Jonathan Livingston Seagull

“They are saying in the Flock that if you are not the Son of the Great Gull Himself”, Fletcher told Jonathan one morning after Advanced Speed Practice, “then you are a thousand years ahead of your time.”
Jonathan sighed. The price of being misunderstood he thought. They call you devil or they call you god. “What do you think, Fletch? Are we ahead of our time?”
A long silence, “Well, this kind of flying has always been here to be learned by anyone who wanted to discover it; that’s got nothing to do with time. We’re ahead of the fashion, maybe. Ahead of the way that most gulls fly.”“That’s something,” Jonathan said, rolling to glide inverted for a while. “That’s not half as bad as being ahead of our time”.
Richard Bach
Jonathan Livingston Seagull

The Seagull Speaks Creative Commons Copyright

Saturday, February 27, 2010

The Flight from Umeå

Looking east through the window,
Intense, bright, white light from the early morning winter sunshine,
Dissolving the clouds that shroud the frozen seascape far below.

There is an austere beauty to the gleaming snow,
A purity that enfolds the glowing sea ice in the gulf,
Surrounding oases of cooling, steaming seas.

And as I traverse this trajectory through the air,
I prepare a path ahead for my sacred beloved,
Who will soon soar through the same crystal cold skies as these.


This poem was written in February 2010 on a flight from Umeå in Northern Sweden to Stockholm. There was an incredible stillness in the frozen landscape below that I had to try and capture...


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