In January of 2006, in the wake of the Abramoff lobbying scandal, the War in Iraq, and the Enron convictions, I had the following dream:
I was given custody of a beautiful pet parrot. I set up his cage, but something told me I could trust the parrot and trust myself. The parrot needed to be let out to fly free and I knew that it was a crazy risk, but I also knew somehow, that he would be back, so I opened and cage and the parrot flew out through a window into the sky. He flew and flew and then circled back. I talked to the Parrot, and said “come on now, time to come back” and he understood me and came right back. I felt that the love and care of this parrot was my grave responsibility and I understood that with the long life span of a parrot, this was a lifetime responsibility.
Luckily I wasn’t in a Monty Python episode, and when I looked up “parrots” on the web, I found the birds used as a symbol of the soul in India, and stumbled across this poem:
‘The parrot, who is yearning to see you, is in my prison by the decree of the heavens. “She sends you greetings of peace and wants justice, and desires a remedy and the path of right guidance.
Apparently a parrot has come to me to steer me on the right path. Sounds good. Whether the parrot helps me transcend being dragged down into the muck of moral indignation remains to be seen.
I remember a wonderful fictional parrot from Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s masterpiece “One Hundred Years of Solitude” (and also made an appearance in Love in the Time of Cholera). This parrot had lived more than a century and still spoke “pirate” at the most inopportune times. My memory is fuzzy on these points, but that parrot touched something in me because by virtue of his long life span he connected us to times long past. He was, in essence, living history, an animate continuity.
