Life is Parrots and Passion
For Mother's Day, I went to see the movie The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill with my Mom and Sister. It is a beautiful movie about a beautiful man named Mark Bittner and how he came to know a wild flock of Parrots in San Francisco. I am still trying to process the lessons I came away from the movie with - there were so many.
There were themes of passion reminiscent of the orchid thief in Adaptation. There is one point in the film where he tells about how he used to downplay his love for the parrots when speaking to others. Then one of the parrots died and he felt the utter devastation that one feels when one loses a loved one. From that point he decided he could no longer hide or be ashamed of his love for the parrots for fear of being labeled "eccentric." There is something touching and moving about knowing someone who is true to thy self.
Everywhere I look lately, there is a synchronicity in the movies I see, the people I meet, the Bill Clinton speech I watched for an hour on CSPAN on Friday night when I randomly turned on the TV as I was brewing some "Sweet Dreams" tea, driving from my Mom's Saturday morning after borrowing her ladder (oops, forgot to tell you :) and seeing the traffic of bloated SUVs and mini-vans on there way to the stores to consume some more, talking with my wife... everywhere I look I see reasons to shift priorities away from money and materialism and toward those things that bring a palpable surge of energy from my gut to my brain to my heart and tear ducts: loving people, art, music, and ending suffering.
In the movie, Mark also did a good job of articulating his realization of the oneness of all things. He spoke of a metaphor he heard from a S.F. Zenster who saw a waterfall in Yosemite and saw a metaphor for that oneness. As the water flows toward the edge of the cliff, it is one: a stream. As the water falls over the cliff it is many: drops. When the water lands it is one again: a stream. Our lives are the period when we are falling as drops. When this life ends, we return to the stream, the oneness.
What makes life fun
is enjoying the fall
and exploring the experience
of being a drop
while knowing the stream
together, with you all
3 Comments:
I am going to bed before I run into more quotes like this:
"A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty." Albert Einstein
Thanks Drew for all the links. Am going through your own blog for now and you'll soon find some comments :)
Good to connect with a likeminded person! Take care nd til soon.
Thanks for visiting my blog...and answering my synchronicity question! I agree with you on and Albert on this: "our task must be...widening our circles of compassion..."
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