From Maria’s diary:
Once upon a time, there was a bird. He was adorned with two perfect
wings and with glossy, colourful, marvellous feathers.
One day, a woman saw this bird and fell in love with him.
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 far-off mountains!
And she was afraid, afraid that she would never feel the same way about any
other bird.
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 realized that
what had thrilled her about the bird was his freedom, the energy of his wings
in motion, 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 more with him across the sky,” Death replied.
“If you had allowed him to come and go, you would have loved and admired
him evermore; alas, you now need me in order to find him again.”
