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Cookie was a white parakeet from Espiritu Santo, the country of the big Nambas.  He could say only two words, and since they were very important to him he was saying them most of the time.  One was his name, ‘Cookie’, and the other was ‘Love me, caress me, pet me’.  In the language of the parakeets this request is a very soft cooing, deep in the throat, something like ‘cooloo, cooloo’.  And when he said it he lifted his crest and extended his head so we could scratch it.  The places where he liked to be scratched, nature in her foresight had coloured bright salmon, which could be seen under his white surface feathers as he lifted them.  And he never had enough of caressing. 

His name, Cookie, was hardly secondary in importance, and he used it untiringly, especially when he wanted something.  But it was not by either of these words that he taught me the secret of the universe. 

It was Sunday morning.  All around the roof of the bungalow an almost solid sheet of water came down.  It was raining as it can rain only in the rainy season in the tropical rain forest.  If you have a strong shower turned on full, and put your head under it, that will give you an idea of how it rains.  The house was empty.  My wife and children had gone to visit our nearest neighbours, some five miles away.  Except for the monotonous sound of the pouring rain, the house and courtyard, the garden and the forest were absolutely silent.  Even the ducks had taken refuge under the kitchen roof for fear of drowning.  We were alone on the verandah, Cookie and I, and out of sight of each other, he in his cage and I in a deck chair with a book which was not very interesting. 

Suddenly Cookie started to sing.  Very rarely did he do this, but today he was really jubilant, singing with full voice into the empty house and the rain forest.  It was not a mating song, it was hardly intended for anyone at all, and neither did he know that I was there.  Then why or for whom should he sing?  As I silently approached him he was looking out into the curtain of rain that descended hardly three feet in front of him, into the huge dark trees of the forest.  Then, on his little perch in his little cage, he started to dance.  And while I became more and more astonished, asking myself what it could be that brought him so much joy, what he could see that I could not see, what he possessed that I, the human being, did not possess, he danced more and more intensely, with utter and absolute abandon.  Here he was, imprisoned in a cage without any companionship, not even another bird or duck or chicken as on a sunny day; and the children had left him no food or water.  Yet he was singing and dancing from a full heart, in ecstasy. 

And suddenly I understood.  Here was no little bird.  That consciousness which sang, which jubilated, was not in a cage.  It was part of the whole, part of the rain and the forest and the wind.  And so the little bird was in ecstasy.  He had himself become that, that rain falling from the clouds, running over the leaves and seeping into the crevices of the earth among the roots.  He had become, himself, that vegetation, that tropical forest which was drinking with big gulps the heavenly blessing.  He had become, himself, the waterfall descending from the hills, the rivulets leaping from stone to stone among the ferns.  He was no longer a little parakeet left alone, prisoner in a cage.  He was himself the universe, himself the joy.                       

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