The Owl’s Rebirth

The Owl’s Rebirth: Feathered Pearls of Inner Wisdom

The girl looked up towards the sound of the beating of wings in the air overhead. She could quite clearly hear the beating pounding through her body like the pulse of the blood flowing through her veins. Just like she knew the pulsing vermillion belonged within her being, she found a deep and indelible knowing that the owl was here for her. The cinnamon and grey flecked wings came to a rest aside its body in stillness as the owl observed her with an inspecting gaze from its perch on the outcropping of boulders and tumbled rocks upon which it had alighted after its descent from the æther from whence it came. The timeless wisdom in the owl’s eyes as they pierced her own seemed to challenge her concept of self to her very marrow. A dare arose in those dark depths as the owl lifted off and dove into the dark cave beyond the outcropping, taunting her to follow it into the abyss. “What will you find if you follow me, girl? What is it you seek? Can you see through the fear into the glory? Is this a mission of potency or are you too weak?” The shiver in her flesh and lump in her throat belied the girl’s hauteur as she slowly rose to her feet from her repose on the mossy and rotting log of a fallen weeping willow and intrepidly placed one foot in front of the other as the raptor led her into the belly of the earth. “Follow me if you dare,” said the swish of her wings, “into the darkness and the truth it shall bring. The clarity untarnished and lies unwed, amidst delusions and illusions you keep in your head!” The thunderous echoes of the girl’s timorousness disrupt the filamentous whispers of a brazen soul calling for her assent to accompany the bird on its quest into the dim, unlit cavernous sanctuary. As she ventures further into the blackness the mists slither damply on the walls seeming to close in upon her. “How did I get here?” the thought rose unbidden, from somewhere unseen, always there, yet hidden in the daylight of ordinary monotonous anticipation yet secluded in the entrapments, attachments, and pain. A reclusive, intimate awareness of the yearning inquiry of existence… A whimpering cry from the owl startles the ingènue from the eerie midsts of her reflections. The anguished sound pulling her from her inward gaze as compassion floods and bewilders her. Why this kinship of known tribulation with the barn owl and the empathy flooding her as it were her own distress call reverberating in the chasm? The sensation of misty tears well in her eyes as she looks for the snowy white heart-shaped countenance of the feathered one and sees her gazing back at the girl from the shores of an underground lake of clear waters lit with an ethereal evanescence. The waters call her, beckoning her, tempting her and mocking her. “Submerge yourself, precious one. I am the terror you seek! You stand there swaying and weak on your feet, although the warrior is inside of these waters, oh yes, she is beneath! Tremble you may, oh if you must, for your own soul you seek to know before you are dust and so in you must wade and under you must go in order that you may emerge renewed emitting your own glow. For the light is inside as it has always been, owl’s wisdom is your own inner kin.” Hollowly walking with the owl’s talons cutting into her very flesh from its roost on her shoulder into the pool of her subaqueous transformation the codes of self-knowledge soak into her submersed form and bioluminescence radiates from the girl enveloping the entire cavern and beaming out into the glade she had been languishing in on the willow when her kin first flew in. As the light slowly fades she walks out of the water’s luminosity in a gentle way sacredly humbled and overflowing with grace, having confronted the terror of the unknown and hitherto unloved self, deep underneath the waters and having merged with the pearls of feathered wisdom and become one with it, kin now residing within, she stands tall and regal as she walks out of the cave without looking back presenting her rebirth to mother earth and the creatures of her forests and the stars anchored in the firmament above. Now at one with all in existence and knowing herself inalienably, gratitude filling all her works and all she touched from that day forward for knowledge of divinity is as such and this is the of the way that these things should be. She looks into the night-clad sky and says “Yes, and it begins with me.”