Owl Alone

One day, like Perstephanie, you might grasp an utter aloneness to existence. The usual and probably healthy response to that kind of epiphany is to take refuge in distraction. Food, chemicals, or the glass piece in your pocket. But sometimes a curious impulse opens us to lines of thinking that wind one through wonder and terror. This is the story of a day that happened.

At least since adolescence, a gnawing sense of incompletion had Perstephanie running in her circular world of little successes and big dissatisfactions. She was so busy trying to complete herself that she didn’t take notice that everyone else was in one way or another experiencing the same sense of lack.

Perstephanie now in her thirties and with a divorce and career breakdown under her belt was finally forced to rest in failure. She was back living with her parents and embarrassed. But she felt good about her progress earlier that day applying for jobs, and so she gave herself the luxury of going for a guilt-free walk on her childhood dirt road.

The minimum maintenance road had its own slow pace, and for a little while she just walked and kicked rocks. Not in a hurry. Nowhere to be. She had forgotten how good it felt to walk on a path with nothing to do but rocks to kick. As the pebbles scattered, she was flooded with a feeling of remembrance. To be without a care, without a schedule, without concern. A little part of her heart ached recognizing how long it had been.

She wondered to herself, What happened? When did I lose THAT? A heavy curiosity stopped her. Really, when do we stop being okay as is and suddenly become incomplete beings needing endless fixing? Her dad’s voice came to mind. “It’s capitalism darling. Everywhere you are told you need this or that to be enough. Happiness is just a few more products and services away…after you get those pay raises mind you.” Maybe he was right and this was the natural outcome of big brains making sense of the algorithms of desire created by capitalism.

Or maybe it was the drive to measure all things in this world that shifted our focus from simple being to neurotic self-assessing. Maybe in insisting on quantifying everything it trickled into us the belief that life could be measured, our doings compared, and our beings thus slated for judgment. Whatever the case, incompletion became the default, and measuring progress the work of every app developer and human user.

“Wow, I’m really in the universe where everything is measured and monetized,” Perstephanie grumbled aloud. She suddenly remembered the “Social Dilemma” documentary and the scoring of girls’ hotness from 1 to 10. She scrunched her nose and felt an anger rising. Then the memory of her best friend’s suicide note bubbled to the surface. It had pointed to the torment such a world inflicts on the sensitive soul when it described her inability to ever live up to her society’s definitions of worth. Perstephanie knew she was being superficial, but still more often than was healthy she wished she were the kind of beautiful she wasn’t.

Kicking another rock on the dirt path, she thought, I’d like to be beautiful. Complete. Special. So nothing could threaten my self worth. At that moment, she saw two piercing eyes. They belonged to a barn owl ten yards away perched in a familiar oak tree. It was the one she used to hug as a child. This must be the owl that had reduced her parents’ brood of ten to just two hens. She felt an odd intimacy locking eyes with such a creature during daytime hours. She looked away. The owl didn’t.

A strange voice whispered in her mind, Tell me, would you like to be the most special of all?

Perstephanie, already stopped in her tracks, frowned in disbelief. That voice was different from her normal thoughts. Where did that come from? Would I want to be the most special of all? She wondered then giggled admitting her neediness to herself. She had spent her life pleasing others, trying to be pretty enough, or trying to be some kind of unique. It never quite worked out, though. None of it. Her conclusion was that she wasn’t enough. Do I want to be the most special of all? Oh yes… I soo would!

The owl descended from its perch. It landed on the branch of a younger maple just a few yards away. Perstephanie’s heart began to race. She did not feel physically threatened, yet this act triggered a deeper fear. She couldn’t name or understand it, but something about reality itself suddenly felt tenuous.

The eerie voice spoke in her mind, this time strange words coupled with beautific images that defied her normal senses. Beauty beyond imagination. The mantle of the most special. As the words echoed, she saw and felt images infinitely more beautiful than anything she had ever seen or imagined. Her breath was caught. She was in total awe. In that moment, she would have given anything to be that.

She was melting into a beauty beyond color and form. Of an entirely different order. It was profound and wove through the known and unknown dimensions of time and space. As if some incomprehensible divine level of intelligence and ineffable beauty had swallowed her whole. But as quickly as the images came, they dissolved. She was left with a painful sense of loss.

Confused seconds elapsed.

She gasped, “Come back!” but was left with an empty feeling and silence. Suddenly she became cognizant of her rapidly beating heart. The fear. The owl hooted. Perstephanie glanced at it and away. I’d face my fears for that, she insisted to herself. Then she stared back at the owl.

The owl hooted again. Then it swooped down from the branch and circled her from above.

As it did, a piece of paper fell from the owl’s talons. It spiraled as it descended. She grabbed the falling paper. It read, “WHAT IF IT MEANT TO BE THE LONELIEST BEING OF ALL?”

She squinted her eyes as she read it. Then without knowing why, she crumpled the paper and shoved it in her pocket. Things had gotten weird. Too weird. Her brain hurt trying to reconcile the extraordinary visions with words too threatening to digest. A cold was now in the atmosphere. She began to shiver, then run. As she ran the length of the road she knew so well, she wondered if she were sleeprunning or real at all.

Back at the house, she found dinner waiting on the table. She was just in time for grilled cheese and tomato basil soup. Halleluijah, some comfort food. Her mom noticed her hand shaking, “Pers, are you okay?” Perstephanie couldn’t keep it to herself, “It’s that that owl that’s been killing your chickens. I know this sounds crazy but…”

She frantically shared what happened with her parents and dug in her pocket for the paper to show them. Of course, she couldn’t find it. She felt stupid. Doubted herself. Embarrassment painted her cheeks. Pers wished she had kept it all a secret. She asked to be excused and her parents, clearly uncomfortable, looked at each other with concern and nodded.

Lying in her bed, she felt tense but was intent on remembering the beautiful visions. She’d do anything to be that kind of beautiful. To fly free from the tyranny of petty things and ugly judgments. To be beyond this world of to-dos and to-fixes. She tried so hard to remember those incomprehensible vistas of deep meaning and beauty where everything was and always had been perfect.

And then she felt a whooshing wind and was transitioned to a familiar dreamscape. She was back on the road. The owl was in the old oak tree. The voice echoed again in her mind…

Fly free. Swallow it all whole. Regurgitate what is indigestible. Soon you will see things from a distance that no one sees. From your vantage point the vistas will inspire awe. The dramas of life mere paintings on the walls of time.

Again, exquisite but untranslatable images burst her heart open. Her senses were overtaken by feelings she had never experienced and couldn’t categorize. They bespoke a loveliness beyond what the old Pers believed possible.

But know this. It will pain you that you will have no one to share it with. All the beauty will be splendid indeed. But it will be laced with a tender knowing that it is for you alone.

And when you look in the mirror your heart will ache in the awe.

At this point, there really wasn’t a Perstephanie. But there was some beingness that understood.

Tell me, will you take the pain of utter aloneness? The moment you understand it all is the moment you will know true aloneness.

The voice in her head disappeared and the owl morphed into a fluid set of blue hued brush strokes that spoke, “Have you ever wondered what could possibly have generated such magnitudes of suffering throughout the ages? The multiplicity of beings. The maddening discord. Such great distances between the stars...

"Only the most agonizing beauty would shatter itself like that.”

And just like that, the blue dissolved into the sky, the tree stood owl-less, and Pers was no longer on the road but in her bed. She shoved the covers aside, paused, and felt a cool tear run down her cheek. No, nothing had happened. She wiped her face and went to her desk to apply for two more jobs. She ate part of an apple and cuddled her parents’ old dog. She checked her notifications and binged the evening on Netflix. But meanwhile something in her grasped Aloneness and how fractional was her human understanding of it.

And though Pers didn’t know that that was happening, she did that night sense for the first time the meaning of the final lyrics of a “Bowl of Oranges” by Bright Eyes. She grabbed her phone and tapped “On Repeat.” Somehow her bittersweet smile knew more than she did of the pools of tears hidden behind her eyes. She drifted asleep again.

And then she was the owl. She was flying freely through the vistas of beauty and wonder that had captivated Pers. Watching all that ever was. All that ever would be. An immaculate symphony of Everything in its place understood from every angle. But as she watched in absolute awe and delight, she began to feel that familiar melancholy seep into her owly heart.

She had forewarned herself. The ache grew. There was no one with whom to share this magnificent honor. She finally remembered. She was always already perfect. She had been here all along and owl alone for a very very long time.

So she did what she always did. She drifted from owl alone to very silly dreams in which she became the messy character that she had fallen in love with many times over.