Freedom in flying

Once upon a time, there was a bird. He was adorned with
two perfect wings and with glossy, colourful, marvellous
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 faroff
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 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
realised that what had thrilled her about the bird was his
freedom, the energy of his wings in notion, 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
Ore with him across the sky,' Death replied. 'If you

had allowed him to come and go, you would have loved and
admired him even more; alas, you now need me in order to find
him again.'

Source: Eleven Minutes by Paulo Coelho