Return of the Night Owl

She got home from work and set her stuff down at her kitchen table. She was in a temporary location until her current project ended and her next one began. Her relocation would most likely be international just like her last one, which ended almost six months ago now. It was hard for her to believe that it had been that long. So much had happened to her during that time, she was still just trying to catch up and process it all.

After living as a US citizen abroad, she just moved back to the US state of Hawaii from the Eastern European nation of Poland. Not only was she experiencing the harsh realities of an America Post-COVID pandemic and vastly changed from the one she left four years ago, she was also experiencing a phenomenon known as reverse culture shock. This is the concept that despite being a natural born citizen of one’s home country, a person would still experience a jarring and somewhat uncomfortable readjustment period upon returning after living for so many years overseas. The only thing making the change easier was her cute little, third floor, studio apartment with a balcony just two blocks from the beach. It was a lot more costly than her last studio in Poland and not nearly as nice, as it was much smaller and older than her unit there, but what it lacked in quality it certainly made up for in location. Poland’s weather was frigid and grey almost nine months out of the year, but here, everyday, she could wake up for breakfast and coffee oceanside and stay there with her laptop to take in the incredible views while getting work done.

While not unhappy with her current life situation, she also didn’t feel completely content with it either. It still felt to her like something was missing, although she couldn’t quite put her finger on exactly what it was. That sensation of searching for something she couldn’t clearly explain or define for herself while not being able to find it was causing her anxiety. If she thought about it logically, this made sense. How can you “find something,” if you didn’t actually know what it was you were looking for to begin with? “OK,” she thought. “You’re smart, you’re organized, you’re motivated to find answers, and you’re unafraid to put in the work to get things done. Let’s go back to the basics. We will figure this out.”

This was her inner dialogue. She had always considered it her way of positive self-talk and coaching herself through challenging situations to arrive at the best possible outcomes for her life, whatever that meant for her. Success looks different and is defined differently by everyone. The life path of each person is deeply personal and unique, and there are no right ways or perfect solutions, only the means and ends that work for the individual.

She had so much going on right now, but she also knew she had plenty of life experience and special skills she could rely on to pull herself out of the darker, unknown spaces of life to arrive at a place of complete personal satisfaction and fulfillment. She had multiple college degrees from good schools, all of them based in the sciences. She had been enthralled with science since she was just a kid. Growing up in Florida, she was introduced to the space program down at Cape Canaveral Kennedy Space Center as a child, witnessed the power of what science could do when applied properly, fallen in love with education, knowledge, and discovery, and never looked back. She had devoted her whole life to honing and developing these skills.

What she learned in the university classroom she applied to her life in the professional world. She could search, sort, manipulate, analyze, and interpret data like nobody’s business. And she had a natural talent and ability for presenting that information, as complicated as it might seem in fancy charts, graphs, and lengthy tables of variables, to anyone, from academic professors to laymen and business professionals who lacked the scientific background to understand the jargon and complex calculations it took to arrive at the final results of analysis and research. She was good at it, really good, and she knew it. And this was how she made her living.

But with everything going on in the world, the paradigm shift in employer-employee dynamics, the economy, and the Great Resignation, she had been seriously contemplating going into business for herself. She had been working slowly but diligently on setting up the foundation for her new small business in consulting and analytics. She had no idea where this part of her journey would take her, but she just knew somewhere deep down inside of her that it would be important. She had always dreamt of being her own boss. She didn’t mind working at all, but she was so tired of being overworked, underpaid, and not appreciated in her professional environment, as were the many people it seemed who had joined this movement. So she at least knew that she wasn’t alone in feeling these sentiments. She had a lot to offer in both technical and soft skills, and she was finally ready to venture out on her own to see if she could make it happen for herself. “If I fall down while trying to stand on my own two feet,” she thought, “I’m not going down without a fight. These experiences are my failures and my lessons just like they are my wins and my celebrations. I am ready to accept willingly every single part of this journey as my own, good, bad, or undefined. This is life. This is the process.”

She was trying so hard to get back into the total flow state she had experienced so beautifully and organically while she was in Europe. “What comes, comes. What goes, goes. Let it. What’s meant to be will be.” She had also learned about herself while she was in Europe that she absolutely loved to travel...everywhere! She had been to Russia, the Ukraine, Germany, France, Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Tenerife in the Grand Canary Islands, Malta, and the UK, among other places. She loved meeting new people and learning new cultures just as much as she loved science, and it was this new aspect of herself she was also hoping to incorporate into her new business. People everywhere now were becoming digital nomads, and it was an idea that deeply resonated with her. “Why sit in office all day and crunch numbers when you could sit on a beach or at a cafe in Rome and do the same thing? Life’s just too damn short for that noise...it was time to grab life by the nutsack! But...how???” she pondered. It was the details of the process that were dragging her down. By all accounts from her closest friends and most trusted confidantes, who were familiar with starting their own successful small businesses, the details would sort themselves out. “JUST GO! JUMP IN!” they told her, before time runs out. It would require her to trust herself and her own instincts in a way that she wasn’t sure she had ever really truly done before, and maybe that was the thing scaring her the most.

Aside from her career issues, she was experiencing issues with her love life, if you could really call it that, as well. She had always viewed herself as not really having a love life or at least de-prioritizing it until a more convenient and appropriate time. She had dated and met a number of interesting prospects, but nothing seemed to last. It was fine with her though because she had been married for twelve years, and it ended in divorce. It would have been a better situation if she and her ex-husband could have at least remained on good terms, but it was not to be. She had made multiple attempts to that end, but even after years apart and a new, seemingly happy, long term relationship for him, they still could not be friends. He was still so angry and bitter with her for making the life choices she had made. It wasn’t that she didn’t try before their split either. She had spent the last two years of their marriage in therapy working on herself and their marital issues in the hopes that things would eventually turnaround for both of them. But the more she honestly reviewed the situation and the harder she worked to repair herself, the more she realized that their marriage and romantic relationship had run its course. While sad to leave and say goodbye to the life they had built together, being single and devoting all of her time, energy, and resources to herself and her own personal development was so liberating and deeply transformational for her. Now, after being single and happy for almost eight years on her own, she couldn’t really even grasp the idea of adding anyone into her personal life. “Being alone was addictive,” she thought, “because after experiencing the sheer and utter bliss and peacefulness of solitude and being genuinely comfortable in your own company, the idea of bringing anyone and all of their drama in on that was anxiety inducing. Why disturb a perfect peace?”

“On the other hand,” she thought to herself, “it might be nice and even desired from time to time to have a partner, someone to do life with. But who?” She wasn’t actively looking. This was one of those life experiences she felt it best for the Universe to manage. If the Universe chose to bring this special certain someone into her life, she would handle this new situation like she was handling her new business...she would trust her intuition. She would know them when she met them. And she would be brave enough to put herself out there accordingly. If it happened, great! And if not, then she would simply continue on her current life path happy and content with any new developments that she was gifted with along the way. Flow state.

But meet someone she did, and as luck would have it, almost immediately after she got to Hawaii. One Sunday afternoon, after spending about four days cleaning her new apartment until her fingers bled, (it was that disgusting when she arrived), she decided it was time to put on something cute and go to the beach just a few blocks from her own doorstep. So that’s exactly what she did. As she made her way along the beachfront, she passed an absolutely gorgeous and immense old tree. It had roots and limbs coming up and going down and appeared to be the conglomerate of about six or seven trees all grown up together. It was a truly fascinating sight to behold. She wandered under the shade provided by the lush, green canopy of its foliage just adjacent to the massive waves crashing against the seawall in the warmth and glow of the sunshine in crystal clear blue skies. It was truly an amazing Hawaiian island day.

As she gazed up at this exquisite display of mother nature, she could feel the presence of someone off to her left. She looked over at him taking photos with a high quality camera and bent over at such an angle to get the perfect shot of the tree’s roots looking up from the ground to the canopy she was also looking at. He was wearing khaki shorts and a navy blue t-shirt with a camo ballcap and sunglasses, and he was so sexy. “Excuse me,” she said. He stopped what he was doing and looked at her, seeming a bit surprised she was talking to him. “Do you know what kind of tree this is?” “A Banyan tree,” he replied. She smiled at him and instinctively started flirting. They shook hands and introduced themselves to each other. They started talking, small and casual at first, but then the conversation grew so stimulating and engaging, they proceeded to walk around the beaches of Waikiki for five miles! When they arrived back at the spot where they started, he offered to give her a ride back to her house. She hesitated at first, explaining that she was really close and had actually just walked down there. He insisted because he had a car, and he was leaving that area to return home anyway. She finally accepted, and it was the beginning of not only a beautiful friendship but also a deeply meaningful love affair.

This turn of events in both their lives started out innocently enough. He would come pick her up every Sunday afternoon to go hang out. He took her around the island of Oahu and even took professional pictures of her at a very pretty beach on the East side of the island. He learned about her, and she learned about him. He was retiring as a Chief from the US Coast Guard in a little less than a year. He had already sent his wife and only daughter ahead of him to live in the house they just bought and were still in the process of renovating in the Seattle-Tacoma area and would be joining them there permanently shortly after his retirement. He was, however, also experiencing issues with his marriage, as his wife had engaged in an affair several years prior. He was still deeply hurt and wounded over it and was also feeling a profound sense of betrayal. He seemed particularly torn up about the fact that his wife had planned the details of the affair out and with the knowledge and assistance of her sister. He admitted he was seeing a therapist about it. He was still married and existing in the life he had created for himself, but there was no more love, intimacy, or connection, and there was definitely not anymore sex, as it had been over a year since his last act of intimacy with his wife or anyone. The revelation really bonded her much closer to him, as she explained how there was infidelity in her own marriage on both sides, which eventually led to her divorce after almost a year and a half of living and cohabitating in a sexless marriage also. Her ex-husband had his affair, and it took her around two years before she had one of her own. But, she told him, while painful and hard to make the choice to split, she was so much happier after the fact and living her best life now. She explained that she really could understand what he was going through at that moment in his life, and her heart really went out to him.

They continued seeing each other casually until one night, when he came over to her place for drinks and conversation, and their relationship turned sexual in nature. She knew that they were definitely heading in that direction, and she knew he was intelligent enough to know their relationship was progressing that way too. Their connection was deeply intimate and so passionate. After the first night, she gave him a free pass to ghost her if he needed to, but he refused. They continued on the physical part of their relationship for almost two months, having sex multiple times a night, several nights a week. They even got wild and crazy, getting sloppy drunk on Waikiki beach and staying late into the night to have a lot of hot sex on her favorite beach blanket from Barcelona. Some passersby could tell what they were doing, even in the dark, and stopped to encourage them! “The sex is so good,” she often joked with him, “it’s Biblical! You always make me call out for God!” Just before the holidays, though, she realized that she really didn’t feel good about the situation anymore. She had grown to feel like she was simply his booty call or sidepiece. He was still communicating regularly with his wife via texts and phone calls; he was really busy with a new side project he had picked up in real estate; and he was still planning on going home over the Christmas and New Year’s break to complete renovations on his house and reconnect with his daughter, although he claimed that relations with his wife would still be difficult and strained.

She had a lot of thoughts on the matter, as this was certainly not her first rodeo. She didn’t want to be the reason his family dissolved, and she knew that even if he made that choice, he would definitely need some personal time to recover and heal from such a harsh and impactful life change before beginning anything even resembling a relationship with her. She had also grown quite busy with her new job and had received notification that she would have to take a business trip to Chicago for a few weeks shortly after the holidays to complete some unfinished work on her last project. Just after her own divorce, she had gotten involved with several married men. She had learned so much about the pain and emotional bankruptcy that so many people experienced in marriage through the dissolution of her own that she carried absolutely no judgement against anyone going through these types of situations. But for herself, she also realized that being involved in these types of intimate relationships didn’t make her feel better. She didn’t want the additional issues they might bring into her life, and after so many successful years overseas where she had the opportunity to find herself, she recognized that she wanted more, even if that meant being alone. If she was going to make the effort, then she was finally ready to try to have another serious and committed relationship in her life, and this is exactly what she told him.

She ended their relationship just prior to the holidays. She explained how she felt clearly and directly to him, and that although she cared for him very deeply and really felt for his current personal circumstances, her needs in the relationship were not being met. And she didn’t want for them to go any deeper or get even more involved knowing the damage it might cause for both of them. He told her that he understood completely, and although getting through the holidays would be difficult for him and he would miss her terribly, he agreed with her decision to terminate the relationship. She told him she would miss him too and hoped someday they would meet again under better circumstances. She wished him well and blocked him on all available avenues for communication, including email, cell phone, and all social media accounts.

Things went well for her for a while, but around the actual holidays of Christmas and New Year’s, she began to think about him and even to be a little worried about him. He was so strong, smart, and successful. He just seemed to be one of those people who always had their stuff together. She was confident he would make it through this situation. But being prior service herself, she had to acknowledge that she had also lost quite a few friends to mental health issues and suicide. And many of them appeared the exact same way, giving no warning to anyone before actually taking drastic measures to permanently resolve temporarily challenging life circumstances. She couldn’t help herself, she just had to check in on him and make sure he was OK. She knew he would see the notifications that she had viewed his profile, but she didn’t care. It was a risk she was willing to take just to be certain he was healthy and functional.

She temporarily unblocked him on LinkedIn and checked his profile. She could see he was making posts and actively contributing to conversations through his comments. He certainly sounded like the regular, positive person she had grown to know and even love. He commented to a friend that he was relocating permanently to the Tacoma area after his retirement from the Coast Guard in just a few months time. Although she could feel a slight twinge of pain in her heart, she was truly happy for him. Perhaps he had reconnected in a good way with his wife and daughter over the holidays, and the two of them had agreed to work on things. If that was the case, then “All’s well that ends well,” she thought. She was practicing compersion, caring enough about someone that you just want them to be happy, so you let them go with no lingering animosity about it. She also certainly didn’t want to be the reason his family was hurt or broken up in any way. Slightly more at ease and relaxed in the knowledge he was alive and well and continuing on with his plans, she blocked him again. But this time, for good.

She knew she would be lying to herself to say that she didn’t feel some type of way about this. He wasn’t one of the random flings or one night stands she typically enjoyed to make sure her own intimacy needs were met at any given moment. She had even had a few sexual partners after the Chief, as she affectionately called him, but these were fleeting and did not carry the same levels of deep meaningfulness and emotional significance she experienced with him. She genuinely cared about him and had grown to have deep levels of love and respect for him. There were real feelings there, and that made this situation hurt a little more than she felt it should. She needed to clear her mind and develop a renewed strength to carry on with her life in a positive and directed way.

That day, after getting home from work, she decided to go for her run. She had been a distance runner for years. Before leaving for her last project, she was usually training for some endurance event, usually a marathon. But she had ceased training for all endurance events in recent years opting instead for a more balanced and regular fitness routine in which she worked out every other day, both distance running five miles out and back from home and lifting at her local gym, where she was a member. Now that she was a resident of Hawaii, she enjoyed the added benefit of running along the beach. She had always been more of a sunset runner and a night owl than a sunrise runner and an early riser. And Hawaii sunsets were a truly breathtaking sight to behold in the evenings, especially during her runs. Her run was the best way for her to process information and make sense of things, a very private and personal conversation between her and the Universe.

She was a deeply spiritual person and believed deep down that she was actually a Starseed or a witch, but not in a bad way. If she was a witch, she thought herself to be a white witch and did not practice nor engage in black magic or any type of energy manipulation. Her belief was that these types of actions were beyond her paygrade, and the Universe would sort out all the mess, chaos, and negativity naturally and in divine timing. This, she reasoned, was karma in action. She did, however, believe in and practice the law of attraction and manifestation, and she happily engaged in these activities quite regularly. She just knew she had manifested the Chief that day, and he had manifested her, destiny and a truly fated event.

She had taken an interest in mysticism and the occult when she was much younger because it resonated with her on a very deep and profound level, but although she found that aspect of herself very interesting and wanted to explore it more at that time, she stuffed it down and ignored it. She had attended private Catholic school for twelve straight years, her entire elementary and high school education, and these kinds of things, Wicca, the occult, spirituality, and especially the sacred divine feminine energy, were frowned upon in Catholic school and by the Catholic Church. Now that she was an adult, however, able to think for herself and act accordingly on her own behalf, she had made the decision long ago to walk away from any sort of limiting religious practices and beliefs in rigid religious dogma. These just weren’t her style.

She had already started to reconnect with herself and explore her spirituality more deeply in the three years following her divorce and before leaving for Europe. But this was just the tip of the iceberg and foreplay to the main event. During her time in Europe, she had experienced an intensely profound spiritual awakening and begun the Ascension process. She had taken an interest in all aspects of spirituality including: learning and practicing the tarot, developing and maintaining a daily meditation practice, listening to the healing frequencies, dream interpretation and journaling, crystal collecting, chakra work, balancing her own Divine Feminine and Masculine energies while enhancing her own knowledge and understanding of the Twin Flame journey, learning and practicing Western and Vedic astrologies along with chart interpretation, and rediscovering her own creativity in the form of art and writing. She was also curious about other world religions, such as Buddhism and Hinduism, but especially ancient religions and Kemetic practices, even reading some of the ancient spiritual texts, like the Emerald Tablets of Thoth and The Tao Te Ching.

She had taken an interest in watching the videos of a handful of tarot readers on YouTube that deeply resonated with her and afforded her some additional comfort and feelings of camaraderie that helped guide her through the newly elevated levels of growth and development she was experiencing in her spiritual process. She could see and hear now that she definitely wasn’t alone. There were many out there just like her, also experiencing their own deeply personal and unique spiritual awakening process. That night, after getting home from her run, stretching, and showering, she got comfortable in her PJs and watched a few of these readings.

One of her personal favorite readers explained that she needed to prioritize sleep, and not just basic eye closing, but good, high quality rest. The reader went on to say that she was in the midst of a new and different Starseed activation and would need this rest to achieve the necessary deep dream states that would not only enable her to astral travel but also to reconnect with her Starseed family and spirit guides for incoming messages and downloads for the clarity, guidance, and direction she was so desperately seeking in this phase of her Ascension. Her reader stated that animals would play a significant role to convey these messages to her and to not be surprised if her spirit guides appeared in this form in her dreams to do so. She should pay attention to the details, engage in lucid dreaming as much as possible in this state, and not fear the message, the messenger, or the sleep paralysis that would likely occur during that time. Sleep paralysis was a usual experience for a Starseed and a phenomenon she experienced regularly as a child. It had dissipated for years only to resurface during her time in Europe and at the height of her spiritual awakening process. It had always scared the hell out of her as a kid, but as an adult, she was always curious about it when it happened and frequently tried to record the dream in her journal as soon as possible after waking. She was being advised by the reader to do this same thing now, so she could solidly receive the message and review those details for later reference and a deeper, more meaningful understanding of the dream.

That night, as she slept deeply, she did have a dream but didn’t recognize herself as a character engaged in the action sequence of its story. She was perhaps only a consciousness or an expression of awareness within the dream itself. She watched mesmerized and in awe as a big, beautiful barn owl appeared to her out of a perfectly black space in complete and total darkness. There may have been some type of light source in this space, but if there was, she was not acutely aware of it and could not see it directly. The owl was in flight and hovered in this space straight in front of her. She could see his full wing span completely consume the inky, black darkness of her dream space, and the only sound she could hear was the perfect beating of his wings against the air...whoosh...whoosh...whoosh...slow, methodical, purposeful. The owl was almost completely snow white in color with two large, round, black, glassy appearing eyes that seemed to peer directly into the deepest, darkest, untouched recesses of her soul. She maintained eye contact with it long enough to know that the owl was definitely aware of her. It was as though this magnificent bird of prey had sought her out to fly effortlessly in front of her and gaze deeply and directly at her. Then she woke up. She was certain there was a message there, but what was it? The dream left her in a stupor, more confused than before, and with more questions than answers. After collecting herself and her bearings enough to be cognizant of her surroundings, she grabbed her dream journal, and began to write about it.......