Aesop’s Fables Month: The Vain Jackdaw and His Borrowed Feathers 🐦⬛🪶🪶
by Crystal A Murray (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) via Gemini & Nano
High Heels on Short Girls
My first brush with trying to make myself look as fancy as everyone else, as far as I can recall, was preparing for my sixth-grade culmination. (Yes, I can still remember the teacher making sure we knew we weren’t getting a graduation but rather a culmination. 🙃)
We had found the perfect long dress. My mom was so excited to shop for the fancy girly things that she kept using the word “debutante” and even had me practice my posture by standing next to a wall with a book on my head. It didn’t matter that we lived in the projects; I was going to be a fancy and proper young lady. 🦢
Now, all we needed was a nice pair of shoes to go with the dress. I’m not sure why we were in a shoe store in Hollywood, but we ended up with a salesman that got just as excited to dress me up as my parents did. He measured my feet and shortly came back with an adorable pair of white high-heels. He said they were the exact shoes worn by Mary Pickford when she stepped in the cement at Grauman’s Chinese Theater on Hollywood Blvd. (She and Douglas Fairbanks were apparently the first celebrities to leave their mark there.)
Looking back to that from adulthood, I’m gonna guess it might have been a lie about the shoes being the exact ones, but it seems we all believed it at the time. And we bought the shoes. I thought we even went over there and tried them to see if the heels fit in the prints there. I can’t recall if they did or not. I’m not even sure if they were four- or six-inch heels, but they were mine, and I felt like a princess in them. But, what I didn’t feel in them was tall. Lol 😂. When you’re 4’10”, even 6-inch heels make you only 5’4″. 👠
Beyond that moment, I’m certain I had brushes with vanity, though most of the time I’ve felt lesser or lower than most people, so maybe that was a type of reverse vanity. Our blackbird (jackdaw) in today’s fable proves that no type of vanity actually works.
The Original Fable Retold: The Vain Jackdaw and His Borrowed Feathers (Perry 101)
A certain Jackdaw, wanting to rival the peacock, gathered up the colorful feathers that had fallen from the peacocks and stuck them all over his body. Decked out in his stolen finery, he strutted proudly away from his own kind and joined the company of the peacocks.
The peacocks, however, quickly saw through the disguise. Recognizing him at once, they flew at him, plucked away his borrowed plumes, and pecked him mercilessly. Bruised and humiliated, the Jackdaw crept back to his fellow jackdaws. But they, deeply offended by his prior vanity and desertion, turned their backs on him and drove him away.
The Moral: Borrowed feathers may make a fine show, but they cannot change who you are.
The Trap of Comparison
Whether we are trying on borrowed feathers, chasing influencer trends (or trying to be influencers ourselves), or putting on any other kind of external facade to compare and contrast ourselves with others, it is a foolish and exhausting game. Vanity isn’t just about losing the approval of fickle crowds or alienating those around us; it takes our eyes entirely off the One who made us and who sees us through the unearned mercy and grace of His shed blood.
Here are a few things the Holy Scriptures say about comparing ourselves and about pride:
“Not that we dare to classify or compare ourselves with some of those who are commending themselves. But when they measure themselves by one another and compare themselves with one another, they are without understanding.”
“For if anyone thinks himself to be something, when he is nothing, he deceives himself. Each one should test his own work. Then he will have reason to boast in himself alone, and not in someone else.”
“Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.”
And now I’m wondering if Aesop or the philosophers who wrote this may have actually seen some Love Birds in the wild. Apparently, they actually do put items under their feathers that end up looking like extensions of their tails. Their reasons are less likely to be vanity (unless it’s mating season), and more likely to make it easier to transport nesting materials to their chosen location. There are a lot of fun videos of birds doing this, so here’s a selection of short ones to demonstrate and explain.
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