Wisdom from Paulo Coelho

At a time when it was needed the most, this short story appeared. I read this today in Paulo Coelho's book Eleven Minutes.

From Maria's diary:

Once upon a time, there was a bird. He was adorned with two perfect wings and with glossy, colorful, marvelous feathers. In short, he was a creature made to fly about freely in the sky, bringing joy to everyone who saw him.

One day, a woman saw this bird and fell in love with him. She watched his flight, her mouth wide in amazement, her heart pounding, her eyes shining with excitement. She invited the bird to fly with her, and the two travelled across the sky in perfect harmony. She admired and venerated and celebrated that bird.

But then she thought: He might want to visit far-off mountains! And she was afraid, afraid that she would never feel the same way about any other bird. And she felt envy, envy for the bird’s ability to fly.

And she felt alone.

And she thought: “I’m going to set a trap. The next time the bird appears, he will never leave again.”

The bird, who was also in love, returned the following day, fell into the trap and was put in a cage.

She looked at the bird every day. There he was, the object of her passion, and she showed him to her friends, who said: “Now you have everything you could possibly want.” However, a strange transformation began to take place: now that she had the bird and no longer needed to woo him, she began to lose interest. The bird, unable to fly and express the true meaning of his life, began to waste away and his feathers to lose their gloss; he grew ugly; and the woman no longer paid him any attention, except by feeding him and cleaning out his cage.

One day, the bird died. The woman felt terribly sad and spent all her time thinking about him. But she did not remember the cage, she thought only of the day when she had seen him for the first time, flying contentedly amongst the clouds.

If she had looked more deeply into herself, she would have realized that what had thrilled her about the bird was his freedom, the energy of his wings in motion, not his physical body.

Without the bird, her life too lost all meaning, and Death came knocking at her door. “Why have you come?” she asked Death. “So that you can fly once more with him across the sky,” Death replied. “If you had allowed him to come and go, you would have loved and admired him ever more; alas, you now need me in order to find him again.”

I will not go into why this story is important to me, but I will say that it resonated deep in my soul. From this book, I have learned that you can never really lose someone, because you never owned them to begin with. The beauty is that when we love someone and when that person loves us back, freely and without obligation, it is then that we experience true love and freedom.

I wanted to share that with whoever frequents this blog. Paulo Coelho has been my saving grace for the last few months...and beyond. My favorite book is The Alchemist, a story about following your heart. I encourage everyone to read it and I hope that it touches your heart and soul in the way it did mine.

Ever-changing.

New paths.