FLORIDA BURROWING OWLS

Recently on a synchronicity site, a member asked about owl symbolism. I wrote him about our experiences with burrowing owls- and an Amazonian owl..

+++

Twice now, a Florida burrowing owl has predicted an event for me. One owl appeared on a fence outside my dad’s room when he was living with us. At first, I thought it was alerting me that he might die. But the owl was missing its left leg and about 12 hours later, I got a call from the Alzheimer’s unit where my mother was that she was being taken to ER. They believed her left hip had been dislocated. Turned out, her left hip had disintegrated. 2 weeks later, she passed.

Another time, several  burrowing owls perched just above our door, on the edge of the roof. That evening, we got a call that a close friend had passed.

Years ago, Rob and I led rips through the Peruvian Amazon for Avianca Airlines. We traveled on an old rubber hauling riverboat that went from some obscure port in Colombia to Iquitos, Peru. The boat was like the Fitzcarraldo – from the movie. At one place where we stopped, an indigenous man had an owls for sale. I trade a couple tubes of lipstick for the owl and it traveled with us on the boat to Iquitos, where the American owner of the boat had a refuge for Amazonian creatures. My entire life changed after that interaction with the owl, whom I fed and got to know during that two-day trip up the Amazon. So they are also harbingers of hope.

Matthew replied:

For me, these two different stories illuminate an attentiveness to the ecology and psychology of nature, respectively. The former captures ‘the signs’ – yet very tangible practical  ones – that non-human nature can signal for us if we attend to them (they are obviously more attuned to earth than we are these days!) whilst the latter captures the more mythic-symbolic-psychic but which equally serves its very real and practical purpose.

These owl stories are so telling and echo my own experiences and those of several of my interviewees. I cannot think of another animal whose association (in this this case, with death/crossings over/liminal life-death space) finds so many cross-cultural commonalities (in many parts of Africa, owls are widely persecuted because of this association but that’s akin to “killing the messenger”) . Of course , it’s not like every owl spells portent or doom – there’s an ecology and psychology to every interaction. Owls are allowed to just “do their thing”. But it’s those unusual and repeated visitations which beckon our attention and deciphering.