Evolution of a Seagull

(Picture from similar location, but different time of day.)

At Christmas in 1980, I was twelve.  One of our family friends gave me two books, slim paperbacks, that, like most books, changed my life.  One of them was T.S. Eliot’s Selected Poems, which blew up my idea of what poetry was (I was a twelve-year-old girl, remember?) and the other was Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull.  Back then, it was Jonathan I loved and returned to over and over.

 

I thought of Jonathan for the first time in a long time over the weekend in Moss Landing.  Early in the morning, I sat in my room looking out over the little finger of water between my hotel and the next batch of dunes.  There were herons and smaller duck-like birds and handfuls of seagulls.  Each different kind of bird did what they did best:  herons looming, duck friends paddling at the edge of things, and seagulls alternately flapping and riding the currents of air.  My window looked west, but in the dawn light the horizon still tinted pink and yellow, the blue coming in higher.  The water was glassy.  It was all very twelve-year-old-girl poetic, but not trite because it was really there.

 

What I remembered about Jonathan was that he wanted to fly better than any other seagull and that one of his breakthrough ideas was that he needed to emulate a falcon’s short wings to dive.  I remembered that he ended up eating better than the gulls who were focused on feeding instead of flight.  And that was about all.

 

It has romance, that idea that some higher purpose, some pursuit of excellence will transform our lives, our very selves.  But the whole thrust of the book was belied by the scene in front of me.

 

When I was twelve, I knew nothing about Buddhism or libertarianism or individualism.  Rereading Jonathan today, it’s obviously a Zen fable, complete with bodhisattvas.  It’s also a peculiarly American fable—number one best-seller!  Of course we alternative-thinking hip birds of 1970 (when the book came out) don’t want to go along with the Flock and their sold-out existence.  Our groovy excellence will set us apart, give us access to the higher planes and better sushi, all at once.  All we have to do is release our limitations, baby.

 

Seagulls are scavengers.  They’re prettier than rats and look well against a dawn or sunset sky.  Evolution has made them good-enough fliers, adaptable eaters, persistent pests.  They’ll kill for leftover fries.  That’s the place they fit in the universe.  The herons hunt.  The ducks flip their little behinds in the air to get to the tasty water plants and whatever else it is they chomp just below the surface.  The gulls do not have a falcon’s short wings on purpose because they’re not falcons.

 

To be clear, I am not saying that anatomy is destiny.  Humans are not, in fact, seagulls, even if they will kill for leftover fries.  What I’m saying is that when I saw the real gulls in the real sky, I finally had to take out Jonathan and look at him and see where he did not serve me well.

 

I’m not rejecting the Buddhist path, either.  There is wisdom to be had there, as there is in all the searches for meaning we humans persist in making.

 

I’m just done with the capitalist insistence that we always need to be doing more, doing better, changing our bodies, trying to achieve some elusive perfection.  I’m done with the image of the lone searcher, the outcast wise man.  I want the web of life, the real seagull in the real environment.  I am an evolved seagull, thank you very much.  I don’t want or need to be a falcon or a heron or even a sea otter.