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

Thursday, January 31, 2013

Too Much Noise

Too much noise
Empty noise
Try to be with you
All noise

People, kids, cars
Withdraw my mind

Peace of darkness
Stars flickering
Quiet wind whispering
A duet with the tide
Audible, but humanly unfathomable
A gentle peace
Natural

Your noise
With you
At last!

Lying back
Listening to the sweetest sound of
Nothing

But everything 




I wrote this in the late 1980s. Our house was often busy and there was a tension in the atmosphere there owing to my Dad's illness. There was often the noise of traffic outside too. I used to retreat into my bedroom for some peace This was probably one of my first attempts to meditating...trying to find some peace and quite within and actually achieving it (for once!).