Epiphany

The holidays were packed away. January was settling in. It was like every other January she could remember. It was gray. It was finally cold. The landscape was the rawness of graphite barren trees, all of their fall leaves had been collected in piles by the edge of the road she was walking on. On brisk days, the leaves would come back to life, swirling and dancing in the winter wind, then landing haphazardly, between branches, in fences, and hanging from unopened windows. Always near dusk, in the blue hour, she would bundle up and lace up her running shoes, and head out for a very long walk.

On this particular long night, it was very cold. Her breathing was like a chimney pouring out smoke into the frigid air. The sky was black, and Jupiter was slightly to the side of a golden crescent moon. The stars were like children raising their hands in a classroom, begging their teacher to look at them. She put her gloved hands in her pockets and started out. The walk was a kind of therapy. The pandemic had made her already caged life seem almost immovable. Going anywhere, which was a rarity anyway, was reduced to a fear of becoming sick, in the very disingenuous, ill world in which she lived. A world of generational trauma, where no one felt good enough, except for a handful of narcissists, and we all know how that works. So life was a road to a nowhere, the road which everyone seemed to be on. She bravely, however, wandered into the nights regardless. Sirens would scream in the quiet, probably a call for difficulty breathing. It was always anxiety or COVID. Her world on two levels was spinning, seemingly out of control. On the surface, it appeared somewhat like it had been manufactured, yet oddly enough, she sill felt somewhat in control. 

As she crossed into the neighborhood, it was eerily quiet. Lights were on inside of houses, and TVs were flickering as she passed house after house. There were no cars on the road. It was a silent night. The only sounds were crackling leaves scooting across the pavement, and the emptiness of the world. It was a mirror of her own world, too, or at least at face value. She often wondered where dreams came from, those reels that played in her head. Those places where she saw herself, being herself, and yet they remained so far away. "Why have dreams if we are unable to grasp them, live them," she often pondered as her feet hit the pavement. 

She heard movement in the field. A small herd of deer was living in the small city where she found herself over and over again. The deer knew her. She often took apples and corn to the tiny forest in the neighborhood. They stood and watched her as she passed by, listening to her every word, their white tails flicking back and forth. She worried about them, the deer, living unnaturally where humans lived. They had become travelers of the night, frolicking in the shadows. She kept walking, and wondered if maybe like her, there were other humans feeling this out-of-sync existence of longing for something more. The ache, so hard to express, of wanting something, yet that continual beat of desire in the chest would not go away.

One night, there was fluttering in the evergreen branches. It sounded to be a rather large bird trying to get comfortable on a roost of green lacy branches. She thought, "A hawk? At night?" And then there was a sound, not a coo, but a screeching, longing hoo. She stopped to look for the large bird, the darkness covered the owl in a kind of poetic symbolism. She listened to that pleading sound and quietly started to move away. With a slow motion, graceful swoosh, she watched the owl appear in the branches, turn and look with big, open eyes, and then fly away. She felt that somehow their meeting was not by chance, perhaps a destiny of sorts, a message from the universe.

When she returned to the warmth of a heated house, she grabbed her phone. She searched the meaning of an owl's calling. Owls are known for their wisdom, and so the chance of meeting one is a message being sent to us to unearth something hidden in our subconscious. Charles de Leusse once said, "When the owl sings, the night is silent." She knew this so very well. The long walks into the darkness, a rhythm of nocturnal souls, the place she was lured to visit nightly.

The spring came, and summer fell into fall. Winter was arriving again, with a chilly call. She bundled up, life was unchanged. The drift of one day into another. The sameness of time etched in different sorrows. She followed the same path. People moved away and people came to stay. Trees were cut down, flowers withered in the first frost. Her legs walked briskly in routine. Her mind traveled, as the road was memorized. At the end of dusk, the remaining geese traveled in a "V" overhead, heading for the pond over the hill. The noise of their wings flapping and their loud honking made her stop and gaze. The geese were like the tide. They ebbed and flowed in the light of the moon, to the order of rhythms humans could never understand. She felt this pull, this tug of her heart, pulling her somewhere she had not seen. The streets she walked really went nowhere, and yet that was a place. She needed somewhere. Off in the distance, she could hear a dog, or maybe a coyote, pleading to be heard. The sad howl, the winter of discontent. The sirens still screeched in the night, she figured it was difficulty breathing. Hospitals were on diversion, a kinder way of saying, "No room at the inn." But she felt safe on the dark, empty streets. Almost back to her mother's home, she looked up, and on the peak of the roof of a house in the curve she walked nightly, sat an owl. The moon lingered behind the owl, and so its silhouette was crystal clear. The barn owl's head would turn as she inhaled the world around her. Her big eyes would blink in slow motion. The owl never made a sound, never moved from her perch. She watched as the human intrusion walked by. Two strangers, two souls in the night, a chance meeting, and as Joni Mitchell says so eloquently, "Love is touching souls, surely you touched mine." The owl and the human, so alike, so different, an awareness in time of our shared lives. The exchange of gifts, if we are open to receive them.

Later that year, in the early spring, when winter had dug in its heels and refused to leave, she walked in the dawn. It was Easter morning. The sun was about to appear on the horizon, the red sky ushering in its arrival. A day immersed in new beginnings. The moon was giving way to new day. The stars were fading, and birds were waking. Blooming flowers were warming in deep mulch. She was wrapped in a flannel poncho, and her hands were warm in winter gloves. She saw something standing in the road. As she got closer, she saw the owl. The woman was standing very still. The light was approaching, it could be seen down the road, peeking through trees, falling on the road. She was afraid to walk too close. She stopped, and once again, they looked into each other's eyes. The world fell still. The connection, the appreciation of respect, the epiphany of the moment. Ever so slowly, the owl turned, looked back, blinked, and like an artist's perfect hand, lifted herself upon perfect wings and flew away. The human watched as the owl disappeared into the dawn of a new day.

In her long walks immersed in solitude, on long winter nights, the owl often called to her. The days and months passed, and she contemplated the message. After every encounter, the owl would look, turn as if a dancer, lift her strong legs, extend her graceful wings, and fly away. So that is what the woman did. Before the blackbirds arrived in swirls of thousands to winter in the nowhere she knew so well. She packed her things, one by one, lifted her weary soul, and she flew away. She never looked back. The road is now still empty. The leaves have gathered by the road. Porch lights are on. A skunk crosses a front yard. The winter ever so cold. The owl sits in the tree, waiting for her. The woman never comes. The owl blinks and flies away.

"The size of an ending will never have offset the inevitability of a beginning." - Craig D. Lounsbrough