Flying Kites into Tomorrow

I flew kites today with a group of eight seven-year old children. The wind was blowing out of the southeast, a gentle breeze just strong enough to hold our kites aloft. The children let all the line out and the kites floated at the end of their barely visible tethers hundreds of feet in the air. A certain peace came over the children while we flew. Some wanted to hold the line, some wanted to sit down and play in the dirt, some wanted to run out, following the line of the kite, to where it might crash should the wind shift or wane. We've flown kites together before, but only in winds too strong for both the children and the kites. So today's calm and successful outing was remarkable and earnestly felt healing for all of us. The Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner described a total of twelve senses with which the healthy human being perceives the world, instead of the five senses we customarily recognize. Among these is the sense of self movement. This sense can be considered similar to what is termed proprioception: "The ability to sense stimuli arising within the body regarding position, motion, and equilibrium." (definition from WebMD) According to Rudolf Steiner, this sense is not only stimulated by the movement of one's own body in space but is also active in the observation of the movement of another body. As we observe something else moving, our awareness enters that moving object, and we are able to sense its movement through our own sense of self movement. This idea is also gaining traction in the main stream through the discovery of mirror neurons. An article on the website of the American Psychological Association states, "Mirror neurons are a type of brain cell that respond equally when we perform an action and when we witness someone else perform the same action." Currently, the only tests that have recognized individual neurons with this capacity have been on monkeys, but it is known that humans have general areas of the brain that perform this mirroring function. Without attaching electrodes directly to the brain (which I guess we don't do to humans, only monkeys) we are not able to isolate the individual neurons, but we know the activity is there. This discovery from the 1990's has tremendous ramifications for our understanding of such developmental challenges as autism, for the way people, (especially children) learn through imitation, and, ultimately, for hope in the innate, hard-wired capacity for the human being to empathize with their fellow human beings. It also tells us that when we are flying kites, there is a very good chance, according to the insights of Dr. Steiner and many others more recently through studies of proprioception and neurology, that we are actually experiencing the sensation of flight. Some part of us is up there floating at the end of the barely visible tether, tentatively dancing against the backdrop of the flat blue sky with the winds that ebb and rise. The boys who normally wrestle and tackle one another were excited and engaged but calm. The children less prone to playful aggression and impulse control challenges rode the edge of boredom but sensed a rightness to the kite flying and joined or sat quietly playing with the grasses and dirt. The flight of a kite in a prairie breeze, the soaring of an osprey searching the ocean below for a fish on which to dine, the arm gestures of a toddler rocking their doll to sleep, the roaring lap of a Nascar vehicle around a petrol fumed track, the pain of seeing someone trip and fall on a concrete sidewalk, a Syrian refugee standing outside a tent with their child in their arms--our neurology demands we sense the movement, the intent, even the feelings of that which we observe. We can see it in the children as clearly as a rainbow colored kite against that flat blue mountain sky, in the lightness of their steps, in their focused but distant gaze--they can't help but reach out and feel it, experience it, within. The future may be asking us all to fly more kites, perhaps our mirrors need some polishing.