going dark

fated encounters in the seep towards solstice

nectar, story & bone is a guest in your inbox that puts words to the feelings and curiosities at the intersections of my life—intuition, identity, divine comedy, ecological psychology and more. I’m so glad you’re here 🌬️💫🦉

I lean down, something shiny catching my eye. A perfect circle glimmers next to the curb. It’s an eerily similar spot to where I suspect I lost a pad of circular post-its months ago. Before my outstretched finger can touch this mystery, my phone crashes out of my breast pocket, upsetting what I now know to be a metal disc. I laugh. Of course it’s not my post-its! Phone retrieved I continue on, rolling my eyes and chuckling at my corvid sensibilities. Shiny mysteries, tricks of the mind…

As I crest the bay fifty paces on, I meet the study of an owl. A great horned owl. Gasping, apprehensive trill. I’ve never been so close, nor on such even ground! The feathery statue is perched on the lip of a cement wall about fifteen feet away; I keep my eyes trained as I fumble for my phone, trying to swipe for a photo. The owl is about to fly—I’m eager, jittery, the phone is uncooperative. It’s just flashing white in my peripheral, likely timed out from being jangled in my pocket. I tuck the finicky thing away without much thought—it’s endured beyond all odds, operative despite its long-ago smashed screen—and watch the owl glide up the embankment towards the road. It pauses in the grass on the shoulder. Ruffle, swivel, bob, lurch and—she’s/he’s off and soaring back down towards the perch, scooping around me—gosh, I am a little freaked out! Mind ruffling with headlines of runners’ pony tails and scrunchies being hunted, mistaken for the dithery movements of crepuscular ground critters. Not me not me not me. I duck and tense, swivelling from north to south with the raptor’s flight path, as it arcs around me and up towards a lamppost.

Sighing relief.

As enraptured as I was by such a close encounter, I feel better with the owl further away. I sit awhile, following the tufted ears, the swivel-bob surveillance technique. It settles in and so do I. After a time I take out my phone and realize that it’s good and gone: that leap from pocket to cement pool was far from the first, but definitely the last. It musters strobe-like flashes from a thin white column at the edge of its jagged screen, effortful beats of a dying heart. I offer a nasopharynx grunt, more bemused than bereaved. I’ve been waiting for this moment for some time—principle has kept me from replacing the scarred device while it remained functional. How absurd that it would die for the sake of long-lost post-its. Post-its that, in the crook of a heavily foot- and vehicle- trafficked parking lot lookout in a windswept bay on the wet coast, managed to fix themselves in place for months? Doubtful, even for a believer in magic.

Location in question—the spit of land across this bay, and next to another bay (left: zoomed in and across). Winter winds on the bay, for further context below 🙄🌬️

What of this owl, though? The immediate encounter woke me up to what was broken, or tried to, but not before frightening me with the full gamut of frisson… I look around, no one seems wise to my revelation nor the presence of this messenger. Of the sunset throng, only one follows my gaze, briefly takes in the owl on its perch. Everyone else is muted to their surroundings—wirelessly plugged in, bent-neck distracted or crushing fitness goals, transacting with dusk, with ocean, with breeze. The one who paused didn’t linger. She avoided my apple-cheeked invitation, bustled past with her furry friend.

For those who grew up along the coast, I suppose sightings of raptors, ravens, hummingbirds, orca, otter and deer are just run of the mill. They are the background to a busy life, like a pigeon or squirrel is to a Montrealer. I try to pour grace into these moments rather than letting my discouragement, judgment and concern win out. While tempting, I cannot presume to know what is occupying every seemingly distracted human I encounter, and I don’t fully accept what this outward-fixation says of me. I do wonder how others have perceived me and what I have missed, in the moments when I was too otherwise-occupied to notice. Did they take a snapshot of me and extrapolate it as all of me, as all of modern-humanity? So no, I do not bemoan the character of such humans, or believe I know much about their lives or pains—but I am deeply perturbed by this cultural phenomenon. By our collective distraction and digitization, our numbness to tiny moments of wonder and encounter. By our recent and ferocious instinct to photograph moments as opposed to live them.

I too like to collect digitized memories. I wanted evidence of my owl encounter; I wanted the detail of closeness captured into cloud memory for myself and others. Capture is an interesting word—capture attention, capture a moment, capture the flag... It means to take or seize by force or stratagem.¹ Is that what we’re doing? Forcefully taking moments, seizing and hoarding them for ourselves? When we take a picture, are we removing something from the same moment we seek to record? And if so, what ought we be giving back to that moment? Surely something.

I sense we have forgotten that our participation is part of our reciprocity to any encounter or experience—and that our participation is still majorly an off-screen happening. Because we don’t describe moments, we capture them, share them, tag them, then quickly forget. Variations of “I was there” and “I saw this” are equal parts social clout and proof of distraction. Our attention is frayed by our devices, and so is our memory, our sensitivity, our participation. Is it any wonder that we’d rather grab and go, and remember by way of a third party? So much of our modern days seem to require busying, quickening, escaping, taking. So rarely do we allow ourselves to linger past the swift aperture of the eye—or lens—such that we might feed our other senses, might seep into a place of deeper meaning.

A softer etymological angle to examine our picture-hungry habitudes by is the word captivate. Linked to capture, it means to enthrall with charm, overpower and hold by excellence or beauty.² Perhaps we are so moved as to be held (captured) by the moment we are witnessing and participating in, as to want to preserve (capture) it. We want to linger in the beauty, stretch out aesthetic memories into forever. But again, there is this holding, hoarding, colonizing. When might our voids be filled? When might one photo—or no photos—be an enough that sates us? When might we unshackle ‘proving’ and ‘taking’ from being and remembering?

*

Earlier in the week I watched a screening of If An Owl Calls Your Name, a documentary on the legacy of residential-school trauma, healing and forgiveness in Esk’etemc, Gitxsan, and Wet’suwet’en territories. The documentary’s namesake is offered by Roy Henry Vickers, who borrows the saying from Nuu-chah-nulth culture and territories, where he lived and created for many years. In the film he explains how, to the original peoples on the West Coast of Vancouver Island, when the owl calls your name, it means death has come; but to Vickers it means time to go home.

I’ve been wondering about the fork of these two meanings, and the meanings I’ve understood in owl encounters over the years. A snowy owl flew over me on an industrial service road days before I moved to BC; I took it as affirmation for my departure, affirmation of a great ending (and a great beginning). “Yes, this is the way,” the snowy owl assured me by way of uncanny wonder. I didn’t see an owl again in Montreal until this October, and the visitations have continued on this other island, across the continent. On the one hand, it’s an autumnal congruence, but on the other, I feel a larger presence, a messenger beyond seasonal circumstance.

I typically file synchronous happenings under ‘gifts of paying attention’ or as breadcrumbs encouraging me forth, and the phone-death great horned owl did just that—but she/he also brought me news of death and homecoming. I’d been noticing my fixation with my phone of late, the way its illuminated screen hypnotized me like a flame does a moth, the way it stole hours and fogged creativity. I’d even started a post declaring my addiction as a form of accountability, lamenting the inconsonance between who I think I am, who I once was, and who I actually am (in relationship to my screen and device hygiene). I wanted to flesh out how believing in what once was helps us conceal the verity of what is. Here’s a portion of the draft I’d written:

… Now, I scroll before bed. Screen-filled nights bring mornings with a certain vapidness to them, like the blaze of my eyeballs has evaporated my brain fluid. I’m hopped up on information of all sorts coming at me in all mediums. I’m held by others in movement and meditation practices where I used to hold myself. And sometimes you need to be held…But now I need QUIET.

What am I hiding from? What am I avoiding?

And here it came, crashing in all quirky and ridiculous: the quiet, the pause, the freedom. A death and a homecoming, nudged—or swivel-bobbed—into my awareness by an owl.

It was not lost upon me that my messenger, who is active in the gradient time of day, hunting and calling in the hang between light and dark, came to me so close to the solstice. So close to the pinnacle of night, of stillness, to the deepest time of the year. I wanted rest, I needed to redefine my relationship with my phone, and here was the gift. So I received it, slipping (mostly) offline and into the dark for shy a week.

There is something so luscious to me about the Winter Solstice. The velvet seep of night, hung with stars. The sensuality of early candlelight, rich soils fertile in rest. The slowing, lulling, magnetic anchor that wraps us into geologic time, dream time, soul time. But I also struggle with this day for the same reason many celebrate it: no sooner are we deepest into the dark, the light starts to return. Our busy, fire-hungry culture focuses on this returning, on it being the shortest day rather than the longest night. So many seem to need and want to rush out of the dark. Me, I want to go deeper into the cave, to drown myself in a blanket and cover my eyes. I want to stretch out like the tip of a stalagmite and drip languorously. I am not a member of the cult of summer, and try my best to keep away from the cult of busyness, but don’t you see? My wanting to linger longer, and the dominant culture’s want to rush ahead are more alike than different. Both seem captivated by—or captive to—a desire to evade or avoid.

May each of us learn to sit and be still in the winter’s dark, as we learn to move and be moved by the return of the sun. And, when it comes, may each of us welcome and heed the owl’s call for change and for return.

Longest night blessings to you, sweet one.
May we not be so hungry for light that we miss the fill of the dark.
May we be participants, fully alive to all encounters in whatever form they come.

Until soon,

PS I highly recommend these three books, whose tendrils helped shape this post.

• Christine Rosen’s The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World

• Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention--and How to Think Deeply Again

• Francis Weller’s In the Absence of the Ordinary: Soul Work for Times of Uncertainty--Essays on grief, change, and sacred transitions

  

  another dusk, another visitation: great horned you-know-hoo-hoo

1. “Capture,” Online Etymology Dictionary, 2001-2025, https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=capture.

2. “Capture,” Online Etymology Dictionary, 2001-2025, https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=capture.