Heron guides and owl witches
How animals help me hear from those I've lost
I was frightened by owls as a child.
Silently watching you with slant eyes, they look stern and knowing. Growing up near the Eastern Cherokee Reservation, their folklore threaded into my brain from field trips and schoolmate stories. My grandfather worked in the Cherokee nation as a lawyer, my mother worked for the Cherokee as a therapist. She told me once that, in Cherokee, to see an owl in daylight augured death.
Reading what I can about owls and Cherokee now, I actually don’t see much to uphold that. They did honor owls in myth, believing some to be shape-shifted witches. The word for “witch” in Cherokee is skili, the same word used for great-horned owls. And, historically, battle parties would listen carefully for owl calls as they moved toward war. If they heard a call from the left or right of the group, they would win the battle. If the call came from ahead or behind, they would lose, so the party would turn around and head home.
Regardless of the true cultural meaning of owls, they adopted their own meaning for me. They were always connected to death in my mind. Seeing or hearing them in daylight made me shiver. Would someone get sick? Will someone die? When would it happen? Who would it be?
After Quentin died, I had to learn a new language to speak with him.
To me, those who pass are sending us messages, always. Their guidance is there, their hands a breath away.
Sometimes messages from Quentin are quite clear—like one New Year’s Eve when someone asked me to be their girlfriend, and the bartender congratulated us. The bartender’s name being Quentin Moss.
That was a bit like someone dropping a brick on my head, it felt so clearly a message from him. But, most of the time, signs are subtler. I imagine I miss most of them. To notice them, I have to be really attuned, “plugged in,” and patient.
I heard somewhere about a practice of using animals as a means to “speak” with those you’ve lost. You assign the person a symbol. My grandfather, who always had a brass statuette of a bald eagle on his desk, is represented by eagles and hawks.
I think because I had just finished reading “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” before he died, Quentin is an albatross to me. In the poem, the death of the albatross, a giant and peaceful bird, was unnecessary and brutal.
Of course, albatrosses aren’t exactly a common sight in my life. Instead, they appear to me in speech and symbols.
In March of 2020, while the world seemed to come apart under the panic of COVID-19, I was blissfully unaware. I was with a group of peers on the Rio Grande, canoeing along with no connection to the outside world.
On our last day on the river, we didn’t know what would be waiting for us once we got out of the backcountry. I didn’t know what was ahead of me.
I was about to receive a triple gut punch. I’d spent months crafting a grant proposal, and more months dreaming of it. I felt like I’d never worked so hard for something, never allowed myself to hope so wholeheartedly for anything. I was about to learn that I didn’t get it.
Not only did I not get it, but the world was shutting down. Everyone was in crisis. My parents were panicking. And I wouldn’t finish my final year of university. Everything moved online. All my friends would disperse without goodbyes, potentially never seeing each other again.
Perhaps it was shock that allowed me to handle all that news with grace. But I also had a premonition. I knew I needed grace. And I knew I wasn’t alone.
For the last ten miles of the trip, I was in the frontmost canoe of the party, steering my boat gingerly through the desert’s lonely river.
After we set out that morning, I saw in the distance a great blue heron standing on a sandy shore. It watched us. When my canoe partner and I reached it, it flew on to the next bank. It watched us. When we swept alongside it again, it lighted on a cliff further downriver. We caught up again. It kept hopping along ahead of us, watching us, waiting for us to get close, then flying off again. It never went around a bend or out of eyesight. Its head was always cocked in our direction.
We kept paddling on, and it kept guiding us forward. After a certain point, my friend in the front of the boat said, “What is this, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner or something?”
I’d been crying since the first sighting of the heron. I smiled and silently pressed out tears. I kept paddling.
“Do you know that story? Have you read that?” He asked, trying to make conversation. I realized I didn’t respond, too struck by the presence of my albatross.
“Yeah, it’s really good.”
When we finally saw the takeout point, the heron waited for us on the opposite shore. When we caught up, it flew off downriver, finally out of sight.
“Thanks, Quentin,” I mumbled, stepping into the water to haul the boat ashore.
My fear of owls has aged into staid respect.
One of my mother’s friends sent me an email in response to a past entry. It was full of tenderness and joyful memories and regret, leaving me in tears.
She told me that the morning of my mother’s death, she woke to a barred owl sitting on a tree branch, ten feet from her balcony.
“I’ve never seen such a wild creature so close,” she wrote. “This was an honor and a gift and I knew it had some spiritual connection. It was such a beautiful creature—I was afraid at first, but just stood looking in awe.”
When one of my close friends lost her partner in a freak hunting accident, I was one of her few friends who could relate to the shock and loss. It’s rare to be bereft in your early 20s. We’d talk on the phone, but it was only around six months after the accident that I saw her in person.
We took a walk through some Sewanee woods. As soon as I saw her, my heart softened. Her face was different. It was like her eyes were weighted by some unseeable thing. As we walked together over pine straw, dogs running and tail-wagging around us, she told me about him. Who he was, how life had been since she lost him.
When I looked up to see a great-horned owl sitting on a branch of white pine, I felt no surprise. It watched us, slowly spinning its head to follow as we walked onward. I said nothing. I nodded to it. She kept talking, telling me stories. It was so soon since the accident. She was still walking with death. He was watching her from treetops.
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And, for those who have made it this far—a note about the name change. Reading through my mother’s journals, I found a note she wrote to herself nearly two decades ago.
“Has anyone ever published a collection of poetry called ‘Internal Alchemy’?”
That, I realize, is what I’m writing about. Internal alchemy. Transformation in every day, magic ways. Thanks, mom, for the title.