Saturday L: Secret Meeting of the Owls · 18 April 2008
I can’t tell you about the “secret meeting of the owls.” I know you are coming here to find out—one google search after another—but I have no information for you.
“The owls are not what they seem.” “The owls won’t see us in here.” Two other searches that bring them in. If that’s you, a tip before you leave: those lines are from Twin Peaks—uttered if I remember by the Log Lady. Owls in that story are otherworldly… harbingers of the secret world where the real shit happens.
I didn’t even like owls when I named this blog but I was looking for a vowely neologistic compound in three syllables. It needed to be suggestively anagrammic and refer to some kind of mascot, so this is what we got.
Unintentionally and despite this year’s surge of hipster-associated owl imagery, I’m suddenly sort of falling for the little creatures. Maybe it’s being the mistaken target of the funny google searches.
Or maybe it’s the secret meetings.
Anyway but listen. My dad’s little brother is sick. Heartbreaking and tense: we’re waiting to find out about a heart transplant. My dad—who picked up a couple of night shifts as hospital chaplain because apparently his day job wasn’t tragic enough—can do emergency grace and sad equanimity like a fucking saint. Catastrophe brings him closer to god, so he runs to it. But not with his tribe: when we’re hurt he’s more voodoo twin than chaplain. I don’t understand it but what it means is that the heartbreak doubles. I tell him and the others I am praying because it’s the only way to express what I mean. I used to refuse to say that because I considered it an insulting lie, since I don’t share their fantasies about salvation and a higher being who takes sides or does you favors. But what other language lets them know I am still part of the clan in spirit, and that I care for my own? I have to respect their god to stay in the circle: anything else is splitting hairs at a really bad time. Anything else makes it about me. Why not find a way to say the old words and mean them sincerely?
I take this all up to Ojai the next two days, to RE’s mountain estate. I love these friends and their land, and also the beautiful sun-drenched yoga studio out in the guest house surrounded by prickly pear and pinyon pine. I understand you ashtangis have a belief that it is wrong to practice the asana sequences on the full moon: I will find some way to honor that belief, even in secret.
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Oh: Image Credit.
Posted by: (0v0) · Apr 18, 04:47 PM · #
I sit uncomfortably silent at the occasional Sunday dinners when dad says grace. Where to draw the line? And is it worth it?
I hope your uncle fares well.
Posted by: Tim · Apr 18, 05:44 PM · #
Hi (0v0)
I hope your uncle gets better and that your family appreciates your genuine concern, even if you express them in different spiritual terms. The owls in the picture are precious.
hugs
Arturo
Posted by: arturo · Apr 18, 07:10 PM · #
Yes, they are good fuzz-ball owls.
About drawing the line… maybe it’s helpful to move the line when there’s a crisis. Crisis for me (getting hit by a car) was a chance to face my mortality and resolve to value life at a deeper level… but for them it reinforces not existential but theistic beliefs. So I guess I can go along with that now.
The weird thing is that this time, saying that he is in my prayers isn’t some community-standards calculation like that. My prayers certainly aren’t to some meta-physical bearded Other, but there is a resonance for my uncle that I can describe as prayer. Maybe because I’m drawing on the meaning that “prayer” used to have for me when I held those childhood beliefs… or maybe (hopefully) I’m finding a more contemplative/expressive use for a word I’ve previously associated with… well… posting wish lists to Santa.
Posted by: (0v0) · Apr 18, 08:15 PM · #
Re: “prayer.”
Word.
Literally.
I will say a prayer for your uncle.
Posted by: karen · Apr 18, 09:11 PM · #
I will too. If you devote an asana practice today to your uncle and move through the sequence with knowledge that it’s for him, if you dedicate your practice, it might resonate for you in a prayer-like way, or not.
Regardless, you’re there for your family now, in words and in spirit, and that’s so important.
Thinking of you all, and sending love.
Secret meeting of the Owls, indeed.
Posted by: Anna · Apr 19, 03:23 AM · #
Not much of a pray-er myself, so in many ways I haven’t got a prayer (of what “its” all about) – which puts me into the mystified sector and the mystic demographic which means I get catalogs from soundstrue which often seems to be a misnomer, rather soundsfalse seems a bit more accurate… Provacative statement: supplication is metaphysical masturbation.
Yet how does one communicate this real wish that friends, families and enemies and self be free from suffering without falling into the hoaxy “pray” word? I grew up in a fairly strict and “damned” scary catholic (doesn’t deserve to be capitialized) way. The descriptions of hell I got as an 8 year old makes Dante’s inferno seem like paradise. I was sure to go hell forever and ever and ever and all of time and infinity (and I had a hard time even waiting for recess to begin) by any accounting method of sins, venial, mortal or otherwise, that I could come up with. Scared the prayer and the conscience right out of me. The only one I could relate to was Thomas, as is doubting Thomas (show me the wounds, I need to feel them to believe them).
I hope that your Uncle is free from suffering and the roots of suffering (and I don’t know that that necessarily means that he gets someone else’s heart that they don’t need anymore)
Posted by: e&sj · Apr 19, 07:27 AM · #
Thinking positive thoughts toward your uncle…..
Posted by: LI Ashtangini · Apr 19, 07:41 AM · #
I do believe in prayer, in the moving of energy, its capacity to help, and in the dedication of practices with this in mind.
I’m trying to say I think that you are doing the best you can to help both your uncle and your father.
Big, psychic hug.
Posted by: boodiba · Apr 19, 01:31 PM · #
Thanks, each of you.
Right now I just don’t know how much the details of belief matter for my uncle’s immanent experience.
Who knows the mechanism (could be god, could be energy, my bet is on the placebo effect though I also am regrettably convinced that energy is transpersonal and can travel), but when you know people really care about you and are thinking about you, it actually you strength in spirit and body. So maybe it’s physical strength to pull through, or maybe it’s spiritual strength to muster the grace to die much earlier than you thought you would. I have to admit I ardently wish for the former for my Uncle, for now: he is young and the center of a network of people who love and depend on him.
Posted by: (0v0) · Apr 19, 02:24 PM · #
I was never really impressed that the bland consolations like I’m praying for you or God bless you or whatever really have any real effect. Even for devout religious people, they can’t mean much because there’s just nothing me-to-you about them. It’s always seemed to mean more just to chat with people and reminisce with them in ways that let them know we think about them. My guess is that as your uncle sits and waits for a replacement heart he’ll probably be more touched by real things you’ve experienced together. His very own real heart is soon to be tossed in a wastebin so he probably needs a little more than what abstract feelings a God can bring him.
Posted by: Carl · Apr 20, 12:32 PM · #
A small list:
Your uncle may taste his life that much sweeter if he survives. And I hope he does.
To pray is to give thanks for being part of this mystery. To appreciate your life, to remind yourself how precious every moment is. It is for you. For the grace of every moment.
And you (you intuitive) sensing the boundaries of others could always dare to try to move ever closer to including everyones fear. And hold it, hold it till it becomes the bees in your heart.
Everything is in, nothing is out. We are all this. Take it all in, and dont think to do anything with it. You become a mountain, yes. A living breathing mountain.
Its nice to have that presence. It helps everyone find thelr own peace.
Posted by: Gregor · Apr 20, 01:25 PM · #
thinking of you owl, and your family. lots of prayers and love.
Posted by: Tova · Apr 21, 06:54 AM · #
Thanks Tova.
You know, I think about turning off the comment function to simplify my life and my point of view. But the different perspectives that get represented here are kind of interesting and make me kind of happy. The diversity of points of view and personalities, and the silent diversity beyond it. It’s almost the nature of the internet to have this be a part. So I leave the comments on a while longer.
And then someone like Gregor comes in and says this crazy nonsense about the bees in my heart (more specifically, about moving closer to everyone’s fear) and it catches me off guard because it’s, well, right. So far as perspectives go… which is a pretty long way.
Heh.
Posted by: (0v0) · Apr 21, 11:12 AM · #