The Mystery of the Blue Bird
There are symbols we don't choose. They choose us. In 2024, I was called toward a building. Incomprehensible at the time. It was a work by my great-grandfather on my father's side — a family, a lineage I knew almost nothing about.
There are symbols we don't choose.
They choose us.
In 2024, I was called toward a building.
Incomprehensible at the time.
It was a work by my great-grandfather on my father's side — a family, a lineage I knew almost nothing about.
Following that thread, I discovered a family coat of arms.
Present for more than four generations.
A blue bird.
The Egyptian bennu — the equivalent of the phoenix.
Symbol of renewal, of rebirth, of what rises from its ashes.
It appeared on the sails of my ancestors' land yachts.
But it was frozen.
Imprisoned.
1897 — it already adorned the gables of the family villa in La Panne.
1924 — it was on the sails of the land yachts of the club L'Oiseau Bleu.
After the war — it became its symbol.
Its origin? A trip to Egypt by my ancestors.
Not a North Sea seagull.
The bennu — the solar bird of ancient Egypt.
Symbol of rebirth.
It was then that I discovered Maeterlinck had written a play with the same name.
A synchronicity that resonated strangely with my own story.
As if this myth had always existed — far beyond me.
In his play, two children set off to find the Blue Bird at the end of the world.
It had been in their house from the start.
You don't put the bird in a cage.
My lineage had been struck by misfortunes that no one had ever named.
Unspoken things. Silenced sufferings. Never-named dispossessions.
What we're not aware of directs us.
I embodied them without knowing it.
For more than two years, I searched outside myself.
What this bird meant.
What it carried.
What direction it was showing me.
Then my health played a serious trick on me.
The body doesn't lie.
It delivers the information the mind doesn't yet want to see.
That's when the bird changed nature.
It was no longer a riddle to solve.
It became my own inner compass.
That's what archetypes are for.
Not to explain.
To liberate.
As long as a story is lived in drama, it keeps replaying itself.
Seen and acknowledged — it can finally pass on what is alive within it.
The blue Grandala is the symbol of the new story I want to embody — now and going forward.
Not inherited unconsciously.
Chosen.
We all have the capacity to change trajectory.
And to listen to the inner master.
"What frees itself in me also frees those who come after."
"The blue Grandala — governing in accord with oneself."