A barn owl lives in a snag in the redwood forest outside my bedroom window. His screeches keep me awake at night. I toss and turn in the darkness. My wandering thoughts coalesce into a dream as sleep takes me without warning or notice. My dreams are calm and clear, I have no fear of nightmares. The dreamcatcher above my bed keeps them away.

In my dream I hear voices I heard long ago. The owl speaks for the spirits. The voices of the trees, the murmurs of the ferns, the silent stoic sophistry of the stones. We forget all these things as we grow old. My dream rekindles the voices. They rise out of the darkness into the moonlight.

The owl flies and watches over everything at night. Owls have night vision. They hunt at night. An owl can locate a mouse in complete darkness. In darkness they seek out their mates. They dance, build a nest and lay their eggs.

I have a lucid dream, the kind where I know I’m dreaming, curious, solemn, an exploration guided by the owl perched outside. In their previous lives bats were poets, owls were thinkers. Even in my sleep I sense the bats scratching for bugs in the wood frame of my window, hungry poets hunting for words. Owls are not tenacious like bats, smart like parrots or bold like crows. Big fierce eyes embedded into their wild monkey faces are the sources of their power. Careful and patient they are formidable hunters that cause rodents of all shapes and sizes to cower.

In a parallel universe an owl watches me dream from across the divide.

“An owl is mostly air,” says Ursula Le Guin in Up In A Cottonwood.

“Did you know what will happen if you eliminate the empty spaces from the universe, eliminate the empty spaces in all the atoms?” asks Umberto Eco. “The universe will become as big as my fist.“

I am a brother to dragons, and a companion to owls, says Job (30:29) whose doleful cries are like the those of the owl in my woods. Job reminds me that all is not right in the world. The owl’s song reverberates with nature’s precision. I am here, the owl says. Listening. Still listening.

The worst times always seem to be times when one group of people believe with absolute faith and absolute dogmatism in something. And they are so serious that they insist that the rest of the world agree with them. Then they do things that are directly inconsistent with their own beliefs in order to maintain that what they say is true.

“Listen,” says the owl. Darkness is where secrets are best hidden. Darkness brings clarity and focus.

The dream stops. I awake with a jolt.

Prudence takes control and soon I’m awash in calculations. Once calculation takes over, the cult of efficiency soon follows. Anything for its own sake—art, poetry, literature, love, decency, respect, decorum—moves to the back of the line.

“Prudence is an ugly old maid courted by incapacity,” says Billy whose wife sits an empty plate at the table to signify they’ve run out of food.

The Owl that calls upon the Night 

Speaks the Unbelievers fright

          Auguries of Innocence, William Blake

Being human is hard. So be an owl.

                    Anonymous