I hear it (or read it) time and again.
"You are a keeper"... "You should be kept, not discarded"... "Your ex missed a keeper"
I am not.
I fly. It is my first dream, it is my last wish. My home is small and winged, my hearth a warm engine turning blades, turbine or propeller, suspended for an instant between the round rock and the endless void, in a sky as limitless as the whole Universe; given the right craft, I can climb forever, to reach the Voyagers and join them in their ascent to eternity.
All who fly are ephemeral, transitory; never are we motionless, for the wind demands that we follow its chaos, and the equilibrium of one instant is never that of the following ones. The hand on the stick, the control surfaces, the aircraft herself, know of no permanence; our comrades of the heavens, bird and bat and insect, are also tremulous, vigilant, motile, the feather, finger or vein ready to dance and return to more dancing.
Flight is thus a solitary endeavor; even the great flocks, the thunderous swarms of metal or chitin, are assemblages where each flier faces challenges and events all their own; the great wind looks each one of us in the face, and all flights will be different, even in company; each pair of wings earned is an invitation to a one-on-one dance with the wind, the Earth, and the void.
And because we are forever moving, because the wind gives us a small place in its great reign to carry us along, because each flight is unique, and infinite, we who fly cannot be kept.
There is one, just one of all the ways humans and other living beings interact, that is a meeting of equals: falconry
The bird is not tamed; its habits and life are not altered to make it submit and depend; it is not reduced to beg, nor enslaved; it is not caged for life. The art of blood and claw is learned before, and the falconer never dares change the bird's art, nor will the bird ever be constrained while on pursuit. The hunt remains as it has ever been, as it was before sleeve and hood, and as it will go on after the last hunt, for the bird will return to freedom, to do what raptors have done since the Earth was young and the theropod learned to fly.
The falconer is no gaoler, neither is their role that of herder, driver... keeper. The bird chooses the falconer as much as the falconer does the bird, and from the first time, the bond can end even before it is established, for there are no cut feathers, no leash, rein or yoke; and the prey going into the hunter's bag is always that chosen by the raptor, not the falconer.
Even when the bond is profound, shared and long, it is never permanent; a time comes when all falconers untie the bells and take the hood off for the last time, and the bird bides farewell, never to return to the arm. Very few birds die in the arms of their partners in the hunt.
Even the Arabs, not the most freedom-loving of humans, have understood; and they pamper their birds, they respect them and treat them like no other being. It is one of the paradoxes of the human condition that oil has paid for the most successful raptor conservation and reintroduction programs, and that raptors are bred not to be slaves, but to be released without knowing if they will ever join the sharp-eyed Bedouin in the hunt; generations may pass between the hand-raised chick returned to the wild and the descendant trained to stand on the leather sleeve.
It is a meeting of the wills, and a dance of partners, this art of falconry; by will is the prey conquered, and by will is the flight aimed back to the small dot on the ground, and by will is the bird taught, not by whip and fear and chain is it held, but by will alone. And when the will aims elsewhere, then is the bond gone, and the memories treasured, of a time unequalled and a life lived in a few wingbeats, a keening cry and a line held true through the heavens and the neck of the prey.
So it is with us who fly. We dare intrude in the castle of the King of All Winds, and learn something the human body was never designed for; we shaved apes of land and water, we who were born to run, have instead dreamed and strove for untold millennia, for some of us are not of the land and the blue sea, but somehow of the sky.
We are raptors too; we carry the will of the hunter who ran down the swiftest of the kine, who could outlast hyena and cuon and be more patient and cunning than lion or wolf. Like the red hawk of the sahuaro, we learn to hunt as many, and then hunt other fliers in the heat and terrible theater of war.
We are fleet of flight, and swift of thought, and we are nomads, visitors to the green and the wet, to plain and crag; for we come down from home, and every moment we spend here, we yearn for it.
And so I humbly ask of you, the beautiful, the great and good, the much better half of humanity: do not keep me.
Do not cut my wings, for they were earned after 40 years of toil, hope, despair and hope regained.
Do not hang a cage for me, for no matter how ample or well furnished, the bars will be all I can see, and they will spear my head and still my heart and bring endless pain.
Do not plan a life with me, for in flight a life can be eternity in one loop, a year in an instant while the storm tosses, time immobile and immemorial on a clear day over the ocean.
Let me show you my home; let us enter the great hall of all winds, dance among the clouds, wonder at the great Galaxy over our heads on clear nights, see the far-off light of Mjölnir and the shadow of the Earth and the flashes of the Sun.
Let me show you the small, precious rock that we share, from where it looks the most beautiful, from above. Let us see all that is grand and great, extensive and profound, ponderous and wonderful and detailed and baroque. Let me show you your Earth, as only one who sees Gaia from home can show it.
Let me show you the awe and wonder we of the Y, the inchoate, the incomplete, feel in our deepest, basic existence when we learn of woman and partake of her warmth, her diversity, her kindness and her steel; Let us depart the cesspool of patriarchy and custom and dare to live and exist and create, and let me ask you to bless the moments, the time and the space you grant me near you.
Let me hope you are also of the sky; let me hope you will find your way home, and learn to fly, and earn the wings that last forever; let us defeat the dead hand of the enslaver, and let me be that small, final step to the freedom and the infinity you deserve as a free being.
Let me be a moment, a meteor, a comet; let us live the transient, and keep the memories, which never lose luster, like the flavors of childhood, like the sounds of music heard yesterday and the day after birth.
Let us share the light that burns bright; let us share the shelter of the dark; let us be eternal in an instant.