Of Eagles ...

Just came across this reading an old book for motivation:

An American Indian tells about a brave who found an eagle’s egg and put it into the nest of a prairie chicken. The eaglet hatched with the brood of chicks and grew up with them.

All his life, the changeling eagle, thinking he was a prairie chicken, did what the prairie chickens did. He scratched in the dirt for seeds and insects to eat. He clucked and cackled. And he flew in a brief thrashing of wings and flurry of feathers no more than a few feet off the ground. After all, that’s how prairie chickens were supposed to fly.

Years passed. And the changeling eagle grew very old. One day, he saw a magnificent bird far above him in the cloudless sky. Hanging with graceful majesty on the powerful wind currents, it soared with scarcely a beat of its strong golden wings.

“What a beautiful bird!” said the changeling eagle to his neighbor. “What is it?”

“That’s an eagle – the chief of the birds,” the neighbor clucked. “But don’t give it a second thought. You could never be like him.”

So the changeling eagle never gave it another thought. And it died thinking it was a prairie chicken.


Yeah, I know it’s heavy-handed and not too sophisticated in what it’s trying to say. But – how many of us truly know and understand the underlying idea? More importantly, how many of us act on the fact that we are “eagles”? How many of us waste our lives, large portions of it, at least, neglecting our talents, squandering our interests, watching the clock hands go round and round and waiting for that payoff that may never come? I would guess the percentage around 80 or 85 percent, if not higher.

Now consider another angle. This story encapsulates a very dangerous idea. Dangerous for the “establishment”, be it the government, your employer, your family and friends. And especially the darker powers in this world. They don’t want you to realize this, no matter what they say. They absolutely do not. Why? Power over you. Forgive me for sounding a bit like a hippie or an anarchist; I am by far light-years opposed to those positions. But I am all for the freedom of the individual. Unfortunately, the vast majority of us, I think, and I include myself here, so many of us mark time in self-imposed prisons. And that thought is even sadder than the parable above.