The Gulls

My fingers searched out and held to the lips and bumps of the algae-slick rocks, pulling me ahead. The splash of the waves had been cold as I had entered, but now as I floated on my stomach, the water felt only cool, like a shady spot in the grass. The breeze gently dipped and crested as did the sea, though neither seemed to pay mind to the other. Sun flared off the boundary of water and air.

A broken pier stood ten feet away in the surf. The walking-planks had been removed or lost to the ocean, and only a few sagging beams were left, corralling a clutch of weather-beaten columns. The unceasing action of the sea had eaten away at the base of the posts, leaving them tapered and ragged where they met the water, like a colony of termites had gnawed away at them for days until finally becoming full and drying into crystals of salt. Along the structure, browned nails backed out crookedly from their holes, some headless, some bent, some at the core of a comet of rust, cast into the wood. Barnacles lined the underbelly of the beams, dripping, though they hovered feet from the water. I could not say how long the construction was like to remain standing as it seemed that it should have already collapsed.

But it was this decay that the gulls had marked for their own. They had made of the pier an outpost, a fishing perch, perhaps something of a resting place. I stopped and watched them as they swooped and lighted and cried into the wind. Their heads and breasts gleamed white while their wings and tails tapered to the color of an evening storm. Feathers caught the breeze, lifted a bit and fluttered and then fell back into place as bony webbed feet somehow held the gulls fast to their perches. Their beaks, sharp and yellow, led their gazes this way and that, always cutting the air in confidence.

They all stood equally apart, preening and surveying, each at a distance from the next that could easily have held two more birds had such been required. As it was, though, they filled the space they had been offered on that pier perfectly and completely. At intervals one would leave, deciding at random, it seemed, to stretch out its wings and go sailing off like a kite. In kind, others would arrive, briefly upsetting the established order with a flurry of squawks and lunges and feints that always died down in seconds. Legs would take a step, heads would swivel, wings would fold, and a new equilibrium would settle.

Those gulls, I knew then, as they stood sentinel in the sun on that failing work of man, cared nothing of the past or the future. They did not contemplate their own fears or anxieties, nor any sadness or guilt, nor prior wounds or shortcomings, nor any inflated surety of doom as we are always so eager to do with our overstuffed primate brains. They cared not where their next meal would come from nor even considered the need for it, much less what troubles the next day would bring or the next second. Instead, they watched the sea, they allowed their eyes to close, they groomed their feathers, and they rested, unknowing, in the wholeness of creation. Those birds were content in each and every moment in a way that I knew I could only strive for. It is in them to live and only to live.

We, for our part, are blessed and cursed with more, though. We know what we are; we see into ourselves as the birds do not; our minds transcend the time and space we occupy; and as such we are troubled in equal measure more.  The useless rumination that chews at the inside of our heads and the words we mutter for no one but ourselves to hear could fill volumes. Yet to what end? Are we fashioned so that we need such burdens when the gulls do not?

Consider the ravens: They do not sow or reap, they have no storeroom or barn; yet God feeds them. And how much more valuable you are than birds! 

Luke 12:14