To Sing Like Birds In a Cage

The following excerpt is from our book, Contentment: A Way to True Happiness:

In Shakespeare's greatest tragedy, King Lear, (which has remarkable relevance to our world situation today) as the story draws to a climax the old king is reunited with his one loyal daughter, Cordelia. Both are in exile, the kingdom is in chaos, and the destructive, unconscious forces are competing for power and leaving a trail of wreckage. The armies of the two greedy and untrue offspring, Goneril and Regan, are about to overtake the camp of Lear and Cordelia. Facing certain capture, Lear makes a wonderful speech.

"Come, Let's away to prison," he says. "We two alone will sing like birds in the cage. / When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down / And ask of thee forgiveness. So we'll live, / And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh / At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues / Talk of court news. and we'll talk with them too. / Who loses and who wins; who's in, who's out; / And take upon us the mystery of things, / As if we were God's spies; and we'll wear out, / In a walled prison, packs and sects of great ones / That ebb and flow by the moon."

This is poetic language saying that he now understands the walled prison of his court and sees with a new clarity and depth of vision the pettiness and intrigues that have fueled his discontent with life.

This is what each of us must learn to do - to sit in the nonsense of our court with its daily upsets, disappointments, and changes. Court news is all the stuff that fills the morning newspaper: who loses and who wins, who's in and who's out. It all passes like clouds in the sky, and with hardly any more lasting relevance.

"We'll live and pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh at gilded butterflies," the king says. That which has once worn Lear down and made him angry and tired now produces laughter.

Lear comes to understand that the stuff of the court (when perceived from a Greater consciousness) is about as substantial as the ebbing and flowing of the moon. He accepts the imperfections of the world as part of the play of God. Lear sees it all - the joys and the sorrows, the victories and the defeats - and he can laugh, the merriment of insight, not the derision of bitterness. An enlightened person can participate in the daily frustrations and absurdities of the world while simultanously understanding them as divine play. And so contentment is found within ordinary experience, not apart from the life that is given. But we must (at least in moments of heighened awareness) view life "as if we are God's spies," and thereby take upon us "the mystery of things."