What if we set our clocks (and attention) to the animals?
When I went home this weekend, the rabbitbrush was blooming, which was my sign that it had been one year since my grandmother had died. September 5 was the anniversary of her death, and her death was my impetus for starting this Substack, my first post being about the surreal and rewarding strangeness of writing her obituary.(Thanks for following along for a full year now, or, if you’re new here, welcome aboard.)
The rabbitbrush brings a beautiful flush of color to the high desert on the heels of the August dry. It’s a flash of mustard yellow among the cut wheat and tawny cheatgrass and parched, gone-silver sage. Happily, when I drove back to the scablands for Labor Day, the land was absent of big wildfire smoke. Happily, a few thunderheads were building up into towers as I crested the hill out of town toward the farm.
I’m trying to figure out which combination of rural things calms my nervous system every time I leave the city and head west, so I can try to replicate them in suburbia, but one part of the equation, for certain, is the ocean-like wash of a shrub-steppe horizon, of open sky meeting desert, of cloud-riddled blue skimming wheat field and basalt scab until they press together and blur, forever and ever, amen.
I wasn’t home long before my dad informed me that 8:00 was owl time. I loved that he knew this and I loved the way in which he announced it: Owl time. Don’t be late.
We often have a host of owls in summer, for our farm is an island of trees in an otherwise exposed land. Hawks love a good telephone pole, and crows seem happy to hop anywhere, but an owl likes a good tree situation. Our farmhouse mix of willow, elm, ash and pine mean they frequent the place most summer nights. We have true doves and false doves and a dozen kind of songbirds, which my parents identify with the Merlin app, and which my father occasionally screenshots and texts me (the last one was a Red-breasted Nuthatch). We have nighthawks and mud daubers. We have small desert bats and scowling great horned owls. But on this visit, we had my favorite: barn owls.
Barn owls are the ones with great, white heart-shaped marks around their eyes, a pattern that accentuates their dark and deep-set owl-eyes, aligning them, as we humans will, with symbolic notions of looking otherworldly or ghostly. Adding to that idea is the fact that they are a creature that stares a bit too sharply back at you. Creepy or gorgeous, pick your adjective; it’s of no matter to the owls. (Or maybe it is.) I associate them with stillness and summer warmth and full harvest moons, which is to say I’ve associated them with love.
8:00 was the time when dusk met something deeper, when the barn owls began to rustle in the pines and launch for short flights between trees. It is an exquisite experience to sit as still as you can on a cement porch step as an owl glides low and quiet above you. If you are lucky, owl time will coincide with a very still night, made stiller by the first cool settling of fall, and you will wonder if owls have the singular ability to parse air particles as they fly. Maybe it’s a trick of the light. Maybe they travel through a magic slipstream that bends physics and time.
On the cement steps with me that night were my kids, whom I’d let stay up for Owl Time, on account of them overhearing their grandfather declaring it in a way that made it clear it was something not to be missed. Despite shushing, my kids couldn’t keep quiet or still. They thrilled at the owls—bright cream bellies, flash of wing—and they thrilled equally at a bat, its erratic shadow doing cartwheels in and out of the last pockets of contrast in the sky. There were four barn owls that night, and we watched their flight patterns braid between trees until we lost sight of feather and wing, until any rush or rustle might be real or imagined, until the handle of the Big Dipper tipped out from behind a scattering of night clouds.
In the city, I don’t arrange my evenings around owl time. But I think I’d be a better human if I could. Because I am human, and a modern one at that, more often than not I soothe my end-of-day-tired by watching TV on the couch after the kids are down. I am not aligned with the daily habits of nature in ways that I might be in more rural places. Watching the owls this weekend felt so real and full and wonderful that it painted my city life in painful contrast.
That doesn’t mean paying attention to animals isn’t possible in more urban settings. When I thought about it, I had already catalogued the suburban wildlife around my nightly routine. I knew the time when the quail came picking down the rocks to take a dust bath in my neighbor’s flower bed. And I knew to look for the quarter-sized, cat-faced spider that had strung a web inches from my sliding door overhead when I let my dog out each night. Was it enough? I don’t know.
The deeper experience of the owls reminded me that this was the way forward, the way to reset in a modern world of unprecedented climate disasters and world events, not to mention regular traffic and organized sports schedules. To pay attention to the true and deep things that have been here forever and that will go on without us, like owl wings giving way to constellations.
Barn Owl Photo by Phil Robson on Unsplash.
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