why a caged girl sings

235. It is especially incomprehensible to see how people often fall from reverence into disparagement. They try to represent the Inexpressible; a false countenance results, which only debases the lofty concept. Many such false representations have been scattered throughout the ages. People repeat about the invisible, and immediately proceed to imprison Light in petrified forms.

It is time to manifest commensurateness.

Agni Yoga, Aum, 1936

I had a teacher in 8th grade who, every week, first thing, would write an aphorism on the chalkboard. Before the readings, before the sentence diagramming, before we sat in our assigned groups to discuss the "questions for discussion" at the end of "The Lady and the Tiger," we'd sit, seat-by-seat, with a sheet of notebook paper on our desks, told to fill a page with our insights into her chosen saying.

A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.

People who live in glass houses should not throw stones.

Don't count all your chickens until they've hatched.

Don't carry your eggs in one basket.

Don't put off until tomorrow what you could do today.

And every week I'd put those wise words at the top of the page. I'd stare at them bleakly. A page, you say? Both sides? Maybe I could write big. Who says one line on the page has to, necessarily, equal one line of text? Until third or fourth grade, after all, we counted four lines for what we'd now call one, lest our mid-line waver and collapse in upon itself. There seems wisdom, then, towards this end:

Shall I fill my page proper?

I'll write much more neatly. You'll be pleased, won't you, as my penmanship untangles? But, alas. This was English 3, after all. Staring bleakly, I'd splutter out a "the." The bird in the hand is more valuable than the two birds in the bush," I'd write. Maybe it wasn't a page limit, thinking back, but a word limit. The first step in either scenario is to repeat the phrase in as many ways as many times as possible, whole at first, and then in echoed fragments traveling down the line.

The bird in the hand is better than the two birds in the bush because the bird, in the hand, is closer to you than the two birds, in the bush, and that bird in your hand represents more cleverness and effort on your behalf because to get a bird, in your hand, you must have a strategy to get that bird in your hand, whereas the two birds in the bush are in the bush no matter, and have no real relationship to you, and have as little significant consequence upon your actions as theirs have upon you, those birds in the bush might, in fact, be there, in the bush, no matter the actuality of your even existing, whether you were there or even if you were not, with this other bird, in your hand, so much better than the birds, the two birds, there in the bush.

( sometimes it's hard to leave these things naked. )