It was a year ago that my lovely grandmother had the stroke that pretty much was the end for her. While she hung on for another week, she had one foot in the other world during that time.
Back in college, one of my mom's friends told me that when her grandmother was older, she made sure to ask her to send some kind of sign after she had died. I think she asked for butterflies. I don't know if she ever saw the flock of butterflies that was meant to signal her passing into a different realm, but the thought stuck with me.
When my other granny died, she spoke through the night and through the distance between the hospital and her home. My grandad heard her call out, and wandered the apartment looking for her before he realized what had happened.
I'm not sure about what world we have this overlap with, but I do believe that our spirits separate from our physical selves. Where they go or what they can inhabit is still a glorious mystery to me.
A few nights ago we had a visitor. It was the coldest night yet here in LA, somewhere in the mid-40s and the neighborhood was surprisingly quiet. We heard a loud and warm series of hoo's out in the night. After walking to the front yard and craning our necks we could see a lump of something at the top of the very tall cypress tree. As his head turned, the moonlight caught his white collar, and with binoculars we could faintly make out his little horns.
I'm not trying to insinuate that the spirit of my grandmother sent this owl on the anniversary of her stroke, but experiences with the wild can feel like encounters with another world. In urban L.A., where we more often hear gunshots than owls, we truly felt like our presence was graced.
Photo above by The Firefly Forest.
2 comments:
Lovely. I always call gifts like that owl an example of God wooing me through his creation. Of course in this case, it was a Hooo--hooooo!
When my dad was really sick, he would come in and out of lucidity, and say a lot of one-liners that we recorded in a notebook. Sometimes funny and nonsensical, sometimes incredibly profound, our collection of his final quotes includes, "When you see the seagulls, you'll know I am active." The first place I went after my father passed away was Kimberly point, next to the lighthouse. Feeling lost and bewildered, I sat on the hood of my car, smoked a cigarette, and looked up. Directly above me, 30-40 seagulls were circling, round and round over my head. In that moment, I felt like my dad's not really gone, somewhere some part of him is still active. Since then, seagulls have shown up at key moments, in strange places. On his birthday, on the anniversary of his passing, on a day I happen to be missing him and needing his advice, outside my Brooklyn apartment window, swooping around my neighborhood in Portland. Maybe it's coincidence, maybe it's something bigger than that. They say when you see a seagull, you know the water's near, but I when I see a seagull, I know my father is near.
This story about the owl visiting you reminds me that I'm not the only one seeing these kinds of connections in the world we live.
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