Parakeets, Rats and Budgies


When you feed the birds, you feed the rats.

My desk looks out onto a bird feeding station. Every morning, I put out a range of seed, rice, sunflower seeds, apples and sometimes, grapes. Within minutes, the tree is a feathered wonderland. Johannesburg is classified as an urban forest and the birds make the most of the trees in our garden.


Frequent visitors to the feeders are the rose-ringed parakeets. Their bright green plumage and sassy character make them entertaining visitors. But they are also alien and feral. They dominate the food and chase the smaller birds away. Every now and again, a blue budgie flutters in to defy the bully birds, on the run/fly from his cage and looking for a meal.  

I open my curtains to the noise and movement and the birds are my symphony as I work.

He comes over the top of the wall. Down the tree, along a branch, fat and sleek and looking for apples and seeds. He is a brown abomination of fur with a tail as long as a parakeet’s, but wire, not feather. When he comes, I close my curtains. I’m not squeamish about many things but rats are my kryptonite. I know he’s there but if I don’t have to see him, I feel better.

The day he ran at my feet was the day our relationship changed. Manie the Rat Man was there within the hour. Bait stations were set, and action had been taken. The feral parakeets turned their heads back to the sunflower seeds, unperturbed.

As a coach, I’m always interested in what drives us to action. I can’t help turning everything into some sort of metaphor, so this is a thinking metaphor. Our thoughts are mostly patterns and habits, often with not much sifting of the good from the bad. We tolerate the feral parakeets and because they are beautiful, they are welcome at our thinking table. Thoughts of freedom can be reduced to budgie size. The seeds of possibility are gobbled by alien invader thinking. 

Hide behind the curtain,
or follow the journey.

Freedom is a dream word. Is it possible? The things we own, own us. Bob Marley calls us to be ‘free of mental slavery’. How?

There is a moment when the rats in our thinking have to be faced, in all their twitching reality. They are voracious and gnaw away at our hopes, making us draw the curtains on possibility.   

The end of March is my two-year anniversary of not closing the curtains on the rats. I was the wrong person in the right place but being in that place was literally killing me. I stepped into space with budgie bravery and found that the size of the wings didn’t matter; it was the first step into freefall that mattered.

I am not naïve. Life is tough in this Covid world. I have had to hustle to be ok. Everyday, the rats and mice of my thoughts come. Some come, seductively dressed as parakeets, telling me not to take another leap, this is good enough.

But here I am, with a for sale sign on the pavement and a dream of the sea and new adventures. Jules is taking early retirement and I have even bigger coaching and leadership work sowing the seeds of a new possibility in my thinking.

We can be bigger than the rats. We can fly with budgie wings.  



Comments

  1. Unknown29 April 2021 at 06:49

    How fortunate I was to meet both you and Jules, dear Ruth, before you flew away. Continue to paint pictures with your words, as I paint dreams with my pictures. If only for a moment in time, you both touched my life.

    ReplyDelete

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