Awakening 2- The flying solar plexus.

Sometimes the soul is so saturated with something undefined: beauty, love, longing, that it becomes one with the air, like a cloud of midges or a field of swelling barley , a crack willow trailing pale new fronds into the music of a brook. My solar plexus is habitually heavy with accumulated dread, but at this moment it soars on the warm air currents and anyone would expect it to drop right out of the sky and splat onto the hard tarmac runway like the proverbial pound of strawberry jam. The idea of the soul as a pollen -laden bee, or a throbbing Lancaster bomber bumblehumming , finds a frequency whose tune almost convinces me that it actually does exist.

How else can I explain the Eureka moment of revelationary understanding that when one is young and is stirred by quickenings of knowledge of love, and longs for that capacity for love to be so filled with love that it brims? I remember imagining a time when my inner and outer world would be one huge Elizabethan May Revel, where some magic potion swapped on the tongues of faun kisses merges the spirits of lovers, and one of those lovers would be me. Or more, the part of the duality which was me would not be able to be distinguished from my imagined Lover.

There are times in life when that love does grab the guts and twist them to ecstatic pain- the birth of one's child, the birth of anyone's child come to that, a friend's pain shared and eased, a long tailed comet moving across the sky, a blood red moon, an untamed sea, a tree in full bridal blossom, the earthy dampness of a fresh dug grave. Always however there is a beautiful yearning for something undefined that drags and strains like a line on a kite. There is a hope, nay, a certainty that at some point in life, that yearning will be fulfilled. We have to believe that, don't we, because if we do not believe it, it cannot happen. Ever.

We left the Aerodrome on Sunday afternoon in convoy of a Half- Track, a Diamond T, a Rio towing a wartime Jeep and an old British Army Landrover, with our 1943 Willys Jeep and trailer after a weekend of glorious sunshine and relaxed enjoyment. We took the convoy through the centre of York. People waved and cheered. We waved back. Out of the city we rumbled along the country lanes that cut through fields of oilseed rape whose scent filled our faces, and whose delicate yellowness bathed us in reflected light. Chestnut candles lit the way through green tunnels. The wide sky over the vale of York met the ridge of the purple moors, while the white horse of Kilvington galloped like a shining destrier from another dimension on the distant horizon, beyond the ubiquitous patchwork of the crop fields that tugged at the essenses of time and my spirit's self imposed boundaries.

The flash of realisation came- this was it. This is the ultimate point, where everything melts away and what is left is pure abstract . One of those watersheds in life where if you were to die at that moment, like getting to the top of a mountain after a long and arduous climb, and jumping off into the void because there is nothing else, there can never be anything else to match the purity of elation, you would die fulfilled; and if that was the last the eyes of your soul had seen to hold in image for eternity, that would be the best anyone could ever hope to achieve. That adolescent awakening longing, of being loved and loving and becoming Nothingness; Nothing at all except for an explosion of sparkling atoms , a cloud of midges irridescent in the late afternoon sun of an English Maytime.