It was a circle of women, the kind we gather together to support each other, and my friend had been given the wing of a great owl. When it came around to me, she laid it across my open hands.
It was bigger than I expected, and softer, the feathers cool and impossibly light, made for a silence you could feel. And the moment it settled over my palms, something settled over me too. A mantle. As if every experience I had ever carried gathered itself in that instant and told me exactly what to do with a thing this sacred.
I knew, without being taught, that this owl had died of natural causes, and that my part was to keep its magic moving, to keep its memorial going, to honor the way all of life keeps weaving on. As I held that great wing, I felt the knowing rise that I was meant to keep being the woman who understands how the honoring of life continues, a keeper of the hearth.
There was also a quieter and certain knowing, one day I would hold owl medicine of my own.
Owl medicine is the gift of seeing in the dark. Not scanning the night for danger, but resting inside the night of the soul without fear, until it reveals what daylight never could, the quiet wisdom that has been guiding your life all along.
The year the owls came for me
That wing was not the beginning. It was the middle of a year where the owls would not leave me alone.
It began the year I finally found my people. I have written about it in The Healer I Am, the night I watched a documentary about shamans and wept, because someone had finally put language to everything I had seen and experienced my whole life. The night after, I dreamed of a man who worked with the elements of the earth, and the very next day a friend wrote to me about a course she was teaching with a shaman trained in Peruvian shamanism. He was the man from my dream!! I was stunned, and that autumn I began to train with him, and that is when the owls started coming. I was walking a trail one evening and heard one hooting low and close in the dark, and it stopped me where I stood. The next month I drove out to the Pony Express with my sister, who runs the long endurance races across that empty desert, and multiple owls greeted us on the road, one and then another, as if they had been posted there to watch us pass. Then the wing, in a circle in November. Then a few months after that, I stepped into a full immersion to become a shamanic arts practitioner.
Month after month, the owl kept arriving. I could not explain it, and I stopped trying to. I only paid attention.
The girl in Prescott already knew
Somewhere in the middle of all of it, I was reading back through my old journals, and I found her. The teenager I used to be in Prescott, Arizona, where I grew up.
She had written, in the plain and open way of a sixteen year old, about hiking outside one day and hearing an owl and turning around to see it. “Isn’t that so cool,” she wrote. “I’m so happy I got to see an owl today.” Then farther down the page, “Owls are so cool, they always look wise, and they are the companions of wizards and gods, like Archimedes.”
I sat with that for a long time. Twenty years before anyone placed an owl wing in my hands, I was already a girl who stopped on a trail for an owl, who already felt it was wise, who already loved that it belonged beside the wise ones. The medicine was not new. It had simply been waiting for me to grow into it.
What the owl actually sees
People love the way an owl can turn its head almost the whole way around, up to 270 degrees in either direction. This lets it look directly behind itself without moving the rest of its body. Most say it is so the owl can watch for danger in every direction. I have never seen it that way.
I see the owl turning to take in everything, and holding the wisdom of all it observes. It sees in the dark, yes. But more than that, it sees what others cannot. That is the medicine, and it is the exact shape of what I have carried since I was a child. I have written before about the light beings I saw that no one else in the room could see, and the messages I could feel rising up out of the land while everyone around me spoke of other things. For most of my life I saw, and I stayed silent, because I had no framework for it and no word.
The owl was the word. The owl was the framework arriving in feathers.
The owl medicine in my hand
A while into my training, at one of our weekends, my mentor told me someone had gifted her a bundle of owl feathers. Before she could even finish the sentence, I said, “Yes. I would be honored to have those.” She made me a fan, with care, those beautiful feathers set into a handle of deer bone.
A fan is one of the most important tools I carry. In an in-person session there is the plain, practical use, Palo Santo or sage or rosemary burning, and the fan moving the smoke so it can reach where it needs to go. But there is a deeper use, the skill of it. When a body lights up in front of me and I can see a place that is asking for support, grief gathered and stuck in the heart, I take up the fan and I move it. Sometimes with the smoke, and sometimes it is nothing but the pure magnificent motion of those owl feathers cutting the air, breaking the stagnation apart so it can finally move.
That is the owl medicine I felt coming, all those years ago, with the wing across my palms. It arrived. It lives in my hand now.
If you are in the dark right now
Maybe you are in a dark stretch of your own as you read this, unable to see the way forward, certain that nothing is happening.
Here is what the owl taught me. Something is always happening in the dark. You simply cannot see it yet with your daytime eyes.
So start keeping a record of your journey, beginning now. It does not have to be elaborate. A few photos along the way. A voice note when something moves in you. A line or two in a journal. These writings become your own oracle cards. One day you will look back the way I looked back at that girl in Prescott, and you will see the wisdom that was guiding you the whole time, held in a version of yourself that was closer to the dream and less polluted by the culture, the media, all of it.
One of my own practices is simple. I write myself an email, so I always know where to find it and I can search for it later. You can search “owl” and see everything you have ever written about it. Do not overcomplicate it. Just begin to gather and record the evidence of your own becoming.
The owl does not fear the night. She sees by it.
Questions people ask
What does the owl symbolize as an animal ally? Owl carries the medicine of wisdom and intuition, the gift of seeing in the dark. She is the part of you that can rest inside the night of the soul without fear, until it reveals the quiet knowing that has been guiding your life all along.
What does it mean when owls keep appearing? In many traditions the owl is a sign of wisdom and intuition, a message that you already know more than you can yet see. For me, the owls came one after another for a whole year, until an owl-feather fan was placed in my hands and I finally trusted what I had always known in the dark. When owls keep arriving, stop explaining it away. Pay attention.
A gentle note: I am a somatic and energy practitioner, not a licensed therapist. This work walks alongside healing and growth. It is not a replacement for therapy or medical care, and many of the people I sit with do both. That is a good and beautiful thing.
If something in you went quiet and listened as you read this, there are two soft places to begin. You can gather with us in the Rewilding Hearts community, a circle of people learning to trust their own knowing again. Or we can begin together, just the two of us, with a free discovery call, twenty unhurried minutes with nothing to sell, only space to be heard.
The wisdom you are looking for is not out ahead of you in the light. It is already here, with you, in the dark.
