I snapped my finger across the screen to refresh my inbox. “Attention! Attention!” called each bold-faced subject line. My morning habit: reading emails on my phone as I walked to the NoHo subway station. East Coasters had flooded my unread stack – just like always. That three-hour lead time meant catch-up, and my 15-minute walk was plenty of time to make a dent before I sat through 30 WiFi-free moments underground.
No, there was no crisis. But email has that Pavlovian way of invoking urgency; compelling you to check. Again. And again. And again…
Suddenly, I heard a sound from above that jolted me back to Earth. “Aw-reeeee!”
It was the parrots! The wild parrots of NoHo… or Burbank, depending on where you are. They’d joined me on my morning commute for the past six months in a flock of about 11. Then, later in the day, I’d hear that same jarring call from my office window. If I leaned back at just the right moment, I could spot them flying above. I imagined they’d followed me there, but I had no way of knowing whether they were indeed the same birds from earlier.
Marbles. A writer once described the Wild Parrots of Burbank’s sound to be that of marbles. But to me, it sounded more metallic. Steel marbles, I thought, and remembered my first steelie marbles; the ones I’d shoot with my 6-year-old index finger across the asphalt on the playground.
I thought I’d treasure those shiny silver balls forever. But alas, they were stashed in some box or drawer or pocket never to be found; never again to be shot with such a flick that they’d impress all of the kids. Like Sean in his red leather jumpsuit, sporting a wristwatch that played “Beat it” in Japanese. “That’s what it sounds like there,” he said of the beeps of his Casio.
“Aw-reee reeereee…” I’d never heard them shriek so loudly. As I stepped onto the corner, I could hear nothing else. It was coming from Fulcher Avenue.
I looked up from my phone long enough to see row upon row upon row, crowding out every inch along the electric wires and poles. Green with menacing orange beaks, twisting and tilting into all contortions, lifting their red chevroned wings to catch themselves as they nearly fell, swinging in opposition along the sagging lines.“Oh my god….” The neighborhood parrots seemed to have recruited some friends. A whole lot of friends.
I grabbed my phone again, flipping through my apps to video mode. No one was going to believe this, I thought, reaching my arms up with the phone resting between both palms. I barely realized I was walking smack-dab in the center of the street. I began counting. 1, 2, 3…. 30. 30 on that line alone! Now 10, 20… there are four rows…. 80, 100… 150? Perhaps more. “There are definitely more in that tree,” I said aloud through the drips of drizzle that must have been raining down this whole time.
Now I was below them. Unafraid of what else might splatter down. Watching as a few careened their disproportionately large heads and hooked beaks down to spy me. I stopped. Lowered my hands, tilted my face upwards, smiling into the rain. And then, whooooooooosh… aw-reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee…… putt-putt-putt-putt…
“Did you get all that?” someone asked.
I spun around. A woman was standing there on her porch. Her hair swept back in a ponytail off an enormous smile that seemed to reflect my own. I laughed. And, so did she.
“I didn’t even see you,” I started to say.
“I’ve never seen that many,” she continued, closing her eyes now as she spoke, shutting out everything but the memory. “For 15 years now, I’ve seen ‘em in my backyard. Maybe a dozen or so but never that many. My goodness, there were so many… “
Those birds were trying to tell us something.
“Here and now! Here and now!” they seemed to say, just like Aldous Huxley’s fabled mynah birds of Pala in his novel Island. The birds served as a device to bring the characters back to “Attention! Attention!”
With the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, many an American looked East (perhaps as far as fictional Pala) for insight. They found comfort in the teachings of gurus like Ram Dass, who wrote, Be Here Now.
It was a discovery 2500 years in the making, for the Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, had also preached the concept with lessons in insight meditation, or Vipassana. His view: anyone can achieve Buddhahood. But first, we must break free from so-called “clinging aggregates” (or skandhas) that threaten to derail us each moment of every day. We are not our skandhas, and once we realize that, and open our eyes (“Attention! Attention! Here and now!”), we discover we are free.
For my part, I made the decision to wake up. I left some emails unanswered that fateful day, and would eventually leave a job that no longer served me in my current state. The experience inspired me to dig deeper into my psyche and begin practicing daily 20-minute mindfulness exercises. I even signed up for a weekly creative writing class.
My walks are much more pleasant these days, knowing that with my head up I won’t miss out on the Here and Now. And when things do feel out of control, I remind myself. The sky’s not falling, it might just be the 100 feral parrots down the street.
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