Flights of time

Flight 1929 (or 1845) from Minneapolis to Seattle, Friday January 11, 2013

I am boarding my second flight of the day, from Minneapolis to Seattle. My flight number is 1929, and I am playing with the significance of that number as a year in the timeline of history. The year of the Wall Street Crash and the beginning of the Great Depression, for starters, hmm.
     When I take my seat, a cheery voice with a Southern accent informs me, through the intercom, that I am on flight 1845. I check my boarding pass. It stillsays 1929. Is the announcer confused? Maybe they'll correct in the next announcement. No, we are reassured, a few minutes later, that we are on flight 1845, still bound for Seattle. And again, "This is Delta flight 1845."
      I start to play with the idea that time has turned trickster. I have been transported back from 1929 to 1845. Let's see, what happened in 1845? The start of a war between Mexico and the United States. Thoreau moves to Walden Pond. Edgar Allen Poe publishes "The Raven". (I looked some of this up later.) Is there some connection between what happened in 1845 and what happened in 1929, and with the present?
      I glance to my right. A couple of young Amish or Mennonite women have taken the seats across the aisle. Their hair is closley confined in their gauzy caps, tied under their chins, and their homespun dresses cover their ankles. I feel I have been transported on this plane of reality back a further century, perhaps to the early 1700s.
     I take up my in-flight reading. I have brought a fresh trade paper edition of The Nature of Personal Reality, a Seth book (channeled by Jane Roberts) that I purchased in a mass market edition on 8.8.88 and started reading then. I found it enormously helpful, together with Seth Speaks and The Education of Oversoul Seven, purchased the same day, in my efforts to find a model of undertanding for the wild and reality-shifting experiences of waking up in the multiverse that were shaking my world that summer.
      I open the Seth book at random to find him speaking, with fierce clarity, about our need to change our relations with time and sleep in order to wake up to the nature of multidimensional reality. We need to grasp that sleeping for longer than four hours at a time is undesirable and unhealthy, because in sleep, whether we are conscious of this or not, we are traveling outside the body, and to stay away for too long can leave us groggy and (I would add jet-lagged). Seth recommends a main period of no more than four hours sleep, reinforced by a nap somewhere else in the daily cycle. I could not agree more, and remember how confirming it was for me to read this back in 1988, because I have always followed this plan, long before I became fully conscious of why it makes sense, except to the pill-pushers in the sleep meds industry.
     I look up and the in-flight monitors have gone dark. Then two words come up on the screen: SLEEP TIME. Yes.
     The games of time on Delta flight 1929 (or 1845) get better and better. The pilot informs us early in the game that our flight time from Minneapolis to Seattle will be precisely 3 hours 52 minutes. Now, this is a "hard time" estimate: time in the air as opposed to the soggier estimates made to cover less predictable things like time on the ground, air traffic delays, taxiing on rinways. Before I see Mount Rainier raising her glorious snowy peak above the clouds, the pilot comes on the intercom again to announce, with wondering excitement, that he has great news of us. We have gained an hour. Flight time will be only 2 hours 52 minutes. There is no obvious explanation for how we are coming in an hour early on a relatively short flight, no strong tail wind, for example, We are among the games of time.
    All of which is trilling for me, since I am on my way to lead a new adventure titled "Time Travel and Reality Creation" at magical Mosswood Hollow, one of my favorite retreat centers, out in the foothills of the Cascades. At baggage claim, where my suitcase joins the carousel immediately, my flight number is once again 1929.

    On the drive to Mosswood Hollow, I tell my host, Paul Martin, about this entertaining sequence. We stop at the Safeway in Duvall because I like to treat workshop participants to a little wine with our splendid dinners, if it is their pleasure. My bill at the cash register is precisely $111.11. A Chinese man behind beams and gives me two thumbs up. "Good luck," he chortles. "Very good luck." I feel the same. I gladly hand over 111.11 and give thanks that the worlds are playing nicely with each other today.