by Stephen Martin

The exhilaration of beginning to climb into the sky. Photo courtesy of Stephen Martin.

This edition of CoastViews Magazine is devoted to the Dream Machines celebration. In the spirit of that celebration, I wish to share my personal experience and the lessons I learned from flying.

In 1993 I learned how to fly off the cliffs at Fort Funston. Not in a dream machine, but with a paraglider — a parachute with a built-in harness that one sits in while riding the wind along the Pacific Ocean’s cliffs. What a thrill. To fly like a bird. To become totally one with the experience. This is what the Buddhists call living in the present moment. The excitement is so intense; there is no time to think of anything but what you are doing right now.

I had skied for many years at Lake Tahoe. Beginning in 1969, at Mount Rose, I learned to ski on the bunny slopes. Eventually I advanced to the so-called black diamond areas. But as with most experiences, I grew bored with skiing and decided to find a replacement that would take me to new dimensions, new heights.

Paragliding is flying without wings. You ride the wind along the cliffs, turning the paraglider with hand-held straps. Soaring like a bird, I felt I was in heaven. And in a manner I was. Until, on Memorial Day, I hit turbulence and my paraglider stalled.

I was 70 feet up in the air, and the wind blew my parachute back off the cliffs into the place where there is no wind. A place of no wind is hard to conceive. But wind, like water, has a predictable path. You can see water as it moves downhill. You cannot see the wind as it follows its predictable flow like water following a path of least resistance.

Back 20 feet from the cliffs I entered the place where there is no wind. As soon as I entered this space my paraglider collapsed, and I fell 70 feet onto my back, landing in a bed of ice plant. I recall the turbulence before the fall. The next moment I was falling to earth and lying on the ground and breaking my neck and doing spinal cord injury to my body as the disc between C-6 and C-7 exploded into my spinal cord.

I recall my first thought well. “I never anticipated this in my lifetime.” I could not move. I was paralyzed. Immediately other paragliders were by my side keeping me still. Someone called 911 and in minutes the ambulance was there to take me to Seton Hospital.

Running down the hill to launch. Photo courtesy of Stephen Martin.

It was six months before I learned how to walk again. The Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Vallejo has a state-of-the-art facility for spinal cord injury patients. In Vallejo, I began life all over again. Learning first how to use a wheelchair, then slowly learning how to walk again, and finally learning how to live in harmony with my life-altering injury.

I learned many lessons from this experience but without a doubt, the most important was that when confronted with a life-altering experience, self-pity is self-defeating. Somehow I instantly knew that if I climbed down into the self-pity pit, no one could come and get me out. Self-pity is a hole in life that only you can extricate yourself from. Not only that, but self-pity gets old and boring to you and your friends and family. Besides, you cease learning what is always present within life’s major lessons.

Years later I came to learn that the word nirvana means “place of no wind.” What I now know is that with this accident I visited nirvana, the place of no wind. For in that place of no wind, the paraglider collapsed, and I came crashing down to earth in my fall from the sky.

Like all survivors of near-death experiences, the catastrophe was also my greatest blessing. I learned lessons I could not have learned any other way. I know that because until I broke my neck and had a spinal cord injury, my thinking was very different. This was life-altering. This was a life lesson given to me in seconds that has enabled me to change my entire view of life.

Every crisis has within it an enormous opportunity. The economic disaster the entire world is currently going through is a once-in-a-lifetime event. Now we have to change. For many it feels like the end of economic prosperity. Everyone is affected. For the optimist, however, it is an opportunity to change our lives and live in harmony with the new economic situation that has been delivered to the entire planet. And like all catastrophes, this is too rich an experience to allow ourselves the feelings of self-pity. Now we can all learn what we are supposed to learn.

We do not yet know what is happening. No one knows. No economist, no prophet, no magician, no president. We are all flying solo, and we are in the midst of major changes that can only help us become different than we have been before. This is our collective nirvana. This is our visitation of the place with no wind. This is our once-in-a-lifetime chance to change. This is our collective fall from the sky.

Stephen Martin is a marriage and family therapist in private practice since 1980, with offices in Moss Beach. He has served as president of the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists, the largest association of marriage therapists in the world. You can read Martin’s blog at his Web site www.healmarriage.com; he can be reached at 650-726-1212 or by e-mail at stephen@healmarriage.com.

Every crisis has within it an enormous opportunity. The economic disaster the entire world is currently going through is a once-in-a-lifetime event. Now we have to change. For many it feels like the end of economic prosperity. Everyone is affected. For the optimist, however, it is an opportunity to change our lives and live in harmony with the new economic situation that has been delivered to the entire planet. And like all catastrophes, this is too rich an experience to allow ourselves the feelings of self-pity. Now we can all learn what we are supposed to learn.

We do not yet know what is happening. No one knows. No economist, no prophet, no magician, no president. We are all flying solo, and we are in the midst of major changes that can only help us become different than we have been before. This is our collective nirvana. This is our visitation of the place with no wind. This is our once-in-a-lifetime chance to change. This is our collective fall from the sky.

Every crisis has within it an enormous opportunity. The economic disaster the entire world is currently going through is a once-in-a-lifetime event. Now we have to change. For many it feels like the end of economic prosperity. Everyone is affected. For the optimist, however, it is an opportunity to change our lives and live in harmony with the new economic situation that has been delivered to the entire planet. And like all catastrophes, this is too rich an experience to allow ourselves the feelings of self-pity. Now we can all learn what we are supposed to learn.

We do not yet know what is happening. No one knows. No economist, no prophet, no magician, no president. We are all flying solo, and we are in the midst of major changes that can only help us become different than we have been before. This is our collective nirvana. This is our visitation of the place with no wind. This is our once-in-a-lifetime chance to change. This is our collective fall from the sky.

Stephen Martin is a marriage and family therapist in private practice since 1980, with offices in Moss Beach. He has served as president of the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists, the largest association of marriage therapists in the world. You can read Martin’s blog at his Web site www.healmarriage.com; he can be reached at 650-726-1212 or by e-mail at stephen@healmarriage.com.