2. SEAGULL

I feel the words, today, pulsating like a scared bird. Somewhere up there, a bunch of words dreaming with a new form, a brief gesture, as fast as light, vanishing in the same instant they start their flight. Seagulls is a sisterhood I know well; they were very proud today. Each one on the top of a lamplight, by the river, like soldiers, like a rhythm of bells. I always love them, almost-fish, radiant birds of glory! And I admire them when they stubbornly fly against the wind, when letting go would seem so easy. Why? They appear frozen in time, but their stillness is the fruit of the infamous wind and their own selfless effort to follow an impossible path. 


Nothing stops, ever, or then it dies.


Music breaths like an organism, with open lungs. It inhabits the air, the same we breath. Music belongs to the air, even before being imagined, created, composed. Then someone listens to the sounds, like I listen to my words, and captures them with a net and a cage...  Later, someone will come and release Music back to the air, where It belongs. And then It will fly like a radiant, glorious, wild bird. Such is the ecology of music, I think. 

But we listeners are trapped on the ground. Music impels us to fly, to follow the impossible path. Seagulls remember how to swim, because they were fish once. But us... can we really fly? Is trying enough? 


There is no wonder that the energy of each phrase feels like an 8 shape, the bow, the air column, the arm, the breath, it is all the same. An eternal movement of taking off and landing, being born and almost dying and start the cycle over and over, hindered only by the surprises found in the way, by delightful counterpoints, by the occasional flower that makes us stop and stare and smell, the honey, the bush, the rage. 


If I am ever born again (a possibility I doubt with fierce passion), I will ask the boss to come back as a seagull.