d become, till finally it would take all my energy to die.
It didn’t seem fair, that I was lying on a bed they could simply wheel into the morgue and call my case over. “Survived the crash, but the other things, complications, drugs, killed him.”
Would I have done better, just lying in the field by Puff? If this was better what would have been worse?
Dying, it’s peace and joy. Dying is life! I could have laid with my airplane for a few hours and won the delight of dying. Mortals have so much to learn, they think dying is some foe, the worst of ends! Not at all, the poor things. Dying is a friend, bringing us back to life once again.
I struggled, though, just as if I were a mortal. I would not be a broken one. I had to learn to eat, learn to walk, learn to think and speak. How to run again, how to do calculations in my mind, how to take off in Puff again, fly anywhere, land so softly I’d hear the grass whisking on the tires again. Before that I had to learn to drive again, awfully more difficult, more dangerous than learning to fly again.
All those essential tasks were halted in my little cell in the hospital. Some physicians, some nurses, they thought this was a quiet place for the injured. They were kind people, the ones I knew.
I needed to get out of there!
Sabryna rented a room near the hospital to care for me. Every day she talked with me, listened to my wish to go home, told me one single reality, floating free from the dream: “You are a perfect expression of perfect Love, right here, right now. There is no permanent damage.”
Without her steadfast awareness of the other side from medicines, would I have died? Yes.
How could I do it, exhausted, broken, unable to sit up more than 30 degrees without a back brace, a brace that hurt more than sitting up?
I found I had diseases that one can only contract in a hospital. It took eight lines here to list them. I wrote them, deleted them.
This person who so disliked physiology and biology that he skipped the courses in high school, was all of a sudden, boiled in the stews of a hospital.
Don’t tell me about medicines, I want none of them. Yet there I was, asked to take a whole spectrum of them from those who believed in hospitals instead of spirit, and meekly I did as requested.
Three months in a hospital! I stood this, learned to stand, thought about walking, till finally my willingness to carry my hunger strikes, my unwillingness to follow their wishes, my constant request that they please let me go home, was honored. I didn’t care whether letting me go home was death or life. Just let me go!
They gave a pass that transferred me to a hospice, as I was close to dying. They called it, “Failure to thrive.”
Sabryna was outraged. “He will not die! He will have a perfect recovery! He’s going home!”
One of the doctors reluctantly changed the form: “Going home.”
At last! Nor more wishing to die. Lucky knew what I didn’t…we’d meet soon enough.
All at once I could look out familiar windows again, the islands about me, the birds, the sky, the clouds and the stars. A rented hospital bed, in my living room, but no streets, no concrete. Around me the books, two assistants here at home, cooking, caring.
How would Donald Shimoda have healed me, if I had asked for help? Knowing his truth, it would have taken no time, instant complete healing.
What do I have to do right now? No help from my friend, no help but my highest sense of right.
I thought about death. Like anyone, I had split-seconds, near misses, but never a long-term test of my highest right, nothing that pressed against me day after day with its suggestions:
“You can’t sit, you can’t stand, you can’t walk, you can’t eat (OK, you won’t eat), you can’t talk, you can’t think, don’t you know you’re helpless? Death is so sweet, no effort, you can let go, let it take you to another world. Listen to me. Death is not a sleep, it’s a new beginning.”
Those are fine suggestions, when we’re desperately tired. When it seems impossible, it’s easiest to let a lifetime go.
Yet we shrug the suggestions away when we want to continue with a life that isn’t quite finished.
What must I do, to live again?
Practice.
Practice: I see myself as perfect, every second a new image of perfection, over and over and over, second after second.
Practice: My spiritual life is perfect right now. All day, every day, perfection always in my mind, knowing how perfect I am in spirit. I am a perfect expression of perfect Love, here and now.
Practice: Choose delight, that I am already perfect, now, a perfect portrait of my spiritual self. Always, ever, perfect. Love knows me this way, I do, too.
Practice: I am not a material human being. I am a perfect expression of perfect Love.
Practice: As I know this, the perfection of my spirit will affect my belief of body, change it to a mirror of spirit, free of the limits of the world.
Practice: The body is already perfect in spirit. Earth is a world that offers beliefs of illness. I decline them. I am a perfect expression of perfect Love.
Practice: It’s not the false beliefs that trouble us, it’s accepting them, gives them power. I deny that power, refuse it. I am a perfect expression of perfect Love.
Practice, over and over, never changing from a recognition of perfection. When do I stop practicing? Never.
At first I walked six steps, exhausted through the last three. I am a perfect expression of perfect Love.
Next day, twenty steps: I am a perfect expression of perfect Love.
Next day, a hundred and twenty: I am a perfect expression of Love.
At first I was dizzy standing up. It dissolved with practice, with constant repetition of what I knew for truth.
I am a perfect expression of perfect Love, right here, right now. There is no permanent damage.
Balance-practice, the little swiveling platform, and a fluffy foam pillow in the corner till I could stay upright, I am a perfect expression of perfect Love, without falling.
I switched from pajamas to street clothes, in time. I am a perfect expression, set my steps to an electric treadmill.
Two hundred steps one day,
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?
He put his hand, gently, on the broken deck. “I can rebuild her if you want. You’ll need to put everything in a closed van, broken wings and tail, of course, drive to my shop. She’s not as bad as you think. We’ll have her flying again, a few months, perfect shape.”
For the first day since the wires, since the crash, I was glad for Puff. By the time I had taken the test to regain my own flying license, by the time I traveled back to Florida, she’d be ready to fly, herself!
Simple. Instead of a dead end road for her, Jim Ratte all of a sudden appeared in the hangar. “I can rebuild her.”
In seconds, quick as the crash, a weight lifted from my heart.
Puff and I, the way we’d promised, we’d fly!
Chapter 12
If this world is a fiction, then soon as we discover what's fact, we've found our power over appearances.
“What’s going on, Don? My last seconds of the crash, it was a perfect landing. But now I know what happened … my own memory, it was fiction!”
“All lifetimes are fiction, Richard.”
“Are you fiction, too?”
He laughed. “The me you see, the you I see, we’re all of us fiction.”
“I’m not so sure…”
“Let me tell you a little story,” he said. “Once, before anyone thought of time, there was a single force in all the universe. Love. It was, and it is and it will always be, the only Real, the only principle of all life. It does not change, it does not listen to anyone. You can call it God or Demon, nonexistent, cruel, or loving, it doesn’t hear, it doesn’t care. It is All. Period.
“When we came to appear to be,” he said, “our worlds of form and fantasy, our universe shifting changing images of stardust, it did nothing. Love is the only Is, beyond space, beyond time, anywhere, everywhere.”
He stopped.
I listened to the silence. “And?” I said. “What did it do?”
“Nothing.”
“Go on with your story. I want to hear what happened.”
“You did. The story’s over.”
“What about us?”
“Nothing. We’re fiction. Does reality have anything to do with dreams?”
“What can we do to be real?”
“Nothing. We already are. The deepest life within us is love. There is nothing else. Reflecting that reality, we cannot die. We don’t live here in the world of spacetime. Nothing does. Nothing lives, anywhere, except love.”
“What’s the purpose of life here?” I said.
“Where?”
“In spacetime. There’s some reason for it.”
“No. Reality doesn’t talk with beliefs, doesn’t listen. Reality does not take form, for forms are limits, and the real is All, unlimited.”
“Doesn’t matter,” I said, “if we’re good or bad?”
“No. What’s good to one is bad to another. Words mean nothing to the All. It is indestructible, it is forever, it is pure Love.”
“We are nothing to the…the All?”
“Our only life,” he said, “is the expression of the Is, of Love. Not what we do, but love itself. You have no way of understanding this, while you live in the world of spacetime, the land of beliefs of harm and death.”
“You’re telling me I can die any time?”
He laughed. “The love you know, it can’t die. The annoyances, the hatreds, the wish that things could be different, gone the minute you let go of the world that seems to be. Gone. What’s real, what does not dissolve, that’s yours forever.”
“Soon as you realize you’re immortal,” he said, “declare the power of Love even when it seems invisible, you’ll go far beyond the illusions of space and time. In all history, the one power you never lose is your power of letting go of space and time, the joy of dying that is no wicked thing, it comes in love, to everyone.”
“Then, who are you? Are you an image, a friend who’s just a thought-form, comes around when I’m ready to die?”
“We’re all shifting out of the belief of mortals,” he said. “I’m shifting, too. “
“What do you look like? When you’re not wearing your thought-form for me?
“I look like nothing. No form. Maybe a faint little sparkle of light, maybe not.”
“Some day that’ll be me? I’m a friend of yours, has no form?”
“Some day? How about now?”
Chapter 13
I don't pray for the Is to recognize me.
I pray for me to recognize It, perfect everpresent Love, way beyond my silly beliefs
After eleven months of believing the power of Love, I thought I was pretty well invulnerable from failure. I could walk, run, I felt light and healthy, didn’t want to be what I was before.
My assistants, those dear souls who had helped me every day, were gone to other patients, the story of my success part of their own.
I was cooking my little meals, exercising on my own, caring for the Shelties.
Thinking back, as I did every day, I wondered. I understand there’s no such thing as death, the total end of awareness. I understand we can shift from one consciousness to another, a smooth easy switch, easy as keeping, easy as losing a dream.
Why, though, did I have the event in the room/dirigible, with no one to say a word for me? Everyone else, dying, had some kind words from the people here. Yes, someone had printed the Please don’t fall out of the door sign. Honestly, though, I didn’t need the sign. I would have welcomed a guide, explaining what I saw:
“Welcome to your dream of the after-life. I am your conductor for this ride. We wish we could have supplied an airplane for you, but considering the haste of your journey, my idea of a flying machine had to do, so we hope you’ve been comfortable. You will have three chances to stay here, or go back
to Earth…” someone was correcting him: “…or go back to the Earth you know. Please speak clearly for your three answers.”
“Some of your tour you will not recall, as those may suggest different choices from your designed lifetime. We hope you have enjoyed your tour, and hope that you will not share it with anyone. Your tour has been solely designed for you and will not be a journey for others.”
Dreams done, back now to my decisions as a mortal.
I saw my friend Dan Nickens after I had healed from the crash. He offered me a guest room in Florida, at his house and Ann’s. I don’t do that often. Ever. Yet meeting the tests and the obstacles two years ago, with him flying our little seaplanes coast to coast…the worst was the sharks in the Gulf of Mexico, the sands of Death Valley…that’s a different story, but we were friends.
Our adventure now was to discover whether I still knew how to fly.
Dan and Jenn, his own airplane, a twin to Puff, how important they are for us! After the crash, Dan had flown the same path that Puff had flown. Almost, since the wires had been reconnected.
“No way you could have seen them,” he said. “They were blocked by the sun, they were sitting up on the final approach. Your only choice was to have flown final approach the other direction, in a tailwind.”
“Makes no difference,” I said. “I was responsible. I was flying the airplane.”
“I know. You just couldn’t have seen the wires.”
Dan mentioned, by the way, that Jenn had a spare set of wings and tail feathers…would Puff like to have those? She’d be welcome to them, if she did.
Amazing, I thought. Puff’s right wing was mostly wreckage, her tail was smashed, an accordion crushed against the ground. Yet, the two airplanes had flown together across the country, they shared all those miles together, lakes and rivers and deserts. Now Puff was down. Jenn, her sister, offered life of her own.
For Puff’s dreaming state, I accepted the gift.
I slid down into Jenn’s cockpit, next day, Dan in the copilot’s seat, and after ten months on the ground, I started Jenn’s engine, taxied her down the ramp into the water. Wheels up as she floated, we taxied slowly while the engine warmed. Wheels up, boost pump on, flaps down, trim set. A few seconds for an engine run-up. Jenn was ready when I was.