The Secret Language of Symbols: The Seagull

Photo by Townsend Walton on Unsplash

On holiday recently, I found myself watching a young seagull on the shoreline.

It was already quite big, but still obviously a baby, and it was crying and crying. I somehow knew it was looking for its mother.

Eventually, it found her — the baby was almost as big as the mother — and hurried after her, calling insistently. The mother pecked into a rock pool, and the baby immediately opened its mouth, clearly expecting to be fed. But she didn't feed it. She pecked again, almost as though she were showing it what to do, then walked off.

The baby followed.

This went on for some time. The youngster calling, the mother moving away, pecking at the ground and the rock pools, but refusing to do for it what it now needed to begin doing for itself.

I found it extraordinarily poignant.

There was nothing unkind in what the mother was doing. Quite the opposite. She was trying to encourage her baby to become more self-sufficient. At some point, a mother has to stop feeding the chick and allow it to discover that it can survive on its own.

But the baby seagull didn't know that.

All it knew was that it was calling for its mother and she wasn't responding in the way it wanted her to.

That touched something very deep in me.

The Need to Attach

Our need for attachment begins before we have any words for it.

We cry, and someone comes. We are hungry, and someone feeds us. We are frightened, and someone comforts us. Gradually we learn that the world is safe enough because there is somebody there.

Or, at least, that is what is meant to happen.

Watching the baby gull, I was struck by the pull between wanting to remain attached and needing to become separate.

The youngster was physically capable of finding food for itself, but it seemed to be saying, No, you do it. You are my mother. This is how it has always been.

I think there is something of that in all of us.

However old and competent we become, there remains a part that wants to be looked after from time to time. We want someone to notice what we need, understand us without lengthy explanations, reassure us, perhaps even rescue us.

And it can be terribly painful when we reach for someone and they are not there.

Losing My Mother

As I watched the gull, I realised why the scene was affecting me so much.

My mother died suddenly when I was seventeen.

Seventeen is a strange age to lose a mother. You think you are almost grown up, but of course you aren't. You are beginning to separate from your parents, pushing against them in some ways and still needing them desperately in others.

There should have been years in which I gradually moved away from my mother.

Instead, she was there one day and gone the next.

There was no slow fledging. No moving backwards and forwards between dependence and independence. No opportunity to discover, bit by bit, that I could manage without her.

I simply had to.

Of course, what I was watching on the beach was quite different. The mother gull was still there, and she was doing exactly what she needed to do. But something in the scene seemed to recognise something in me.

That young bird following its mother, calling after her, wanting something she was no longer going to provide, took me straight back to a much younger part of myself.

The Shoreline

It also seemed significant that all this was happening on a shoreline.

A shoreline is neither quite land nor quite sea. It is always changing. The tide comes in, and the tide goes out. What is covered one moment is exposed the next.

It is a liminal place: a threshold.

We often find ourselves in liminal places psychologically too. We have left something behind, but we haven't yet arrived at whatever comes next.

Adolescence is like this. So is grief. So is the ending of a relationship, retirement, illness, recovery, leaving home or changing direction in life.

The old identity no longer quite fits, but the new one isn't fully formed.

I think this is one of the reasons transitions can make us feel so unsettled. There is a temptation to go backwards simply because backwards is familiar.

The young gull seemed to be caught in exactly that place. It was no longer a helpless chick, but it hadn't quite accepted that yet.

The Symbolism of the Seagull

Perhaps the seagull itself added something to the meaning of the encounter.

Gulls are remarkably adaptable creatures. They move between different environments, make use of what they find and seem equally at home alone or among others. They can suggest freedom, independence, resourcefulness and an ability to survive change.

But they are also social birds, which makes the tension between attachment and independence even more interesting.

Here was a young gull being asked to become more self-sufficient while still very obviously wanting the comfort and security of its mother. It seemed to embody something we all have to negotiate eventually: how to become separate without losing our capacity to belong.

And gulls have another quality that makes them particularly rich symbolically. They are comfortable in three different elements.

Land, Sea and Air

They walk on land.

They sit on the sea.

And then, suddenly, they are airborne.

I found myself thinking about those three elements.

Land is solid ground, the practical world, everyday reality.

The sea can represent feeling and the unconscious, all that lies beneath the surface.

And air brings to mind thought, imagination, spirit and freedom.

A gull can move between all three.

Perhaps part of growing up is learning to move between these different places too. Sometimes life requires us to keep our feet firmly on the ground. At other times we have to go down into the emotional depths. And every so often we need enough distance from both to see things from another perspective.

The Cost of Freedom

Birds are obvious symbols of freedom.

We look at them flying and imagine escape, possibility, the ability to rise above things.

But freedom has a cost.

To fly, the young bird has to leave the security of being fed.

It has to discover that its wings work.

It has to tolerate the frustration of its mother no longer meeting every need.

Growth doesn't always feel like growth while it is happening.

Sometimes it feels like rejection.

Sometimes it feels like something has been taken away.

Sometimes we only understand later that being deprived of what we wanted forced us to discover a capacity we didn't know we had.

That doesn't make the pain unreal. Loss and growth are often much closer together than we would like them to be.

The Mother We Carry With Us

I used to think that growing up meant moving away from our parents. Now I think it is more complicated than that.

We leave them, but we also take them with us.

We carry something of the people who cared for us inside us. Their expressions, sayings, habits, values and ways of loving remain with us.

And this is true even when they die.

My mother has been dead for most of my life, but there are moments when the seventeen-year-old girl who lost her feels very close indeed.

An old photograph. A song from those days. A smile on a stranger's face which reminds me of her. A phrase or saying. A dream.

And, apparently, a baby seagull on a beach.

Grief is strange like that. It doesn't move neatly from one stage to another and then finish. It seems to come and go, rather like the tide.

Most of the time we get on with our lives.

Then something opens the door, and there it is again.

Finding Its Own Food

Eventually, that young gull will stop following its mother with its mouth open.

It will learn to find food in the rock pools.

It will fly further.

And one day it will look just like all the other adult gulls wheeling above the sea.

But on that day, it was still in between.

Still wanting its mother.

Still expecting to be fed.

Still calling after her.

And at the same time, being pushed towards a life in which it would have to find its own way.

Perhaps that was what moved me so much.

There are losses that force us to grow before we are ready.

There are people we continue to long for, long after they have gone.

And there are times when the part of us that wants to be looked after is met instead by silence, or absence.

We may not like it. We may never entirely stop longing for what we lost.

But somehow, over time, we find other ways to nourish ourselves.

And eventually, if we are lucky, we learn that we can stand on solid ground, enter the depths when we need to, rise again and find our own kind of freedom.