Sunday, October 19, 2008

Wild Parrots

Some quotes from Mark Bittner, the guy who used to feed the parrots in North Beach. I'm watching The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill this morning.

"How do you get so attached to an animal? I know there's lots of people that have experienced something like this. In a certain sense they're a lot purer than we are. Because we have a lot of neurotic thoughts, things that bind us up inside, and we play a lot of games that animals don't play. They're really straightforward."

"There's a story that Suzuki Roshi told, he was the Zen master at the Zen Center here in San Francisco. He went to Yosemite. And he sees this big waterfall coming over this cliff. And it's one river at the top of the cliff, but as it falls, the river breaks up into all these individual droplets. And then it hits the bottom of the cliff and it's one river again. We're all one river...til we hit this cliff. That distance between the top of the cliff and the bottom of the cliff is our life. And all the individual little droplets think they are individual little droplets until they hit the bottom and then they're gone. But, you know, that droplet doesn't lose anything. It gains. It gains the rest of the river."

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