There they were…thirty or forty geese, slowly walking in their ambling way, pecking at the ground, holding a sort of  meditative space…..on an airport runway. This is the runway I see every morning as I drive on Hwy. 62. It was an ironic sight. Just as a huge Northwest plane came over my car on its way to landing, the geese rose en mass into the air and out of harms way. But for just a moment there was the mirror image of flight….geese to plane…plane to geese.

Surely it was out of this vision of flight that the Wright brothers and their likes began to dream of human flight. We are fascinated by flight…being able to take off from our attachment to Earth and to float on the air around us. Most super heroes and heroines have the gift of flight…that ability to rise above whatever is happening and to fly away, to float gently on the invisible, to save whatever needs to be saved.

One of my favorite parts of the stories of King Arthur is when Merlin is teaching the young Arthur about what it means to be a leader, a king. Merlin, with his magical abilities, turns Arthur into an eagle and sends him off to view the world. When Arthur returns, Merlin asks him what he noticed, what he had learned by being able to fly. Arthur simply says, "there are no boundaries." He goes on to describe how in flying over the land he realized how all the fences, the gates, the walls we erect are really artificial…that when viewed from flight the Earth is all one, unified.

I am not sure that we have learned this lesson very well. Our sense of unity on this planet gets pulled in countless directions each day. We continue to build barriers, both real and invisible, in an effort to divide, to create some false sense of safety, to keep those "unlike" us out, to keep those most like us, within.

Oh, to be like the geese, to fly over the land and see not barriers but beauty, not walls but wonder. Perhaps our fascination with flight is not just about being able to get someplace faster, to places far away. Perhaps someplace deep inside of us, we also long to be able to have the perspective that allows us to see past the artificial boundaries to what is true……unity.

"I know all the birds of the air, and all that moves in the field is mine. Those who bring thanksgiving honor me, to those who go the right way, I will show the wholeness of God."  Psalm 50