Jonathan Livingston le goéland

For most gulls, it was not flying that mattered, but eating. Life was a frantic, screeching scramble for scraps of fish and bread tossed from fishing boats. But Jonathan Livingston Seagull was different. Far out at sea, alone, he was practicing. While the Flock fought for food, he fought against his own limitations, straining to hold a painful, twisting curve in his wings, seeking not a meal, but mastery of the air. His parents despaired. “Why, Jon, why?” his mother asked. “Why can't you be like the rest of the flock?” His father warned him that winter was coming and that flight was merely a means to find food. But for Jonathan, flight was the end itself.

He pushed himself past every known boundary of gull-kind. He learned about speed, discovering why gulls don't make blazing power-dives when his wing stalled at seventy miles per hour, sending him tumbling into the sea. Battered and exhausted, floating in the moonlight, he nearly gave in to the voice that told him he was just a limited seagull who must forget this foolishness. But as he flew wearily toward shore, a new thought struck him like lightning: *a falcon's short wings!* Climbing two thousand feet, he folded his forewings tightly, extended only the dagger-tips, and plunged into a vertical dive. The wind was a monster roar as he blurred past ninety, then a hundred and forty, then two hundred and fourteen miles per hour - a gray cannonball under the moon, triumphant and in control.

When he returned to the Flock, expecting them to be wild with joy at his breakthrough, he found them assembled for a Council Gathering. He was called to Stand to Center, a place of highest honor - or highest shame. “Jonathan Livingston Seagull,” the Elder intoned, “Stand to Center for Shame in the sight of your fellow gulls!” He was condemned for reckless irresponsibility, for violating the dignity and tradition of the Gull Family. “Who is more responsible,” he cried, “than a gull who finds and follows a meaning, a higher purpose for life?” But the Flock was like stone. They closed their ears, turned their backs, and he was made Outcast, banished to a solitary life on the Far Cliffs.

Jonathan spent the rest of his days alone, but he was not lonely. His sorrow was that the others refused to open their eyes to the glory of flight. He learned to dive for the rare, tasty fish that lived deep below the surface and to sleep on the wing, crossing hundreds of miles of open ocean between sunset and sunrise. He discovered that boredom, fear, and anger are what make a gull's life so short, and with these gone, he lived a long, fine life. Then one evening, two gulls, pure as starlight, appeared at his wings. They flew with a skill that matched his own, flawlessly mirroring his every move. “We're from your Flock, Jonathan,” they said. “We've come to take you higher, to take you home.” Understanding dawned. One school was finished, and it was time for another to begin.

He rose with them into a perfect dark sky, and found himself in a place that felt like heaven. Here were gulls who thought as he did, for whom the most important thing was to touch perfection in that which they loved most: to fly. His own body was now brilliant white, his wings like polished silver, capable of speeds he had never dreamed of. His instructor, a wise gull named Sullivan, explained that this was not heaven, but simply the next world, one chosen by what is learned in the last. “You, Jon,” he said, “learned so much at one time that you didn't have to go through a thousand lives to reach this one.”

Jonathan's learning accelerated under the tutelage of the Elder Gull, Chiang, a being of immense power and wisdom. “Heaven is not a place, and it is not a time,” Chiang told him. “Heaven is being perfect.” He taught Jonathan that the body is nothing more than thought itself, and that to fly as fast as thought, one must simply know that one has already arrived. After much practice, Jonathan broke the chains of his thought and learned to vanish and reappear anywhere, anytime he wished. As Chiang prepared to move on to a higher world, he left Jonathan with one last instruction: “Keep working on love.”

The more Jonathan practiced kindness and worked to understand the nature of love, the more he wanted to return to Earth. He yearned to find that one gull who might be struggling to see beyond the fight for a breadcrumb. Despite Sullivan's warnings, Jonathan knew he had to go back. He held in his mind an image of the great gull-flocks on the shore of another time, knowing with practiced ease that he was not bone and feather, but a perfect idea of freedom and flight. He found a young, fierce bird, Fletcher Lynd Seagull, who had just been cast out for his own love of flight. “Fletcher Lynd Seagull,” a gentle voice spoke in the young bird's mind, “do you want to fly?”

Jonathan took Fletcher as his student, and soon other outcasts, curious about the joy of flying, joined them. After months of training, Jonathan led his small flock back to their home beach in a dazzling double-diamond formation, executing maneuvers the Flock had never imagined. The Law of the Flock was to ignore them, but a circle of curious gulls began to listen in the darkness. Soon, one crossed the line to ask to learn, then another, and the crowd grew. They called Jonathan a devil, or the Son of the Great Gull himself.

The true test came when Fletcher, demonstrating a high-speed pass, swerved to avoid a fledgling and smashed into a cliff of solid granite. As the Flock watched in horror, Jonathan spoke to Fletcher's consciousness, adrift in a strange sky. “What you did manage to do,” his instructor said dryly, “was to change your level of consciousness rather abruptly. It's your choice now.” Fletcher chose to return, and reappeared, alive, at the base of the cliff. The Flock, terrified by what they had seen, cried “DEVIL!” and closed in to destroy them. Instantly, Jonathan transported himself and Fletcher a half-mile away.

“I don't understand how you manage to love a mob of birds that has just tried to kill you,” Fletcher said. “Oh, Fletch, you don't love hatred and evil, of course,” Jonathan explained. “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.” He told Fletcher that he was no longer needed here, that Fletcher himself was now the instructor. Jonathan's body began to shimmer and go transparent. “Don't believe what your eyes are telling you,” he said as he vanished. “All they show is limitation.” Fletcher Gull, alone again, turned to his new students. He looked at them, and for a moment, he saw them as they really were, and he loved what he saw. *No limits, Jonathan?* he thought, and smiled. His race to learn had begun.