The Weight of the Sky

When I was seven, my uncle took me to the docks in Port Harcourt to watch the gulls. I remember being struck by how they didn’t seem to fly so much as they simply existed in the air, as if the wind were a solid thing they could lean against. I spent hours trying to mimic the way they tilted their heads, watching the water with that sharp, unblinking intensity. It felt like they were reading a language written on the surface of the sea that I was not yet allowed to understand. My uncle told me that birds don’t worry about the distance between two points; they only care about the current that carries them. I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to feel the air against my own skin, waiting for the moment it would become firm enough to hold me up. We grow older and learn to walk heavily on the ground, but do we ever stop looking up, hoping to find that same invisible support?

Kristel Sturrus has captured this feeling perfectly in her image titled The Pelican. It reminds me that there is a quiet grace in simply knowing how to drift. Does this bird look like it is searching for something, or has it already found everything it needs?