Kanokalender
29. januar 2010
Dagens billede
Dagens tekst
It
was morning, and the new sun sparkled gold across the ripples of a
A mile from shore a fishing boat chummed the water
and the word for Breakfast Flock flashed through the air,
till a crowd of a
It
was another busy day beginning.
But way off alone, out by himself beyond boat and shore,
Jonathan Livingston Seagull was practicing.
A hundred feet in the sky he lowered his webbed feet, lifted his beak,
and strained to hold a painful hard twisting curve through his wings.
The curve meant that he would fly
and now he slowed until the wind was a whisper in his face,
until the ocean stood still beneath him.
He narrowed his eyes in fierce concentration,
held
his breath, forced one... single... more... inch...
Then
his feathers ruffled, he stalled and fell.
Seagulls, as you know, never falter, never stall.
To
stall in the air is for them disgrace and it is dishonor.
But Jonathan Livingston Seagull, unashamed,
stretching his wings again in that trembling hard curve
- slowing, slowing, and stalling once more -
was
no ordinary bird.
Most
gulls don't bother to learn more than the simplest facts of
- how to get from shore to food and back again.
For most gulls, it is not flying that matters, but eating.
For this gull, though, it was not eating that mattered, but flight.
More than anything else.
Jonathan Livingston Seagull loved to fly.
This kind of thinking, he found,
is not the way to make one's self popular with other birds.
Even his parents were dismayed as Jonathan spent whole days alone,
making hundreds of low-level glides, experimenting.
Jonathan Livingstone Seagull
By Richard Bach