#Airborne (Pt. III)
(The soaring heart of Jonathan Livingston Seagull)
Every ascent begins with exile.
To rise is to lose the flock,
yet find the wind waiting..
faithful, invisible,
unafraid to hold you.
The breath that fills him is older than dust,
borne through the reckoning
of one who first owned his own shadow..
Each atom refined,
each word made Light.
“To breathe is to bless,”
Jonathan whispers,
*“for every breath must leave the world
cleaner than it arrived.”*
His lungs remember Eden,
and the sky bends to his remembering.
Below, the drizzle hums its dull chorus..
the fat and the fed peck at comfort.
Jonathan breaks from the circle,
rising through their fog,
his wings burning clean in the cold.
“Fear not the thin air,”
he calls,
*“for only those who hunger for height
will learn how mercy breathes.”*
He learns the cost of air,
the ache of height..
and in that thin solitude
where only truth can breathe,
he knows at last
what it means to serve God
with the evil impulse:
*not by hiding it,
but by turning it toward Light.*
Before the Word becomes sound, it becomes breath.
And before breath becomes air, it remembers its Source.
This is the mystery of Jonathan..
the soul who learned that flight begins not in the sky,
but in the heart that has faced its own eclipse
and has chosen to turn toward the Sun
#