Tonight with a friend I watched a DVD: The Parrots of Telegraph Hill. You come away seeing that even within a flock of birds as with humans, there are individuals with different traits, ways of relating, preferences.

Toward the end of the movie, the main narrator speaks of coming to understand as he experiences the death of one of the birds that the force of life within him and within the parrot are the same. He speaks of a waterfall at Yosemite. The river comes to a cliff and in falling over the edge bursts into many droplets. They remain droplets until they reach again the water below, flow again as one river.

He said life is that river, our lives the individual droplets. You don’t lose anything in leaving the droplet shape at the bottom of the falls. You regain the river.

There is a similar reference in Rumi’s The Seed Market that is posted somewhere in this blog.

I never have been completely fond of my name, but tonight it seems a good one. It means Beautiful Waterfall. Life is indeed that. The fall to be experienced with wonder and not fear.