Little Bird.

I walked to class in this beautiful weather today, and along the way a bird flew alongside me, chirping a song of freedom. When I think of birds, that's exactly what I think of: freedom. They soar where they please, they aren't chained by comfort, and no one can tell them "Stop flying, you're going too high." They're boundless. Even the smallest of birds can sing a liberating tune while he flies across the sky. But the little bird I saw today seemed to be mocking me with his song. As I walked -and as he flew- through a construction site, he perched on a bulldozer and looked at me, chirping for what seemed like minutes. The juxtaposition of that free little bird resting on the confines of this concrete jungle resounded in a voiceless kind of irony.

"Look at you." I could almost hear him sing the words aloud. "You are chained by the very comforts that you think will give you freedom." As I sit here thinking about that bird, I realize that the securities of this age which we strive for whole heartedly, supposedly making us more free, only serve to confine us to an all-encompassing ideology. We reach so hard for the reliability of a home and spouse and financial stability, the American Dream, that we miss the freedom that rests in the spontaneity of a sudden adventure. We put ourselves in a cage, and the worst part is that we can't even see the bars.

I want to be like that little bird. I want to follow wherever the sun leads me, not constricted to what this world requires. I want to go into the villages of Uganda and feed an orphaned child, and climb the mountaintops of Peru, and walk the streets of London in the rain, and swim with the dolphins in Australia.


I'm just as tied into this society as the next person, but I want to be free.