by Anthony DeMello
A man found an eagle's egg and put it in the nest of a barnyard hen.
The eagle 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
in 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 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.