Re: Wing

I’ve been watching a pair of seagulls raise a pair of puffy looking offspring this past breeding season. I have a vantage point that makes me feel like a voyeur some days and an anxious grandparent on other occasions. When the parents seem in a panic as they defend their own privacy, their nest, and then their nestlings, I can’t help but believe that I’m witnessing the reason for the phrase, ‘Living on a Wing and a Prayer.’

In my home I have a folk-art sculpture of a single herring gull I made to scale out of wire, plaster casting material, and paint. I call him Webster. He reminds me that I share this planet with other sentient beings; capable of being parents, babies, teens, and ultimately road kill. Webster reminds me of the circle of life for all living things. Some times we are required to go-with-our-gut by winging it and hoping for the best outcome.

For soaring birds like gulls, it appears that the sky is virtually the limit. As I watched the repetitive runs by my neighbour avian parents, returning from a hunt, regurgitating, and flying off again, I wondered about my past role as a parent looking after the needs of my growing boys. When the emotional weather was stable and resources were in good supply the job of preparing my kids for flight seemed routinely easy. But on stormy, unpredicted days it seemed all I could do was find shelter for my trio in the nest that I had painstakingly built with my wife.

Immature gulls must be trained. Reaching the size of their parents doesn’t guarantee successful flight. I can’t imagine what that risky leap from 3 stories up must feel like. Presently I watch as they bob on the waves near shore hoping for a handout from the latest military-like feeding style of the local harbour seals. Those marine mammals hunt in pairs, laying a bubble trap for minnows then exploding through the centre of the curtain to gobble a mouthful. Gulls, young and old, wade nearby looking for scraps.

A common human dream, next to appearing in our underwear, is being in flight, soaring above our problems and having the advantage of the sky as our higher ground. From there, while on-the-wing, we observe our possibilities and potential from a more commanding perspective. I wonder if that is an advantage that my gull friends are aware of as they take wing each morning. Looking for an updraft to lessen their need to flap they squawk like they know the meaning of freedom, even boasting of their superpower.

I can only imagine that first flight feeling by engineers like the Wright Brothers. Or of poet/pilot John Gillespie Magee Jr. as he “slipped the surly bonds of earth” on “laughter- silvered wings.” When I daydream of joining my fine feathered friends in fantastical flight I soar through clouds that comfort me as a blanket might when my mood is blue. Up there I’m away from the perils of a human Earth.