Words from my Youth

I was in high school ... just 15 years old, when Richard Bach first published Jonathan Livingston Seagull in 1970. I still have my copy of that little, almost trite novella. I have dragged it all over the continent; packed and unpacked it out of untold moving boxes. I've let hundreds and hundreds of books go from my grasp over the years, but the story of the seagull who wanted to learn the secrets of perfect flight has remained an unchanging presence on my bookshelves.

There are books that I keep and read over and over and over on a regular basis. Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run with the Wolves, falls into that category. Jonathan Livingston Seagull -- does not. As enchanted as I was when I first encountered those words back in my middle adolescence, I've never revisited it in all these years.

But Sunday, I pulled it out of the stack, ran a hot bath, and crawled in. Jonathan is a very short, very simple read. There is nothing tough about it. So, I floated lazily in the warmth of my bath, and let myself travel back to the very first time that I understood that we were beings without limits; that there was more to life than just getting along; that it was important, even critical, to follow the dream no matter what the flock says.

I am older, by nearly 40 years, than I was when I first met the detemined little seagull who would break all the barriers. It seems more trivial now than it did; more trite. I'm more sophisticated and more jaded. I know from personal experience, what it costs to buck the social tides and norms. Still, Jonathan Livingston Seagull still speaks to me in the depths of my spirit. That makes me feel quietly glad.

swan