Keen Insight

Vegetarian Times, May, 1999

True freedom can elude even the most enlightened minds. But according to author Sam Keen, it is actually quite easily found--in a place high above the treetops.

Two weeks before his 62nd birthday, the Harvard Divinity School graduate and former Psychology Today editor swung from his first flying trapeze and discovered freedom through flight. That was six years ago. Today Keen, author of numerous theological and philosophical books, runs trapeze workshops at his home in Sonoma, Calif., and has recently penned a book detailing all that the airborne world has taught him. Learning to Fly (Broadway Books, 1998) is the story of that journey.

When it comes to attitudes about flying, people fall into three distinct groups: those who don't believe it's possible, those who've soared only in their dreams and the rare few who have actually experienced flight. Regardless of which category you fall into, you'll be pulled in by Keen's insights into the lessons of fear, humility, confidence and joy that the trapeze offers those who venture up her ladder. He goes further, however, and in these pages uses all that he's learned to explore the inhibitions that make us fallible as well as the faith that liberates us. "On those clays when my emotional life is in turmoil and I feel graceless, inept and impotent, I sometimes climb the pedestal, swing out over the chaos of the world and make one flawless move," he writes. "For a brief moment, a simple back-end uprise becomes a prayer in motion. My small gesture of mastery establishes a beachhead from which I launch an expedition to free myself from the dominion of incompetence, fear, panic and worthlessness."

Keen is a true wordsmith. His book is a rare opportunity to be privy to the inner world of someone who's a master in one realm but a neophyte in another. As Keen grapples to achieve flight--in all senses--the reader becomes enriched, heartened and elated with his every word.