Photo by Mark Bittner
Photo from: The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, the movie: http://www.wildparrotsfilm.com/publicity.html
Bittner was a homeless street musician and wanderer searching for the meaning in his life when he first came to San Francisco 26 years prior. In this film of self-discovery, his relationship with the wild parrots, unbeknownst to him at first, brings him everything he needs. Filmed in 2005, the documentary is Rated “G” and is now available on DVD. If you watch it, be sure to view all of the great “extras” at the end of the film!
Since the documentary first came out, Bittner has published his memoir about his experiences with the wild parrots, also titled The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill; the book was on the New York Times bestseller list.
Excerpt from the documentary:
Speaking of his experiences caring for a dying wild parrot he named Tupelo, Bittner states:
”…in a certain sense they’re (animals) 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. She depended on me, so she loved me, and I felt that. The thing that’s interesting to me actually…a lot of people think that this is anthropomorphism. But I felt those…emotions (from the parrot as she was dying) pass through me. They came from her. I wasn’t looking for anything…
…so to say that animals don’t have these kind of things (emotions) is nonsense, and I think it’s cruel nonsense. We do a lot of bad things to animals because we believe they don’t feel anything.
So, up until Tupelo’s death…I was unconsciously anthropocentric. I only thought of it in terms of human beings…If somebody asked me if I thought that animals had thoughts and feelings, I would say ‘Oh, sure, of course,’ but I didn’t put it into a whole…When I was thinking about consciousness I was only thinking in terms of human beings. There’s a number of events that made me think differently about this, but Tupelo’s story is definitely one thing that contributed to that idea. That idea being that all life is one whole, it really is.
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. 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 till 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 really 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.”