Did you know that you may not be who you thought you were?
Anthony DeMellow tells a story…
“A man found an eagles egg
and put it in the nest of a backyard hen.
The eaglet hatched with the brood of chicks
and grew up with them.
All his life the eagle did what the backyard chickens did
thinking he was a backyard chicken.
He scratched the earth for worms and insects.
He clucked and crackled,
and he would thrash his wings
and fly a few feet into the air.
Years passed and the eagle grew very old.
One day he saw a magnificent bird far above him
in the cloudless sky.
It glided in graceful majesty among the powerful wind currents,
with scarcely a beat of its strong golden wings.
The old eagle looked up in awe
“Who’s that?” He asked.
“That’s the eagle, the king of the birds” said his neighbor,
“He belongs to the sky.
We belong to the earth,
we are chickens.
So the eagle lived and died a chicken,
for that’s what he thought he was.”
Sometimes we look into the faces of the world around us like mirrors.
We learn to dance their dance and be shaped by what we see in them believing that is who we are.
What if you are given a flash of vision in a world that disregards vision?
In a world that thinks its small mind is the only reality that exists?
Have you ever noticed that there are those among us that simply seem to rise?
They seem to peel off the layers of other mirrors and peer through the veil of time into a reality that infuses them with unseen vigor.
They rise out of the quick sand and we count them as heroes.
We all need heroes to mirror to us who we really are.
An icon is an image we gaze into, to see through to the beyond.
The beyond is the mirror.
I heard it once said by a monk in the world, “The sky is my icon.”
I wonder what we would see if we looked into the sky to see through to the mirror of the beyond?
There was a man in ancient times named Abram. He was old, childless and lived in at tent, in a dessert. One night he looked into the sky and the voice of God told him, he was the father of a great nation with a people as vast as the stars.”
But it would take a risk to believe, to move from one land to another, from what was familiar to what was unknown, to shift realities.
This man chose to believe.
Though he made a lot of mistakes along the way, it came to pass, born of a promise that looked more like the stars of the universe than the old mirrors of time.
Rising Strong
Let’s rise strong together.