by Richard Bach
“Your whole body, from wingtip to wingtip,” Jonathan would say, other times, “is nothing more than your thought itself, in a form you can see. Break the chains of your thought, and you break the chains of your body, too. . . .” But no matter how he said it, it sounded like pleasant fiction, and they needed more to sleep.
It was only a month later that Jonathan said the time had come to return to the Flock.
“We’re not ready!” said Henry Calvin Gull. “We’re not welcome! We’re Outcast! We can’t force ourselves to go where we’re not welcome, can we?”
“We’re free to go where we wish and to be what we are,” Jonathan answered, and he lifted from the sand and turned east, toward the home grounds of the Flock.
There was brief anguish among his students, for it is the Law of the Flock that an Outcast never returns, and the Law had not been broken once in ten thousand years. The Law said stay; Jonathan said go; and by now he was a mile across the water. If they waited much longer, he would reach a hostile Flock alone.
“Well, we don’t have to obey the law if we’re not a part of the Flock, do we?” Fletcher said, rather self-consciously. “Besides, if there’s a fight, we’ll be a lot more help there than here.”
And so they flew in from the west that morning, eight of them in a double-diamond formation, wingtips almost overlapping. They came across the Flock’s Council Beach at a hundred thirty-five miles per hour, Jonathan in the lead, Fletcher smoothly at his right wing, Henry Calvin struggling gamely at his left. Then the whole formation rolled slowly to the right, as one bird . . . level . . . to . . . inverted . . . to . . . level, the wind whipping over them all.
The squawks and grockles of everyday life in the Flock were cut off as though the formation were a giant knife, and eight thousand gull-eyes watched, without a single blink. One by one, each of the eight birds pulled sharply upward into a full loop and flew all the way around to a dead-slow stand-up landing on the sand. Then as though this sort of thing happened every day, Jonathan Seagull began his critique of the flight.
“To begin with,” he said with a wry smile, “you were all a bit late on the join-up . . .”
It went like lightning through the Flock. Those birds are Outcast! And they have returned! And that . . . that can’t happen! Fletcher’s predictions of battle melted in the Flock’s confusion.
“Well, sure, O.K., they’re Outcast,” said some of the younger gulls, “but hey, man, where did they learn to fly like that?”
It took almost an hour for the Word of the Elder to pass through the Flock: Ignore them. The gull who speaks to an Outcast is himself Outcast. The gull who looks upon an Outcast breaks the Law of the Flock.
Gray-feathered backs were turned upon Jonathan from that moment onward, but he didn’t appear to notice. He held his practice sessions directly over the Council Beach and for the first time began pressing his students to the limit of their ability.
“Martin Gull!” he shouted across the sky. “You say you know low-speed flying. You know nothing till you prove it! FLY!”
So quiet little Martin William Seagull, startled to be caught under his instructor’s fire, surprised himself and became a wizard of low speeds. In the lightest breeze he could curve his feathers to lift himself without a single flap of wing from sand to cloud and down again.
Likewise Charles-Roland Gull flew the Great Mountain Wind to twenty-four thousand feet, came down blue from the cold thin air, amazed and happy, determined to go still higher tomorrow.
Fletcher Seagull, who loved aerobatics like no one else, conquered his sixteen-point vertical slow roll and the next day topped it off with a triple cartwheel, his feathers flashing white sunlight to a beach from which more than one furtive eye watched.
Every hour Jonathan was there at the side of each of his students, demonstrating, suggesting, pressuring, guiding. He flew with them through night and cloud and storm, for the sport of it, while the Flock huddled miserably on the ground.
When the flying was done, the students relaxed on the sand, and in time they listened more closely to Jonathan. He had some crazy ideas that they couldn’t understand, but then he had some good ones that they could.
Gradually, in the night, another circle formed around the circle of students—a circle of curious gulls listening in the darkness for hours on end, not wishing to see or be seen of one another, fading away before daybreak.
It was a month after the Return that the first gull of the Flock crossed the line and asked to learn how to fly. In his asking, Terrence Lowell Gull became a condemned bird, labeled Outcast; and the eighth of Jonathan’s students.
The next night from the Flock came Kirk Maynard Gull, wobbling across the sand, dragging his left wing, to collapse at Jonathan’s feet. “Help me,” he said very quietly, speaking in the way that the dying speak. “I want to fly more than anything else in the world . . .”
“Come along then,” said Jonathan. “Climb with me away from the ground, and we’ll begin.”
“You don’t understand. My wing. I can’t move my wing.”
“Maynard Gull, you have the freedom to be yourself, your true self, here and now, and nothing can stand in your way. It is the Law of the Great Gull, the Law that Is.”
“Are you saying I can fly?”
“I say you are free.”
As simply and as quickly as that, Kirk Maynard Gull spread his wings, effortlessly, and lifted into the dark night air. The Flock was roused from sleep by his cry, as loud as he could scream it, from five hundred feet up; “I can fly! Listen! I CAN FLY!”
By sunrise there were nearly a thousand birds standing outside the circle of students, looking curiously at Maynard. They didn’t care whether they were seen or not, and they listened, trying to understand Jonathan Seagull.
He spoke of very simple things—that it is right for a gull to fly, that freedom is the very nature of his being, that whatever stands against that freedom must be set aside, be it ritual or superstition or limitation in any form.
“Set aside,” came a voice from the multitude, “even if it be the Law of the Flock?”
“The only true law is that which leads to freedom,” Jonathan said. “There is no other.”
“How do you expect us to fly as you fly?” came another voice. “You are special and gifted and divine, above other birds.”
“Look at Fletcher! Lowell! Charles-Roland! Judy Lee! Are they also special and gifted and divine? No more than you are, no more than I am. The only difference, the very only one, is that they have begun to understand what they really are and have begun to practice it.”
His students, save Fletcher, shifted uneasily. They hadn’t realized that this was what they were doing.
The crowd grew larger every day, coming to question, to idolize, to scorn.
• • •
“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 anybody 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.”
• • •
It happened just a week later. Fletcher was demonstrating the elements of high-speed flying to a class of new students. He had just pulled out of his dive from seven thousand feet, a long gray streak firing a few inches above the beach, when a young bird on its first flight glided directly into his path, calling for its mother. With a tenth of a second to avoid the youngster, Fletcher Lynd Seagull snapped hard to the left, at something over two h
undred miles per hour, into a cliff of solid granite.
It was, for him, as though the rock were a giant hard door into another world. A burst of fear and shock and black as he hit, and then he was adrift in a strange strange sky, forgetting, remembering, forgetting; afraid and sad and sorry, terribly sorry.
The voice came to him as it had in the first day that he had met Jonathan Livingston Seagull.
“The trick, Fletcher, is that we are trying to overcome our limitations in order, patiently. We don’t tackle flying through rock until a little later in the program.”
“Jonathan!”
“Also known as the Son of the Great Gull,” his instructor said dryly.
“What are you doing here? The cliff! Haven’t I . . . didn’t I . . . die?”
“Oh, Fletch, come on. Think. If you are talking to me now, then obviously you didn’t die, did you? What you did manage to do was to change your level of consciousness rather abruptly. It’s your choice now. You can stay here and learn on this level—which is quite a bit higher than the one you left, by the way—or you can go back and keep working with the Flock. The Elders were hoping for some kind of disaster, but they’re startled that you obliged them so well.”
“I want to go back to the Flock, of course. I’ve barely begun with the new group!”
“Very well, Fletcher. Remember what we were saying about one’s body being nothing more than thought itself . . . ?”
• • •
Fletcher shook his head and stretched his wings and opened his eyes at the base of the cliff, in the center of the whole Flock assembled. There was a great clamor of squawks and screes from the crowd when first he moved.
“He lives! He that was dead lives!”
“Touched him with a wingtip! Brought him to life! The Son of the Great Gull!”
“No! He denies it! He’s a devil! DEVIL! Come to break the Flock!”
There were four thousand gulls in the crowd, frightened at what had happened, and the cry DEVIL! went through them like the wind of an ocean storm. Eyes glazed, beaks sharp, they closed in to destroy.
“Would you feel better if we left, Fletcher?” asked Jonathan.
“I certainly wouldn’t object too much if we did . . .”
Instantly they stood together a half-mile away, and the flashing beaks of the mob closed on empty air.
“Why is it,” Jonathan puzzled, “that the hardest thing in the world is to convince a bird that he is free, and that he can prove it for himself if he’d just spend a little time practicing? Why should that be so hard?”
Fletcher still blinked from the change of scene. “What did you just do? How did we get here?”
“You did say you wanted to be out of the mob, didn’t you?”
“Yes! But how did you . . .”
“Like everything else, Fletcher. Practice.”
• • •
By morning the Flock had forgotten its insanity, but Fletcher had not. “Jonathan, remember what you said a long time ago, about loving the Flock enough to return to it and help it learn?”
“Sure.”
“I don’t understand how you manage to love a mob of birds that has just tried to kill you.”
“Oh, Fletch, you don’t love that! You don’t love hatred and evil, of course. You have to practice and see the real gull, the good in every one of them, and to help them see it in themselves. That’s what I mean by love. It’s fun, when you get the knack of it.
“I remember a fierce young bird, for instance, Fletcher Lynd Seagull, his name. Just been made Outcast, ready to fight the Flock to the death, getting a start on building his own bitter hell out on the Far Cliffs. And here he is today building his own heaven instead, and leading the whole Flock in that direction.”
Fletcher turned to his instructor, and there was a moment of fright in his eye. “Me leading? What do you mean, me leading? You’re the instructor here. You couldn’t leave!”
“Couldn’t I? Don’t you think that there might be other flocks, other Fletchers, that need an instructor more than this one, that’s on its way toward the light?”
“Me? Jon, I’m just a plain seagull, and you’re . . .”
“. . . the only Son of the Great Gull, I suppose?” Jonathan sighed and looked out to sea. “You don’t need me any longer. You need to keep finding yourself, a little more each day, that real, unlimited Fletcher Seagull. He’s your instructor. You need to understand him and to practice him.”
A moment later Jonathan’s body wavered in the air, shimmering, and began to go transparent. “Don’t let them spread silly rumors about me, or make me a god. O.K., Fletch? I’m a seagull. I like to fly, maybe . . .”
“JONATHAN!”
“Poor Fletch. Don’t believe what your eyes are telling you. All they show is limitation. Look with your understanding, find out what you already know, and you’ll see the way to fly.”
The shimmering stopped. Jonathan Seagull had vanished into empty air.
After a time, Fletcher Gull dragged himself into the sky and faced a brand-new group of students, eager for their first lesson.
“To begin with,” he said heavily, “you’ve got to understand that a seagull is an unlimited idea of freedom, an image of the Great Gull, and your whole body, from wingtip to wingtip, is nothing more than your thought itself.”
The young gulls looked at him quizzically. Hey, man, they thought, this doesn’t sound like a rule for a loop.
Fletcher sighed and started over. “Hm. Ah . . . very well,” he said, and eyed them critically. “Let’s begin with Level Flight.” And saying that, he understood all at once that his friend had quite honestly been no more divine than Fletcher himself.
No limits, Jonathan? he thought. Well, then, the time’s not distant when I’m going to appear out of thin air on your beach, and show you a thing or two about flying!
And though he tried to look properly severe for his students, Fletcher Seagull suddenly saw them all as they really were, just for a moment, and he more than liked, he loved what it was he saw. No limits, Jonathan? he thought, and he smiled. His race to learn had begun.
For a few years, after Jonathan Seagull vanished from the beaches of the Flock, it was the strangest bunch of birds that had ever lived on earth. Many of them had actually begun to understand the message he had brought, and it was as common to see a young gull flying upside-down and practicing loops as it was to see an old one, unwilling to open his eyes to the glory of flying, boring straight and level out to the fishing boats, hoping for a supper of soggy bread.
Fletcher Lynd Seagull and the other students of Jonathan spread their instructor’s teaching of freedom and flight in long missionary journeys to every flock on the Coastline.
There were remarkable events in those days. Fletcher’s own students, and students of their students, were flying with precision and a kind of joy that had never been seen before. Here and there were individual birds who flew aerobatics as they practiced, better than Fletcher, sometimes better even than Jonathan himself had flown them. The learning curve of a highly motivated seagull goes on steeply off the top of any graph, and now and then there were students who overcame limits so perfectly that they disappeared, as Jonathan had, from the face of an earth too limited to contain them.
It was a golden age, for a while. Crowds of gulls elbowed in upon Fletcher, to touch the one who had touched Jonathan Seagull, a bird they now considered divine. In vain did Fletcher insist that Jonathan had been a gull like them all, who had learned as they all could learn. They were after him constantly to hear Jonathan’s exact words, his precise gestures, to find tiny details about him. The more they begged for trivia, the more uneasy grew Fletcher Gull. When once they had been interested in practicing the message . . . training and flying fast and free and glorious in the sky . . . now they began to slack away from difficult work, and became ever so slightly wild-eyed over legends of Jonathan, as though he were the idol of a fan club.
“Gull Fletcher,” they asked, “
did the Magnificent Jonathan say, ‘We are in truth the ideas of the Great Gull . . .’ or was it, ‘We are in fact the ideas of the Great Gull . . .’?”
“Please. Call me Fletcher. Just Fletcher Seagull,” he would reply, appalled that they would use a term of reverence upon him. “And what difference does it make, which word he used? Both are correct, we are ideas of the Great Gull . . .” But he knew they were not satisfied with his answer, they thought he had dodged their question.
“Gull Fletcher, when the Divine Gull Jonathan rose to fly, did he move one step toward the wind . . . or two?” Before he could correct the one question, another was fired. “Gull Fletcher, did the Sacred Gull Jonathan have gray eyes or golden eyes?” The questioner, a bird with gray eyes, was in anguish for one answer only.
“I don’t know! Forget his eyes! He had . . . purple eyes! How can that matter? What he came to tell us was that we can fly, if we would just wake up and stop standing around on the beach talking about the color of somebody’s eyes! Now watch, and I’ll show you a Pinwheel Turn . . .”
But more than one gull, finding it wearying to practice something as difficult as a Pinwheel, flew home musing, “The Great One had purple eyes—not like my eyes, not like the eyes of any gull that ever lived.”
The classes changed, with years, from wide soaring poems in flight to hushed talk about Jonathan before and after practice; to long involved recitations on the sand about the Divine One, with no flying ever done by anybody.
Fletcher and the other students of Jonathan were at turns puzzled and correctful and firm and furious at the change, but they were helpless to stop it. They were honored, and worse—revered, but they were no longer heard, and the birds who practiced flying were fewer and fewer.
One by one the Original Students passed away, leaving cold dead bodies behind them. The Flock, seizing upon the bodies, held great tearful ceremonies over them, burying them under enormous cairns of pebbles; each pebble laid in place after a long sorrowing sermon by a deadly solemn bird. The cairns became shrines, and it was required ritual for every gull who wished Oneness to drop a pebble and a doleful speech upon the cairn. No one knew what Oneness was, but it was such a serious deep thing that a gull could never ask without being thought a fool. Why, everybody knows what Oneness is, and the prettier the pebble you drop on Gull Martin’s tomb, the better your chance of getting there.
