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Hot Air and Balloons

Hot Air and Balloons

Author: Jo Rushby
Date: 2023-03-25

Your love is like a hot air balloon, rises me up without breaking my promise to touch the sky.

I have always had a head for heights. Unlike Alice who fell into a Wonderland underground, I always saw beauty from above. As a child, I spent many hours in our back garden on a swing hung from the branch of a giant willow, its? soft floaty branches felt like a porous umbrella letting in just the right amount of light. Its roots stretched far, threatening to upend the house. For me, it was a magical cocoon, a secret garden shed where my imagination could swing into action. ?Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness? (Herman Hesse). Little did I know that it would be the story of my life, soaring high into the sky, only to fall down, then catapult into dizzy heights once more.

I once went up in a hot-air balloon. This was a contraption first put to the air in the late eighteenth century. I marvelled at its architecture, the bag known as an envelope and the basket. The propane burner swelled the nylon fabric as we slowly edged upwards. Down below, the willows tried to reach up to us, wanting to climb on board. Little did I know that that the branches of a willow wove the very basket that we stood in. Our relationship with trees is not only a physical one, but cultural and spiritual. We cannot be without them. Buddha received enlightenment under the peepal tree. Trees have feelings and speak to each other. I thought about Khalil Gibran?s quote "Trees are poems that the earth writes upon the sky."

Of course we live at a time of hot air. And by this, I do not mean climate change but the political discourse dominating the air-waves. The anger, the acrimony, the massaging of lies into facts. All this in the build up to Human Rights day! I saw a lovely T-shirt the other day that simply said Human-Kind.

Who will pierce the balloon and bring the high and mighty down to earth and end the weeping of the willows? Or should we listen to the words of Peter Pan; "Just think happy thoughts and you will fly".