Juan Salvador Gaviota
Parables and Illustrations for Values Education |
Years ago, was a great book by Richard Bach that Juan Salvador Gaviota was entitled best-seller. We talked about a Seagull who dared to dream. You are interested to be herself, to live intensely, to develop all their talents and possibilities. Not accept life monotonous and always the same of the flock who only dared to crawling flights, without a soul, behind debris which threw boats. She felt in his soul the call of the heights, the vocation of freedom. For daring to propose a different life, isolated it, let it alone, they labelled it crazy, they banished it.
Juan Salvador, the dreamy little gull, accepted the solitude of learning again, the solitude of the daring quest for new seas, new heaven, new horizons. In the depths of his sore heart, I felt that its wings were born to open at the immensity of the unknown.
And it is risked. After many failed trials, a day was found riding the high skies, blue, great, huge, fragrant to eternity. And that day understood why and for what was born Gull. He felt the vertigo of deep, lived the originality, initiative, creativity. He underwent the honduras of perfection: reach the end of the undertaken, reach the root, the wellspring of his own being. It was no longer so much seek freedom, to be free. And you are delivered passionately to be herself, no strings attached nor fears.
But Juan Salvador Gaviota still loving his people while they had banished him. And he decided to return to the flock to teach them that life could be something much more interesting to eat and play waste from vessels. He was sure that his company would not be not easy, which again would isolate it, would offend him, because they were not willing to change or to quietly listen someone to speak to them of the need for change. It didn't matter that they do not understand it: with that a single Seagull dared to dream and a new flight, justified his adventure. At the bottom of his heart, Juan Salvador Gaviota felt that it was impossible to live intensely your freedom without trying to free others, that fullness implied service.
He returned without preaching or fanfare. It was only be a genuine Gull born to fly. Gradually, some young Gulls were closer to witness his vigorous flight. And asked him to teach them to fly. Not the flock to despise them and expel cared. They wanted to fly, to experience another life, dare to be free.
And they dared. To live and to fly. To be themselves.
We live in a world that proposes as fullness accumulate, swallowing and eating. There is no space for flying heights, for the adventure of the dreaming. He has only the present, selfish and petty satisfaction of the needs and desires of crawling, the fight ruthless to survive disputing mate your piece of food. Fell the utopias, dreams, the pretense of a life other than a world best, a society of brothers.
Therefore, today more than ever, we need an education which proposes with passion to open up to the fullness of the unknown, that we lift both creeping flight after waste throwing us the culture of consumption, so much illusion of fullness in a world without horizons or dreams. An education that rescue and proposes encouraging firmly returned to the utopia, dare to dream and to build a world where possible the freedom and adventure of the service.
To educate is sowing illusions, offer by Word and example horizons of fullness and genuine freedom that is unleashing the subtle fetters of money, power and pleasure, petty, selfish, flights without spirit, without a soul. Mere illusion of flight.
Educators need to be masters of high flights, Sowers of utopia, always open to the adventure of the unknown, to the risk of heights and summits, explorers of new skies and more human worlds built beyond the cries and squawks of the flock.
Young people should see in our lives an invitation to transcend it, to go beyond themselves. An invitation to the risk of flying.