Illusions Read Online Free PDF Page A

Live
         never to be
                    ashamed if anything you do
                            or say is published
                        around the world   even if
                      what is published
                      is not true.
     
           You are led
       through your lifetime
        by the inner learning creature,
         the playful Spiritual being
            that is your real self.
                            Don't turn away
                   from possible futures
          before you're certain you don't have
           anything to learn from them.
          You're always free
         to change your mind and
       choose a different future, or
          a different
               past.
     
                 Choose a different past? Literally or figuratively or how did it mean . . . ? "I think my mind just boggled, Don. I don't know how I could possibly learn this stuff."
                 "Practice. A little theory and a lot of practice," he said. "Take you about a week and a half."
                 "A week and a half."
                 "Yeah. Believe you know all answers, and you know all answers. Believe you're a master, and you are."
                 "I never said I wanted to be any master."
                 "That's right," he said. "You didn't."
    But I kept the handbook, and he never asked for it back.
     
     
    5
     
     
                 Farmers in the Midwest need good land for their work to prosper, so do gypsy fliers. They have to be close to their customers. They must find fields a block from town, fields planted in grass,
    or hay or oats or wheat cut grass-short; no cows nearby to eat the fabric from their planes; alongside a road for cars; a gate in the fence for people; fields lined so that an airplane doesn't have to fly low over any house any here; smooth enough their machines aren't jolted to pieces rolling 50 mph over the ground; long enough to get in and out safely in the hot calm days of summer; and permission from the owner to fly there for a day.
                   I thought of this as we flew north through Saturday morning, the messiah and me, the green and gold of the land pulling softly by, a thousand feet below. Donald Shimoda's Travel Air floated noisily off my right wing , bouncing sunlight all directions off its mirror paints. A lovely airplane, I thought, but too big for real hard-time barnstorming. It does carry two passengers at a time, but it also weighs twice as much as a Fleet, and so needs much more field to get off the ground and back on. I owned a Travel Air once, but traded it finally for the Fleet, which can get into tiny fields, fields the size you're a lot more likely to find close to town. I could work a 500-foot field with the Fleet, where the Travel Air took 1000, 1300 feet. You tie yourself to this guy, I thought, and you tie yourself to the limits of his airplane.
                 And sure enough, the moment I thought that, I spotted a neat little cow pasture by the town going past below. It was a standard 1320-foot-farm-field cut in half, the other half sold to the town for a baseball diamond.
                 Knowing Shimoda's plane couldn't land there, I kicked my little flying machine up on her left wing, nose up, power to idle, and sank like a safe toward the ball park. We touched in the grass just beyond the left-field fence and rolled to a stop with room to spare. I just wanted to show off a little, show him what a Fleet can do, properly flown.   A burst of throttle swung me around for take off again, but when I turned to go, there was the Travel Air all set up on final approach to land. Tail down, right wing up, it looked like some glorious graceful condor turning to land on a broom-straw.
                 He was low and slow,