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It was almost three in the morning when she walked home after her shift at the bar.

This time, this twenty minutes, was a pause in her life that was always her favourite part of her day. It was like a clearing in the woods, an opportunity to slow things down and start the process of cleansing herself of all the want that filled the pub each night, clinging like smoke in her hair.  All the solitary men who needed drinks, who needed her to pay attention and make them feel valued as they sat there at the bar, searching each night for some unlikely route to love. And there were the needs of her coworkers, always wanting her to cover shifts so that they could either go to a party or recover from one, always needing her encouragement or complicity, and then simply the need to have a job, to get somewhere on time and serve the needs of others, always dressed in a prescribed, deadening uniform that made her feel like a stranger in her own life. All of this, all of this started to fall away when she walked toward home.

And one night she came upon a pigeon lying on the sidewalk.

She barely saw it, but she did, and as she leaned in toward it, the bird spasmed and flapped about in useless, frenzied circles. And then exhausted, collapsed and looked up at her, it’s chest heaving. She did not know exactly what she saw in those eyes, but she could not deny whatever it was that was calling her. It was her burning bush.

She picked the bird up, held it tight to her chest, and took it home. And as she delicately cleaned it in her kitchen sink, it struck her that she had never before felt so whole. Over weeks she nurtured this bird, restoring it to health and flight– and then other birds followed, and then others, and without any conscious intent her life began to organize and cohere around these lost and wounded creatures, and the person who inhabited the body she had travelled within for 37 years was finally discovered.

It was a startling thing to see in downtown Toronto, this unadorned and pitiless majesty.

Had the bird taken it’s victim in mid-flight, plucking it from unsuspecting air?
Had it tracked it’s prey at great velocity, and then it’s sharp, sudden talons piercing the animal, and then the wood upon which the creature had been scurrying?

My eyesight is not great, and the bird receded back into the camouflage of the tree. I stared up at that tree– that tree which could have been two centuries old– for a long time, hoping to see that world flicker back into mine, but it did not, and this vivid life of blood and bone would remain known but unseen. A reminder on a cold, November day of this other world, of how quickly, astonishingly and with unsentimental finality, it will one day make it’s presence known to each of us.

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On a winter day while hiking through the woods, Rachelle’s father Terry came across the imprint of an owl’s wings and body in the snow. From the tracks, he could see that it had been following a mouse of some sort, and then swooped down, picking the creature up from the surface and carrying him up and off to death. He took a photograph of the imprint, and it’s amazing to see such a moment crystallized, to see just the shadow of this small and brutal divinity.

It has always reminded me of this poem by Mary Oliver:
White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field
by Mary Oliver
Coming down out of the freezing sky
with its depths of light,
like an angel, or a Buddha with wings,
it was beautiful, and accurate,
striking the snow and whatever was there
with a force that left the imprint
of the tips of its wings — five feet apart —
and the grabbing thrust of its feet,
and the indentation of what had been running
through the white valleys of the snow —
and then it rose, gracefully,
and flew back to the frozen marshes
to lurk there, like a little lighthouse,
in the blue shadows —
so I thought:
maybe death isn’t darkness, after all,
but so much light wrapping itself around us —
as soft as feathers —
that we are instantly weary of looking, and looking,
and shut our eyes, not without amazement,
and let ourselves be carried,
as through the translucence of mica,
to the river that is without the least dapple or shadow,
that is nothing but light — scalding, aortal light —
in which we are washed and washed
out of our bones.