The Lessons of Owls

I had been seeing owls for months— and I felt as if they felt my awareness. Like conspirators in an elusive cult, they followed me: on my nighttime walks, computer browsers, and silhouettes on craft store jewelry. They were speaking to me.

The logical part of my mind rationalized

“Owls represent wisdom. There is something here that you need to learn.” My gut wretched. I somehow knew that, perhaps, this was information that I needed to learn, but not information that I necessarily wanted to. As someone who tends to see most things as blessings, this immediately felt more like a lesson.

Onto the internet I went, my fingers clacking keys as if I were scanning through innumerable filing cabinets. Owl symbolism- what does it mean, and does seeing a barn owl symbolize something different than a snowy one? My anxiety began to rise through my stomach, going into my heart like a feral cat attached to a red balloon. My throat began to sweat. “Breathe,” I told myself, grounding my breaths in my chest, attempting to cool off the system before it shut down. “Okay. I’m good.”

Back to the catacombs I go, and with each discovery I make, I sink a little deeper into the darkness. I begin painting a picture with the knowledge I acquire, and I quickly remember one of the first times I saw one: I see a hot, humid streetlight. My house creaks white on the corner, and it’s Louisiana June. I can tell from my phone that it’s nine at night, and I’m surrounded by heat and black. This is when I work out. To my left, like an apparition, the brown-winged god swoops low and seduces the asphalt. It immediately leaves, and being that it was roughly twenty feet away, I wonder if it ever came.

Owls can ask us to use our intuition, and I knew that my alertness was required. “Listen to your gut.” Was I in danger?

Around the time I began seeing these owls, it also came to my awareness that I may have an online stalker. The puzzle pieces began falling together, and instead of the sharp, accelerating crescendo that I expected, I felt  oddly calm. Although I await the steam-engines of worst case scenarios and what- it’s, my mind takes a momentary pause. I reflect on my discovery, like cold raindrops on a city window. It feels cold, even beautiful— and there’s something surreal about it. It almost feels like looking into snow globe: chaos, a mirror reality, but one that was previously entirely separate from me. That sense of detachment hugs me and holds onto me, and after another moment, I begin to wander onto another website. A simple click, and some scrolling. I see the word “death.”

Everything suddenly goes quiet— like white noise on a television, but without the sound. Numb nervousness. Time begins to freeze.My eyes glaze over the other meanings like “wealth” and “creativity”, not truly registering them as concepts. I feel as if I’m in a space separate from time, floating in otherness, drowning in some invisible force. Death.

Death. I breathe. Then, I breathe again. Life.

I was scared, and I was strong. My heart began blooming like a lotus flower; my heels dug a little more deeply into the ground. “Well,” I said “I guess there’s that”. I stopped seeing owls.

The owls revealed that there was a lesson: you do not become less scared, but rather, the more you know, and the more you know yourself— you gain the courage to face death in spite of it.

You live.