The Parrot's Message to the Forest

A merchant kept a remarkably intelligent parrot in a magnificent golden cage, feeding it the finest fruits and speaking to it kindly every day, genuinely believing he was giving the bird a wonderful life despite never once considering that a cage, however golden, was still a cage. When the merchant's son prepared to travel to the very forest region the parrot had originally come from, the parrot asked him to carry a message to its wild relatives there.

"Tell them," the parrot said carefully, "that I am comfortable and well fed here, unable to leave." The son delivered this exact message to the wild parrots in that forest — and watched, startled, as the moment they heard it, one of the elder wild parrots keeled over and fell from its branch as though dead, without any further explanation offered.

Returning home confused, the son reported exactly what he had witnessed to his own parrot, who, upon hearing the story, immediately fell from its perch in the very same way, lying motionless at the bottom of its golden cage. Grieving, the merchant opened the cage door to lift out what he believed was his beloved dead bird — at which point the parrot sprang instantly back to life, flew straight through the open door, and vanished into the sky, calling back a final thanks for the message that had, in fact, been coded advice all along: only by appearing to give up entirely could it ever hope to be released. Sometimes the only way out of a comfortable trap is convincing the one who built it that there's nothing left worth keeping.