Learning to Really Fly

This blog is dedicated to the participants attending The Icarus Foundation's first fundraiser and the volunteers and sponsors who made it possible.

Here's the reason why we chose Icarus as the name of our foundation......Let me tell you a story....Are you sitting comfortably, then I'll begin........

Once upon a time, a long time ago……Icarus and his dad Daedelus were stuck – imprisoned  on a Greek  island.

So are we humans on this planet.

Like our Greek heroes, we humans are stuck in an old way of thinking about ourselves and our relationship with our home, planet Earth.

It took an enormous spark of creativity and imagination for Icarus and Daedelus  to see themselves flying out of their predicament. It will take us an equal  amount of creativity and imagination to see ourselves living in a different way with the environment, other life forms, and each other.

It also took huge courage to put on their wings,  jump off a cliff and flap hard enough to fly beyond the shores of their prison. It will take equal courage for us to defy the gravity of habitual thought and create a less wasteful and selfish way of life and living. It will often mean doing and saying things that others don’t want to hear.

There is nothing sustainable about mass tourism and the growth rates it needs to sustain its old business model even though much good comes from this most treasured human activity. Unless we change, we too will get stuck – imprisoned by the limits of our imagination.

What we have to conceive is a form of travel and exploration that minimizes the true cost and maximizes the real value to all – the individual who has left home, the host who cares for the guest and the community that makes it safe and efficient to move from origin to destination.

The only tourism worth imagining is a tourism that leaves no sooty, carbon footprints. That’s what it will mean to fly in the bigger sense…. and having escaped our prison – where our accumulative waste defiled and diminished our space – we must learn to fly neither too high or too low. We must not let our sense of self importance carry us close to the unforgiving heat of the sun; or our sense of insignificance drag down into the waters of despair, denial or indifference.

In the original Greek myth, Icarus, like many over ambitious, over confident and inexperienced would-be heroes was killed by his own hubris. It doesn’t have to be that way for our generation. We can learn to fly and stay flying…….But it will take imagination and courage.

You believe that – that’s why you’ve come to this fund raiser. How you imagine what true flying is all about and how you take those first steps towards the cliff edge is your choice.  Thank you for believing that you can. It’s a wonderfully hopeful first start.

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