Tag Archives: bird

A bird needs a big sky

I read a great book called Japan Through the Looking Glass by Alan MacFarlane. He notes that for the Japanese it is often the spaces between the words that carry the real meaning. And he recounts an old story about a famous artist who is asked to paint a picture of a bird. He does so but the person who has commissioned the picture is disappointed to find that the artist has painted a small bird in one corner of the canvas and left the rest empty. When asked why he hadn’t painted a larger bird, replied ‘then where would the bird have flown’. Sent from my BlackBerry?? wireless device