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

Wednesday, January 1, 2014

Evening Comes


Evening comes,
And I Am,
Alive.

This hill again,
Spring mist rising down below,
Hazy shadows are bushes and trees in the fog.
It's cold and I'm damp.

The sun is huge,
Glows a fiery red,
'Laughing fat man's head',
Slips down and leaves heat,
In the Earth,
And the skylarks cry,
High.

The haze rises,
This mist mutes all sound,
The skylarks fade,
And I'm still cold,
Swimming inside,
Me?

This mist is like a lake,
How these moors were before,
Men and drainage came.

The sounds have gone,
Dampened in the shadows,
As night comes and it gets colder.

I sigh and I leave,
Because I try,
But I still don't understand.

Written on 'my favourite hill' overlooking Tealham Moor, Hozzard, Wedmore, Somerset, England
Sometime 1987-1990