Owl on My Shoulder

A Many Voices Guest Post by Rosemary Starace

Rosemary Starace, Her Earthly Presence, colored pencil, collage leaf rubbings, 2023

For a few years now, I’ve been making art from and about the forest. I’m attracted to the layers of leaves and leavings that make up both the forest floor and its canopy. With gathered fronds, needles, blades, and sometimes flowers, I’ve made drawings, prints, collage, and tracings. I want to steep myself in the ancient, primal complexity of the forest, and comfort myself in contemplation of its cycles of decay and rebirth. 

But the forest, of course, is not only made of and by its leaves and trees, but also from many creatures and processes. Owls, especially, keep entering my forest spaces, asking to be (literally!) drawn in, seen. But though I may set out to sketch my owls as the real birds they are, my hand is often pushed in ways that emphasize the almost-human quality I perceive in their ghostly faces: their compelling, front-facing gaze and deep eyes, their tight, feathered cowls that wrap them in mystery. In this work, I’ve tried to return their gaze, to peer more deeply into their essence, which includes their ecological and creaturely existence as well as their symbolic reality. I’m not the first to be so taken. Our ancestors observed the owls closely and placed them in their stories and rituals. Cultures across time and place have seen owls as holders of wisdom, as harbingers of death, as messengers between this world and the next. Athena carries a small owl on her shoulder, her advisor, perhaps. Other goddesses and witches ride the backs of owls into the dark, seeking the owls’ knowledge of how to navigate and live in night realms both inner and outer. As my aging unfolds and losses abound and compound, I find I am called to keep an owl close by, to become one of those riders into the dark.

After the death of my partner in late 2021, I entered the dark not by choice, and searched there for knowledge of the afterlife, in hope of experiencing his continued existence. I found convincing but unprovable evidence of various kinds, but unexpected solace came from a clearly demonstrated fact. All matter, all bodies wear down, die and decay, and become earth—literally the forest floor. And so, I find him there in that incarnate eternity, along with all the ancestors, human and otherwise.

I still seek what the owl knows about living an abundant life in the darkness of uncertain futures, personal and planetary, and I want to face the unsentimental majesty of a consummate predator who, like Death, reminds me what it means to be a creature of Earth.  

A poem emerged from the thickets of these owl dreams:

When I Feel Tiny, I Think of Owl

Listen, she is goddess to the mice and all who skitter.

She is an early thought of Earth’s, too old to be known. 

Repeater of the ancient questions, 

she swoops into the ears of sleep. 

She nests in myth, but feasts on flesh,

indifferent to the bones she drops. 

She lays the forest floor with things that were, 

the cries and footfalls. She keeps the night safe 

from the armies of brilliance. 

(Only the moon gets in.) 

While sirens wail, while children play, 

she undertakes her works— 

(All hail the unsuspecting.)

She must satisfy her longings. 

She must pluck the living out of time.  

She must make the world anew before the dawn 

casts its brightened skew.

And though she goes about her life without me,

I would lay upon a snowy field for her,

travel in those lands the soul pines for and dreads.

Rosemary Starace has been a visual artist and writer for many decades, taking on both practices as a life path, exploring creative work as a means to deeper understanding of self and other. In writing, she has concentrated on poetry, but also writes essays on art and meaning. Her woodsy backyard provides her with an abundance of leaves, and she has thrice heard owls calling on her close-to-downtown street in Pittsfield, Massachusetts! She shows her art at The Oxbow Gallery in Easthampton, MA; much of her published writing is available to read on the internet. In recent years she has delved into Jungian ideas and is currently studying Jungian clinical process at The C.G. Jung Institute of New York. More examples of her art and writing are online at her website, www.rosemarystarace.com.

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Many Voices will appear on the last Sunday of each month and will feature contributions from the community of paid subscribers. If you would like to contribute to Many Voices, please reach out to seventysomething9@gmail.com. All subscribers are now welcome to read Many Voices posts. Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support seventysomething, have access to the archives, and become a contributor to Many Voices. Your ideas are always welcome.

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Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from Amazon or your local bookseller.

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