Owl-ification

My picturesque new home-base just got even more welcoming

Barred owl by Scott Martin Photography

Nature brings me immense pleasure. It’s truly the reason for being. My earliest song lyrics were written about trees, animals, land formations, and the profound, pressing need for environmental conservation. I have sculpted my life around spending as much time as possible around water, trees, and wildlife. I’m a hardcore nature nerd, and proud of it.

I saw my first barred owl the other day, in the forest behind our house. It’s surprising that it took this long - 43 years - for somebody who’s spent a great deal of time in every kind of forest, traipsing around full-blown wilderness for fun. I’ve encountered some fun and magical creatures in the woods in years past. There’ve been elusive (yet abundant) foxes whose presence so enamoured my partner and me that we named our son after them. Coyotes for sure, have howled metres away from us on many nighttime walks. Endless deer. Moose from the highway, (thankfully) afar. Bison. A colony of bats flew next to us at eye level on a trail in Southern British Columbia at sundown. Snakes of so many varieties (found living inside our house, of all places). Porcupines gnawing on pine trees; one brushing precariously against my leg with its lengthy bristles (that experience humbled me for sure). Seals. Otters leaving poop in the backyard. A family of racoons living on our deck, the mama hissing furiously at me from a metre away. We’ve run into our share of wandering flocks of goats, and even an errant emu in one Southern Ontario forest.

I’ve heard owls, including this one hooting and chattering away in the early mornings and evenings. I’ve communed with them in enclosures at wildlife preserves, and yet, I’ve somehow never casually happened upon one in my daily life until the day before my birthday. It was sitting in a tree behind my house, and flapped silently past me on the trail as I headed into the forest alone. We played a few minutes of hide and seek, catching glimpses of one another until my son arrived home from school.

Photo by May Finch on Unsplash

My meeting with this owl constituted one of the happiest few moments of my life, which is saying a lot. I’ve experienced a whole lot of joy over the last two decades, all of it involving either my loved ones … including animals … or music.

I used to collect owl carvings and sculptures and figurines; I was gifted horned-owl-shaped earrings and a macrame wall-hanging from my future spouse and a new friend, respectively, because both of them had noticed I had a “thing” for owls in my early 20’s. My fascination with them may have waned over the years, but the significance of their presence in my life has not.

I simply couldn’t stop smiling as I left the owl’s domain. That meeting was the perfect birthday gift for me.

Owls seem to encourage us to embrace the mystery of our own shadow. We as three-dimensional, moving, breathing beings cast and drag around a two-dimensional darkness that only follows us when light is scarce. When we peer directly into our shadow, we see that there is nothing there to fear: it’s just a benign, translucent simplification of our physical self. It is but a simple caricature lacking detail or any nuance whatsoever. Owls remind us of this. Barred owls, with their impossibly dark, large eyes that - only when viewed up close - contain a softness and light that tugs at our humanity, beg our forgiveness for being so afraid to confront that which moves and thrives in the dark.

My new friend