"There is more," said Krishna, and his voice dropped lower, the way a
voice does when it carries something precious.
"You have seen birds caught in a fowler's net," he said. "They beat their
wings, they hop from corner to corner, but the net holds them. Most living
things are like that. They live, they grow old, they leave their bodies —
and the net of the world draws them gently back, and they are born again,
and again, and again. It is not a punishment. It is simply the way of
things, until something changes."
Arjuna watched him, hardly breathing.
"But suppose," Krishna said, "that one bird, just one, truly understands
the net. Not just that it is there — anyone can feel the threads — but
what it is, where it ends, how it is tied. Suppose that bird sees with
perfect clearness. For that bird, there is a gap in the net it had never
noticed before. And when its time comes, it does not fall back into the
weave at all. It rises straight up, through the gap, into open sky."
He gathered the reins a little closer.
"When you know — really know, in the deepest part of you — that my coming
into the world is not ordinary like other births, that my deeds shine with
a heavenly purpose and are not the tangled doings of a tired heart, then
something opens in you. You have seen the gap in the net. And when at last
you set down your body the way a traveller sets down a heavy pack at the
end of a long road, you do not get pulled back to walk it all again."
"Where does the bird go?" Arjuna asked softly.
"To me," said Krishna. "It comes home to me."
For a moment neither of them spoke. A single white heron lifted from the
riverbank beyond the army's edge and climbed in a slow spiral, up and up,
until the mist swallowed it and it was gone.
Arjuna's eyes followed it long after it had vanished.
