None of his students had come to believe that the flight of ideas could possibly be as real as the flight of wind and feather. "Your whole body, from wingtip to wingtip," Jonathan would say, "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..."
As the days went past, Jonathan found himself thinking time and again of the Earth from which he had come. If he had known there just a tenth,just a hundredth, of what he knew here, how much more life would havemeant! He stood on the sand and fell to wondering if there was a gull backthere who might be struggling to break out of his limits, to see themeaning of flight beyond a way of travel to get a breadcrumb from arowboat. Perhaps there might even have been one made Outcast for speakinghis truth in the face of the Flock. And the more Jonathan practiced hiskindness lessons, and the more he worked to know the nature of love, themore 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 ofdemonstrating love was to give something of the truth that he had seen toa gull who asked only a chance to see truth for himself.
When he returned, the flock was amused to see Jon and the other fellow gulls fly, at that height, at that speed, they asked how he expects them to fly and that they are not gifted. Jon said, "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."
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