Rereading Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull as a good reminder for “Find what it is you want most in the world to do – and then do it.”

Practice it every day. Experiment. Strive to know “what I can do in the air and what I can’t” – “there is so much to learn!” And through practicing this art of being who we really are we feel alive, “trembling ever so slightly with delight” and we let go of fear. Once we find what is it that we want the most, we feel power, joy, pure beauty and “how much more there is to living!”

Jonathan Seagull discovered that boredom and fear and anger are the reasons that a gull’s life is so short, and with these gone from his thought, he lived a long fine life indeed.

On perfection and being there:

You will begin to touch heaven, Jonathan, in the moment that you touch perfect speed. And that isn’t flying a thousand miles an hour, or a million, or flying at the speed of light. Because any number is a limit, and perfection doesn’t have limits. Perfect speed, my son, is being there.

… To fly as fast as thought, to go anywhere that is, you must begin by knowing that you have already arrived…

The trick was to know that his true nature lived, as perfect as an unwritten number, everywhere at once across space and time.

It always works, when you know what you’re doing.

On kindness and love

… and then you will be ready to begin the most difficult, the most powerful, the most fun of all. You will be ready to begin to fly up and know the meaning of kindness and of love.

“Jonathan, keep working on love”

And the more Jonathan practiced his kindness lessons, and the more he worked to know the nature of love, the more he wanted to go back to Earth. For in spite of his lonely past, Jonathan Seagull was born to be an instructor, and his own way of demonstrating love was to give something of the truth that he had seen to a gull who asked only a chance to see truth for himself.

On friendship

If our friendship depends on things like space and time, then when we finally overcome space and time, we’ve destroyed our own brotherhood! But overcome space, and all the we have left is Here. Overcome time, and all we have left is Now. And in the middle of Here and Now, don’t you think that we might see each other once or twice?”

 

Books in my life