Penguini: The Penguin Who Longed to Fly

Penguini was a penguin. Her real name was Penelope Penguin but when she was very young she had gotten the nickname Penguini from her sister, Pamela, because she loved to try out magic tricks. Penguini, Pamela, and their parents, Paula and Pablo Penguin, lived in a cozy igloo in the chilly Antarctic ice near the South Pole. Penguini loved to play with her sister, she loved to go sliding around on the snow banks and ice flows, she loved going to school and learning all about the famous penguins from history, especially Tux, the penguin famous for creating Linux, although silly humans thought Tux was just a cute spokespenguin to help sell their product and he didn’t get any of the credit for actually creating the program. And of course she loved magic. She could spend hours and hours in the library reading about Houdini and David Copperfield. Of course Houdini was her favorite magician, seeing as her nickname was similar to his name (and probably the inspiration Pamela had in mind when giving her the nickname).

Penguini learned card tricks, how to pull a penguin chick out of a hat (after all, there really aren’t any bunny rabbits in Antarctica!), how to pull a bouquet of flowers out of thin air, and how to make food disappear quickly, although that last one may not have been magic so much as an empty stomach. But the one magical trick Penguini wanted to learn most of all was one she couldn’t seem to manage. Penguini longed to fly. Her parents always said that when she was just a little chick she would flap her wings as fast as she could as though she was trying with all her might to take off into the air. As long as she could remember she always wanted to fly. She felt weighed down by gravity, by the land, by her solid bones. She envied the gulls and albatrosses that could spread their wings and fly high above the icy ground. To Penguini flying was freedom and she longed more than anything else to feel that freedom.

She had tried to tell her friends and her parents about her secret desire but they all just laughed at her. “Penguins? Fly? That’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard,” said Paula, one of the more popular girls at school. “Just face it, Penguini, you’ll never be able to fly,” Percy, a teammate of Penguini’s on the swim team, told her. “We’re just not built that way so you should just get used to it.” But despite all the laughing and jokes at her expense, Penguini still held on to her dream. And she was determined to make it come true one day. She wasn’t sure how, but she felt it right down to her heavy, solid bones that one day she would take off into the air and find herself soaring through the sky.

Every night she would fly in her dreams. She would soar high up to the clouds, feel the wind whipping at her face and tickling her flippers, and she could feel that freedom. The world wouldn’t weigh her down anymore and she could leave all her worries and troubles behind and just be alone with the clouds and the sunshine and her thoughts. But every morning she would awake and be reminded that she was only flying in her dreams and her heart would sink a little bit. Her friends and family loved her, she knew that, but she also knew they just couldn’t understand her deepest desire. They were all content to waddle about on land, slide along the snow, and swim in the cold water. Her swim team told her that she should think of swimming as her form of flying. “After all, we do use our wings like the air birds do while we’re under water. Can’t you feel free doing that?” Percy asked her one day at swim practice. “It’s just not the same,” Penguini responded, and she dove into the water to swim her 500 meter freestyle.

Time went by and Penguini grew up but she never abandoned her dream of flying. And then came the day that changed her life. She was out for a long waddle along the shore which she did quite often as a way to get away from the crowd and have time along with her thoughts, when she decided to stop and rest for a while.

She began thinking about things – about her life, about her dreams, about the goals she had set for herself, and about what she really wanted to do with her life. She was deep in her thoughts, very serious thoughts for a young(ish) penguin (she was only 5…that’s about 25 in people years). She thought about all the criticism her friends and family have given to her about her dream, how they had laughed at it, and how she had stopped telling people about it because she didn’t want people to mock the dream that was so important to her. She always kept hope alive that one day she would realize her dream and be able to soar through the sky. And as she sat there deep in thought looking up at the clouds passing by something came over her. She came to the realization that she shouldn’t feel held down by her limitations as a penguin, a “flightless bird” as they’re are often referred to, but learn to let her heart and spirit carry her wherever she wanted to be.

On that sunny afternoon on the edge of the ice and snow, Penguini’s heart felt light and she felt as though a weight was lifted from her shoulders. She felt a sense of freedom come over her. And she knew that she needed to break free from her life for a while to go in search of her true happiness. She realized that the expectations that other people had for her had a big part in weighing her down, not gravity and her heavy, solid bones that she blamed for her inability to fly. Penguini was scared to go off on her own but she knew that if she didn’t she would always be living the life that everyone else wanted for her – to remain in the same village, become a responsible adult, make other people happy – instead of living the life that she didn’t even realize she wanted yet.

When she got home, Penguini began an internet search for a place to go and work on herself far away from everyone who knew her and had these expectations for her life. She found the perfect place – Penguin’s Rest, a Buddhist retreat center on Roosevelt Island out on the Ross Ice Shelf. It was set away from the rest of the penguin villages and provided a place for meditation, contemplation, and awakening which seemed to be exactly what Penguini needed. She worked hard to save up the money for a month-long stay at Penguin’s Rest and a few months later she packed her bags, said goodbye to her friends and family, and set off on the journey for Roosevelt Island.

Penguin’s Rest was the perfect place for Penguini. She got up early in the morning and spent time meditating in her room, then had a wonderfully cooked but simple vegetarian breakfast (who knew penguins liked things other than fish!) with the other visitors at the retreat center, and spent most of the rest of the day in meditation out on the ice flows, in the meditation studio on the top floor of the center, or in group workshops. She was amazed at how much she grew and the rising sense of freedom she found by exploring her own path to happiness without trying to make other people happy.

She learned how to sit in stillness and focus inwards while still looking outwards at the world. She meditated, prayed, practiced yoga, and learned more about herself than she even knew there was to learn! Her life changed. And when it came time to leave Penguin’s Rest and return home she knew what she wanted to do with her life. She didn’t want to stay in her village but she wanted to get out into the world, explore, meet other kinds of penguins, and see what lay beyond the horizon. The world was open wide to her and she felt like she could reinvent herself into whatever she wanted. And her dream of someday flying was still there but now she felt like it was all the more real in her everyday life. As she went about her day-to-day activities with intention, she felt her spirit soaring. As she journeyed far to the Galapagos Islands and the coast of Australia she felt her body become lighter and lighter. It was as though the weight of the world had been lifted from her and she felt freer than she ever had in her short lifetime.

And one day, without even realizing it, she began to float above the ground. Just a few inches; just enough so that she felt the wind tickling her flippers; just enough so that she felt weightless. Penguini looked down at the ground to discover her flippers had left the snow below her. She smiled from ear to ear and her heart swelled. It was as though she had created a special kind of magic by following her own dreams. She no longer had to go to sleep to dream of flying; she could feel it in her waking hours.

Over time she learned to float farther and farther off the ground – some may say she was just levitating, a trick that she had learned from one of her magic books, but she knew that this was different. She continued her traveling, learning so much from the other parts of the world and from the penguins and other animals she met. She showed them all how she could fly and told them of her dreams since she was a chick of someday taking off from the ground to be among the clouds. No one laughed at her anymore. No one scoffed at her dream because they could see that it was no longer just a dream. She had realized her dreams by finding the courage to go off in search of herself. And, in this discovery, she had found the freedom to no longer let gravity, and other people’s expectations for her life, hold her down.