A man found an eagle’s egg and put it in a nest of a barnyard hen. The eaglet hatched with the brood of chicks and grew up with them.
All his life the eagle did what the barnyard
chicks did, thinking he was a barnyard chicken. He scratched the earth for worms
and insects. He clucked and cackled. 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 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’re chickens.” So
the eagle lived and died a chicken, for that’s what he thought he was.
Anthony de Mello~~~
