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, February 11, 2010

The Night Time

Written in Somerset,
Early 1991 

Crisp,
The night time calls me,
As it does sometimes,
Like a pilgrim to another land.

Crisp,
Chill in the air,
An owl hoots and I step out,
Into the swaying of the trees,
And the silence of the night.

Starlit,
A few clouds pass,
In front of the crescent,
That masquerades as the moon.

Crisp,
The night time fills me,
Feeling plumes of breath,
Dancing and disappearing,
In front of me.

Smiling,
Stepping on,
Through fields, over hills,
Where morning will reveal,
Where Jack has been,
And carpeted the ground,
With sprinkled icy, whiteness.

And I will awake.
Refreshed,
Staring from my window,
Towards the east,
At the sun above my coffee cup,
Wondering how it is,
That a world so wonderful,
So simple,
Can have so many woes.

This poem was written in Somerset in early 1991 during the very cold, snowy winter. I would sometimes go out for a walk in the early morning darkness... it was something I felt called to do...  I remember hoar frost on the trees and returning home to the cottage to write this.