How often we walk about with the soft brilliant bird trapped in our head, without even knowing. Of course, we each must ask, what constitutes those bars, which, focused on, turn the world oppressive? What makes up the cage though we can’t see it—worry, fear, doubt, anger, lack of self-worth, a refusal to accept things as they are, the urgent need for approval, a relentless fear of death—What? Even more crucial, what is the soft and brilliant bird perched between our eyes? Is it the Atman that Hindus praise, the breath of the Eternal Self exhaling from our deepest almost unreachable Center? And what must we do to see the world from that soft bird’s eye? Isn’t this tiny feathery spirit that lives within us worthy of our friendship?

The American poet Theodore Roethke calls this tiny voice “a light breather . . . a music in a hood,” and Rilke has captured the torture of life focused only on the bars in his famous poem “The Panther”:

His vision, from the constantly passing bars,

has grown so weary that it cannot hold

anything else. It seems to him there are

a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.

Yet like so many of life’s deepest truths, we seldom experience our gifts and trials separately. A profound treatment of all this is René Magritte’s eerie painting of a faceless man whose chest is an open cage with a white bird perched peacefully in the cage, not flying, though the cage remains open.

If we can see the white bird perched in its open cage as our inner heart facing the world, we are left with this quandary: Is the bird free at last and incapable of exercising its long-awaited freedom? Or, finally seeing with the eyes of inner freedom, is the bird surprised that there is nowhere to go; that what was a cage for so long is really its nest, its home; that freedom is in the heart’s eye all along?

We’re brought back to risk, to the question of how to protect ourselves by being who we are. We are so steeped in skepticism and distrust in our age that this simple truism might seem like an outright contradiction. In his poem, “Self-Protection,” D. H. Lawrence affirms the power and durability of living by our own light when he declares that creatures that hide their essential nature have all become extinct and only those who live in outright splendor like the tiger and the nightingale have survived:

A nightingale singing at the top of his voice

Is neither hiding himself nor preserving himself;

He is giving himself away in every sense of the word;

And obviously, it is the culminating point of his

existence . . .