What do you do when you can't save them? When what you are by your nature is a builder of nests and a strengthener of wings and you have to stand by and watch them plummet instead?
Is this what Daedalus felt like when he saw Icarus falling? I feel like am reaching out and grabbing nothing but handfuls of feathers when I need to be pulling a body to safety somehow.
Yet the choice to fly to safety is not mine to make. Though it breaks my heart, I know some not only have to singe the tips of their wings but also to lose them altogether before understanding comes.
It's just that I've seen this happen too often, and I know that not everybody survives the fall. The ocean that waits down there is not soft when the crash landing happens. It just wants to swallow down, cover over. It is relentless. As that old painting by Bruegel shows, all too few bystanders will turn away from their own little pursuits to extend a hand, either.
I don't want them to fall at all. I want them to turn away from this madness, this futile and destructive insanity, this pretend command of things that are as destructive and unstoppable as hurricane winds, that will rip through their fragile, beautiful wings like a typhoon through a paper kite and start learning how to soar again.
My heart is broken.
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And then you said.....