Mark Bittner has not worked in at least a couple of decades. He knows how to make cappuccinos, which he calls a survival skill, at least in his part of the world: the north beach section of San Francisco.
Mark has read lots of the beat poets, you know Lawrence Ferlingetti, Gary Snyder. He came to San Francisco to be a singer, which didn’t pan out.
Instead he keeps, well he doesn’t keep them exactly, let’s say he has befriended, a flock of wild parrots, the wild parrots of telegraph hill. (http://www.pelicanmedia.org/wildparrots.html)
He loves them.
Today I want to talk about passion. I want to talk about holding fast to dreams. I want to talk about the open heart that opens eyes and opens lives. Your life. My life.
No one is quite sure how this group of red crowned conures made their way to this wild side of San Francisco. Never mind.
We do know how Bittner got in touch with the wild parrots. Bittner one day was reading Gary Snyder, the Nature Beat Poet who has been, I think, influenced by Buddhism.
Here’s the last part of an early Snyder poem entitled Robin
Rain patters on the rhododendron
cloud sweeps in from the sea over sand dunes
and stoopt lodgepole pine.
Thinking of the years since we parted.
last week I dreamed of you--
buying a bag of groceries
for Hatch.
He was reading Snyder because he wanted to get into nature and Snyder was a nature poet. And he said that Snyder gave the following advice: If you wish to get into nature, start where you are. So Bittner bought some bird seed, some sunflower seeds, and started looking for and at what was around. And then, he saw a couple of parrots. To him, they seemed more like monkeys than birds. He was immediately smitten.
Soon, he was consumed with his work, the work of observing, feeding, and loving a bunch of red crowned conures, and one blue crowned conure, named Conor.
A loner, Conor had once had a love, but she died soon after Bittner met the wild parrots of telegraph hill. Bittner loved Conor, admired Conor. And he wanted Conor to be his friend, but Conor wasn’t really a joiner.
Conor was his own bird.
Bittner observed these 45 birds of Telegraph Hill and the partnerships that they fell into and sometimes, of necessity, fell out of. Sophie and Picasso were two birds that had kind of precarious lives. They had both been struck with viruses and Picasso, of the temperament worthy of his name, got into fights and because of a black eye received by a bigger bird, couldn’t see real well. Bittner thinks that Picasso was killed by Hawk because his vision was limited on one side.
After Picasso’s death, Bittner thought that Conor might fall for Sophie, that Conor might gain some new purpose in life by being in a position to protect Sophie, small and vulnerable, but Conor wouldn’t have any part of that.
Conor was his own bird.
Bittner’s vision was trained on these birds. Tourists would often think that Bittner owned the parrots or was some kind of city official charged with the care and nurture of this unusual flock. But he had simply fallen, headlong and completely, into his life’s work.
Today, we talk about the joy of falling—madly, deeply—into the meaning and purpose of your life.
But Bittner’s crazy, right? He’s eccentric, yes? Surprisingly not. I don’t think so. He saw, with his open heart and his open eyes, an opportunity to get to know something right in his field of vision and he went for it.
It turns out Jesus, if we look at the biblical witness, spoke only a few times about love. Once in the sermon on the mount, to love one’s enemies. (May we please, please attempt to be a sermon on the mount people. Is it too much to ask?) And once in answer to the question from the lawyer, who tried to trick him: What shall I do to have an open heart and open eyes and a life open to greatness and adventure? (I’m paraphrasing.) Love God, Jesus said, and love your neighbor as yourself. That’s it, as far as I know, that’s it on the love front.
Oh, he demonstrated it again and again. My guess is that perhaps he felt that was enough.
While love is rarely mentioned, the biblical witness points to the necessity of an open heart again and again. The heart is an image of the deepest self in the Biblical witness—it impacts vision, it impacts thoughts and feelings. It impacts will.
When we see with a heart enlightened, we see wonder, we see beauty. The open heart knows radical amazement, in the memorable phrase from Jewish leader Abraham Heschel.
When we see with a heart enlightened we sense a deep feeling of gratitude. We are in touch with compassion. We are in touch with a passion for justice.
One day Mark Bittner encountered, with an open heart, the advice of poet Gary Snyder to look around at what was close at hand. And because his heart was open, his eyes saw a bunch of wild parrots right in his back yard, and he fell madly and deeply into his life’s passion.
At one point, one of the birds in his charge, Tupelo, dies. He says that the night before she died, he saw her on the floor, paralyzed, immobile. (Most of the birds never came into his home, unless they were hurt or sick. One, I can’t recall the name, came into his house and refused to leave. When that bird was in trouble—outside he went!)
Anyway, he fed Tupelo a kind of formula. He says that when he picked her up, he could feel a sense of gratitude coming from her. Later, as she grew increasingly sick, he said that he would pick her up and she would express some sense of resignation.
This is the worse kind of anthromorphizing, he realized, but it is what he felt from her.
As he reflected on Tupelo’s death, he came to see that all life is one. That is all one thing. That we are all caught up in a network of mutuality.
A teacher of his, Suzuki Rashi, went once to a national park and saw a beautiful waterfall. He saw that the river flowed as one, then individual droplets made up the waterfall and each droplet returned to the river as one. He said that all there is is contained in that river. At some point the massive river hits the cliff, and these individual droplets rush over the side. One’s life is that droplet of water in the time it takes to get from the top of the cliff to the bottom. We think, as individual droplets, that we are separated from the oneness of all things, the river, but we have merely forgotten. We lose nothing as a result of our forgetfulness, because at the end we are reunited with the rush of the river, but our remembering, or our forgetfulness, does not make one bit of difference in whether or not we’ll return to the All. It simply is what it is.
Remembering seems better, though.
Let us turn, for a moment, to the problem of plastic bags stuck in trees. The problem of plastic bags stuck in trees confounded and frustrated a particular Brooklynite, Ian Frazier, the former staff writer for the New Yorker magazine.
And there are a bunch of bags in trees. He says that once he saw his first—they are called witches knickers in Ireland apparently—he began to see them all over—in mesquite trees in Arizona, in cottonwoods in South Dakota, and in unidentified sorry trees along the Dan Ryan Expressway. But he says that at the Grand Army Plaza in the Park Slope area of Brooklyn, you could only call the bags in trees a blight.
So one day he mentioned the problem of plastic bags in trees to his friend Tim. His friend Tim is a jeweler. They somehow designed a snagger that would not hurt the trees and off they went. They didn’t seek permission. They didn’t seek publicity.
They just went around trying to do their bit of good in the world.
Bag snagging is sort of quixotic, of course; but it is also, in its essence, good. Ian Frazier says that he was surprised to find out how solid and real good can be. One easily recognizes it, and knows when one has done it, even when the act is as small as taking a bag out of a tree.
He says it changed his life. He thinks a tree that has been liberated from its plastic hanger-on is simply more beautiful than a tree that’s never been bothered by a plastic bag. That’s a debate I’ll refuse to engage. But there is something here.
You keep your heart open and your eyes begin to see in new ways. You keep your eyes open and whole vistas are open to you.
God, in the Hebrew scriptures, is angered at one point (Amos, chapter 5). The widows are being ignored. The innocent are being falsely accused. The poor are being marginalized. (Let me just share with you what is written there, in case someone should ever tell you that the Bible is not concerned with the public good:
because you trample upon the poor
and take from him exactions of wheat,
you have built houses of hewn stone,
but you shall not dwell in them;
you have planted pleasant vineyards,
but you shall not drink their wine.
[12] For I know how many are your transgressions,
and how great are your sins –
you who afflict the righteous, who take a bribe,
and turn aside the needy in the gate.
Amos, the prophet speaks on God’s behalf, trying desperately to cut through the numbness abounding, the blindness, the closed hearts.
I hate, I despise your festivals. Your solemn assemblies do nothing for me.
You think I want your sacrifices, your slaughtered flesh?
Stop singing for a minute. Listen. Look. Feel. Remember.
What is required? What opens eyes, and hearts and makes life worthwhile:
Let justice roll down like waters. Let righteousness spring forth like an everlasting flowing stream.
A parrot needs some nurturing. A bit of litter needs addressing. You keep your heart open and whole vistas open up. You find yourself holding a patent on plastic bag harvesters, after simply noticing blight, despair, chaos.
You begin to do things you never thought possible. You suddenly realize that you’ve named 45 parrots, determined their names based on their particular individual characteristics. You suddenly, after years of pretending you are alone, self-sufficient, find yourself in relationship to a bunch of birds. Find that you know the names of trees, in lots of different places.
May you keep your heart open, your eyes peeled. There are wild parrots all around us. There are plastic bags in trees waiting to be harvested. May your passion catch you and may we find your enthusiasm and commitment contagious. Inspire us. The world needs one more open heart and one more pair of open eyes.
May it be so.
August 14, 2005 - Unitarian Church, Davenport, Iowa. Rev. Roger Butts