Thank you for your comments.

As you live within your awareness, so I must live within mine. Your mind has some comforts that my mine does not afford me. While you exist effortlessly within each moment, my mind reaches to a speculative future and a remembered past in its attempt to aid survival. You live mostly unencumbered by these spans of attention I cannot ordinarily avoid.

Just as you believe your senses implicitly, I’ve learned to believe in the normal reach of my mind; it has seemed so advantageous in reducing the insecurity of ordinary daily life. I cannot ignore this insecurity or return to a state of ignorance. The only avenue open for me as a human is what I would call transcendence – i.e., deliberate development of a different perspective that will free me from somewhat destructive preoccupation with these normal realms of imagination.

Forgoing knowledge in an attempt to cultivate some blissful ignorance would not be wise or helpful to either of us. We humans, though, have a tendency to stick to our beliefs (knowledge), particularly conceptual ones, even when they prove to be faulty and incomplete. Sometimes we have to be fooled several times before we are willing to re-examine them. In your domain, you tend to change beliefs rather more quickly; you are wired better than us to do this. The only way for me as a human to reach a state of being where the present is fully and consistently accepted and lived is to go beyond the ridge of concepts that normally bound my nature. Regression to a pre-conceptual mind is not an option for me; I have to go beyond the ridge rather than slipping back into the valley below.

Though I cannot know your life, I find it inspirational to mine. The apparent majesty of your flight, the directness of your action, and the acceptance of all things seem to have elements of what I think lies beyond the ridge I am attempting to traverse. These aspects of your existence bring me happiness. I am grateful for even this transitory reminder to fully and completely live and burn each moment.

I’ve learned to be a tidy camper. Perhaps I’ll leave a few crumbs of food, but there won’t be any trash to sift through or containers for bugs to polish food from. Here’s my coffee toast to you! May all your flights be happy.