birds that never flew

Its Colours They Are Fine, by Alan Spence is a magical book. Full of being wee and seeing the world in its splendour, growing and moving away, and trying to reach that thing that prowls inside of us. Life. The human heart and the conflict with itself.
There is a part where he is in London staying with friends, and is testing the world on many levels. He wonders where he should go next and a book in his friend's flat about Zen buddhism falls open at a page that says:

Here is the bird that never flew
Here is the tree that never grew
Here is the bell that never rang
Here is the fish that never swam

This is on the Glasgow Coat of Arms. Glaswegian Zen. It's aw Wan. So he goes back up the road.........

We voted YES here in Glasgow, my city. But this bird never flew, and the tree never grew, the fish never swam and the bell never rang. As almost all of the rest of Scotland voted NO. That's democracy. I'm saddened, but the sky is - remarkably - still there.

It's a beautiful riddle to have on bus shelters and a Coat of Arms. What is our essence? If we are a bird and don't fly are we truly a bird? A fish that doesn't swim !? Yet we exist. We are ourselves. Yesterday, after falling in love with all my heart with a movement that spoke to me, I was heart broken. I was chucked by the canny folk. NO. That is not our essence.

So to the day after. The riddle remains as I commute to my work. What use is disappointment? The sun still rises, the people that shared the dream are still there. But we have retreated a little, broken-winged. For we didn't fly. We were only able to talk about about how we didn't fly.