Learning From The Birds

I had a conversation yesterday in the forest with a friend about birds.  I mentioned with my usual irony that birds exist in order to remind us that we cannot fly.  My friend suggested that they also inspire us to soar high without limits.  I am sixty.  My friend is in his early thirties.  We are, one could say, in rather different stages and situations of life.

Having learned a little too well from my own youthful arrogance I tend to think much of Icarus.  He was the strapping young son of Daedalus of the Greek myth.  Father and son were imprisoned on the island of Crete.  Daedalus, being an incredibly inventive fellow with a gift from the gods, had already designed the Labyrinth of Knossos, the home of the fabled and dreaded Minotaur, the horrifying man-bull to whom the Athenians were forced as tribute to feed seven of their sons and seven of their daughters every seven years.  Minos, the king of Crete, did not want Daedalus to divulge the secret of his labyrinth for which reason he had him and his son imprisoned.  So Daedalus fashioned from found feathers, beeswax and string two lovely sets of wings, one pair for himself, the other for his son.  When they put them on he warned his son to not fly too high or he would get close to the sun and the heat would melt the wax on his wings.  Icarus, like a lot of teenagers, ignored his dad`s advice and, carried away by the exhilaration, flew way too high.  The sun melted the wax and down he plunged and drowned in the sea.  His grief-stricken father made it to the mainland alone.

I can understand why my friend would have a Jonathon Livingston Seagull approach to birds.  He is entering a new stage in his life and career and definitely wants to soar as high as he can go and I completely support him.  As a good friend I will also try to be near in case he flies too close to the sun and will even do what I can to soften his landing when the wax melts from his wings, just as the wax melted from my own wings when I flew too high and plunged to the depths.  There was no one there for me.

I think it is inescapable that when we are young we are Icarus.  How else can we learn our limits unless we test them and end up falling, often many times.  So we learn, and so we get up again.  Unlike Icarus, we don`t have to drown.