The Eagle

Daily Meditation 822–5/30/2024

There is a fairly well-known bit of trivia about eagles.

In nature, many types of birds will “mob” birds of prey such as kestrels, hawks, or eagles. If you see a bald eagle, there’s sometimes a small swarm of bluejays or crows harassing their larger cousin.

Supposedly, when harried like this, eagles — formidably powerful and massive, capable of easily overtaking any smaller creature — simply shrug them off, opting to fly higher. They spread their enormous wings, catch a warm updraft and soar up, up, up…
And the smaller birds just can’t do that.

While this may or may not be a fully true fact of nature (although, as a “bird nerd” and nearly an ornithologist as a younger man, yes eagles and carrion birds can easily ride updrafts quite high into the air!), it holds a great lesson for us.

In our lives, we will also be harried and harassed by many others who may, in fact, be of little consequence to us and perhaps even be lesser. We should never perceive another person actually as lesser, certainly, but they very well may a scourge upon our Earth.

For many of us, we react. We get in their face. We screenshot the nastiness and share it far and wide. We get angry. We try to fight or get even!