Barred Owl Ballad

Time flies on silent wings

In the late evenings I hear the the call of a barred owl. I suspect there are two, likely a nesting pair, who have found a fine hollow for their owlets. So far as we know, barred owls mate for life and breed each year. Back and forth they call, their hoots sweep and dive through the trees along the same aerial pathways the owls take to on the wing. I call back to them sometimes, and on occasion, I hear a response. Lately, I’ve just been listening.

Myths around owls cover a broad swath of beliefs, including associations with wisdom, life transitions, shapeshifting, and in the case of the Choctaw people, a warning about the death of a relative. I’ve had a bizarre—call it spiritual—experience with a great horned owl, and their yellow eyes have a discerning, if not disconcerting, way of seeing through me. It was those yellow eyes that I once stared into, and then out of, to see, to my surprise, me. Minutes after the encounter, I took a deer with my compound bow and watched the last breath leave the animal’s chest.

The barred owl has a different energy. Barred owls don’t bring omens, they bring awareness. Their calls in the night cause me to stop and listen, to pay attention. The sound ripples the edges of spacetime and I realize my elder son is five, my second son is one, and my german shorthaired pointer is eleven. Gray hair stipples my beard and my dog wears it as eyeglasses around her once brown snout and face. My wife and I are also approaching the anniversary of our first date ten years ago. This past weekend I joined a group of classmates for our twentieth high school reunion. Time, like owls, comes on the wind, drifts in the quiet moments between the trees. For long stretches we think nothing of it, then it calls out, through the darkness, and demands our attention. Even the feathers of the barred owl reflect time. The stripes on its chest are small timelines in our lives, the feathered discs around its eyes are the whirlpools we are trapped in, and the mottled back shows events happening all over, all at once. If we’re not focused directly on the owl, or on time, they can be hard to see, hard to make out.

Almost eight years ago, my wife and I danced to Luke Bryan’s Fast at our wedding reception. The song didn’t include any owls, but the lyrics evoke a similar sentiment:

Sixty seconds now feels more like thirty
Tick-tock, won’t stop, around it goes
Sand through the glass sure falls in a hurry
All you keep trying to do is slow it down, soak it in
You’re trying to make the good times last as long as you can
But you can’t, man
It goes too fast
It just goes too fast
Way too fast

The lyrics remind me of the brief evenings when my local barred owl calls out to its mate on the other side of the woods. Before the return call, my dog barks at the clouds, I hear my son yelling to join me on the walk, and my wife carries our baby on her chest as she tends to the garden as the approaching storm filters the last long light of day.

It was long ago when the yellow eyes of a great horned owl transported me to see the life I was living, the way I was hunting, the path I wasn’t following. Today, the barred owl gives me a different kind of sight, a gracious indwelling that reminds me the things that seem to go the fastest are those that are timeless.