The Owl Journal

A decade-long search for myself started with a gift from a co-worker and a visit to a shaman.

Before there was Owl, there was the Owl Journal. Its pages bear witness as my spirit found its way out of despair and into a love story that seems like it was foretold.

I have a mystical journal.

I know; it seems odd to call a journal mystical.

It’s a dog-eared paperback model, too. Not even a lock or clasp to keep its sacred text secure from accidental viewing like the leather ones I’m fond of. It was gift from a colleague, and definitely not a journal I would have picked out at that point in my life.

Now, it is never far from my grasp. I study it like scripture, finding meaning and direction on every page.

Especially the pages dated April 24, 2019.

The visit to the shaman.

The shaman who ostensibly was going to help me save my marriage but whose healing ceremony profoundly altered my life instead.

To understand how, it’s crucial to go back to the journal itself.

On the cover, three hand-drawn owls sit among trees. I had playfully added: Whoooo are you? on the first owl, with the others answering back “Who Who Who Who?”

“I AM THAT” I wrote at the bottom. My mantra. My breath when the insults and derision were through raining down.

Inside, my small print documents the angst, the insights, the earnest affirmations — sometimes all on one page.

Doubt.

“I’m at the biggest crossroads of my life right now. My relationship is in shambles, and every part of my brain is telling me, it’s not going to work. And yet I cannot bring myself to end it. I am going back to the safe, but will it ever bring me joy?”

Insight.

“Just because I am rooted now doesn’t make me an unyielding jerk. It just makes me absorb blows better and not snap at the first sign of stress.”

Affirmation.

“Feel the spark of the divine in you. Nurture it!”

Page after page chronicles my disintegrating marriage, along with my utter confusion about who I was or what I stood for. And yet, sprinkled throughout are quotes and phrases that lifted me, if only briefly, from my despair.

Ho ‘oponopono. I’m sorry, I love you, please forgive me, thank you.

Heal thy soul is only one space away from healthy soul.

Silence is God’s language; everything else is a poor translation.

I had received the little artsy journal as a going-away gift from a co-worker I really didn’t know that well. Though I have tremendous respect for her now, I hadn’t been enthusiastic about her arrival. Perhaps I saw her as a sign of things to come: new people (yes, often younger,) with a keener sense of direction about where newspapers should point their efforts.

It was an unexpected gift from an unexpected person at an extremely unexpected moment in my life.

I had gotten married just a week before in New Hampshire when I returned to my job as a senior editor at the Tampa Bay Times in September 2014. Big knots of anxiety and rampant speculation coursed through the newsroom. A boatload of people were about to be let go. What if I was one of them?

The timing proved fortuitous. I was cynical after being passed over for a promotion, wondering what my future at the paper was going to look like. Now, I was faced with deciding if I even had a future at the paper at all.

Restless in my personal life as well — the wedding having come as something of a surprise for me since we’d gone through some very rough patches — I had begun volunteering at Hospice in March of that year. It was a welcome distraction from the turmoil I was feeling inside over the escalating tension in the house we shared.

Hospice, it turned out, has a lot to offer the living, as well as those who are dying. I am proof.

Four days after my return, I was in my new boss’ office, asking, “Is my name on some list somewhere?”

He shifted and paused. “Well, we did wonder if you would be someone who would raise their hand” for a buyout, he finally said. He explained that if someone took an offer to leave, they would get 13 weeks of severance. If you didn’t volunteer and you were tapped: no job, no severance.

My decision was made in that conversation, but I coolly asked for a day off to think about and explore options. A mere two weeks later, I was walking out the doors of the newsroom for the last time with my new journal, after a lackluster farewell cake gathering that felt forced and awkward.

It had been my dream newspaper job. Now it was over after 32 years. And so was my time as Editor Anne.

Now, who was I? Who was really underneath that commanding presence who used to methodically slay every conceivable obstacle throughout 14 deadlines a day?

So this is how my next chapter begins —————> says my writing on the title page of the new journal.

Reading it now feels like I’m seeing my unraveling relationship happen all over again. But this time, I can detach and see it with more than a little sympathy for myself. I can see the moments of gaslighting, of lying, of withholding intimacy as the things they were, not some character flaw on my part, one that I was desperate to fix.

The anxiety spilled out within those pages at exactly the time I was embarking on a life-changing exploration of what it means to live and to die. I was being encouraged to answer hard questions, explore my spirituality and think about what I really wanted in life. All in the service of making death easier to bear for our Hospice patients and their families.

My volunteer coordinator, a retired teacher and former school board member, reasoned that if volunteers could dive into these ever-present concepts about living and dying in a more peaceful state, we’d be better stewards when it came time to see someone through their transition. Many of us sat with patients who were actively dying, sometimes alone, sometimes with anguished families.

She started a book study class that I eagerly joined. Every six months, she’d pick a book and we’d read several chapters before our monthly meeting. In between, she would send us contemplation questions to answer every week. As those little owls perched and peeked through scraggly trees or from mossy logs, I pondered questions I’d never asked myself before and tried to answer them as best I could.

How do I relate spiritually? Who do I relate to: yourself, other people, God, Buddha, Earth?

How many moments is my mindset optimistic each day?

What does it mean to forgive?

Define sacred.

What nourishes my soul?

Then, after an hour drive through commuter traffic, I’d show up at the Garden House on the Hospice campus for the monthly meeting and pull out my owl journal and my fine-liner pen. Throughout the next two hours, I would synthesize the spiritual thoughts that came in our replies to the weekly questions. Sometimes there were tears, sometimes raucous laughter. Sometimes just solemn nodding heads, no words needed.

The chosen books were like a feast for me, a person starving for meaning and purpose going through a relationship desert that seemed endless and hopeless.

Anam Cara was the first, a book by the late Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue. The name translates to “soul friendship.” The people at that book study became my spiritual mentors and guides as they shared their insights and wisdom from their experiences in life, good and bad.

For the life of me, I cannot figure out why I didn’t write the name of the book we were studying when we started new studies. Instead, I would write Week 1, or 4 or 6. No matter, the titles of the books we studied remain part of the journal’s story: The Untethered Soul, The Four Agreements, Rising Strong, The Five Things You Must Discover Before You Die, The Power of Intention: Allowing In and Letting Go, The Sacred Art of Living and Dying, Wayne Dyer’s Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Life, Einstein and the Rabbi.

We also tackled the Enneagram (I’m a 7, an enthusiast) and quantum physics (I’m still lost in that book somewhere).

I didn’t know it at the time, but all of this work inside the warmth of that book study circle was building a protective wall around my heart that I would need someday. Because in my outside life, my relationship was turning darker and darker. By 2019, four years after I first started the owl journal, I had begun documenting the abuse and the fights in another journal because I didn’t want to bring that into my sacred space.

“I’m sitting in the waiting room of the therapist’s office,” begins the entry for Jan. 3, 2019 in the small book that looks more like an accountant’s ledger. “Things are so tense that she offered to see us separately. …

“This is not how I envisioned the year starting.”

In the smallest of handwriting, I recorded the escalating fights and the tense days that followed them. The smallness of the lettering is in stark contrast to the free-flowing doodles and phrases and notes from the owl journal. It was as if I wanted to be very clear and precise to myself about what was happening.

Our counseling sessions turned into either shouting matches or human punching bag marathons as I was pummeled with accusation after accusation of my failings as a partner: lazy. money waster. selfish. foolish. incompetent. …

The therapist must have known this was a rapidly diminishing situation just a few weeks into our sessions, because she threw out a wild suggestion: She knew of shaman who might help, who might get rid of stuck energy.

Shaman? I don’t think I grasped what she was recommending. Weren’t those the South American people who served up ayahuasca to gullible Americans?

No, she explained, this shaman was a real doctor who studied shamanic medicine and used it to heal trauma wounds. She even had a practice on the Hospice campus at the time. The convergence of my yin and yang lives was uncanny.

I knew of trauma wounds, because not only did I know my own, I was shown my wife’s deep ones every day and expected to tend to them. Perhaps this was the lifeline I was meant to seize in my most desperate of times.

I mistook the intention of the counselor, though. I thought I was to book a couple’s session. “I don’t do couples,” the shaman said. I fumbled through the call after that, trying to explain just why I was seeking her services. “Stuck energy, I guess,” I finally mumbled. To my relief, she agreed to take me on.

I didn’t know it at the time, but it usually took four months to get in to see her. I was to come in two months, in April, and to keep a dream journal in the meantime.

Thus began yet another journal, which was a lot harder to keep than I had realized. Because I was having tons of long dreams, sometimes on ships, other times in a car on long stretches of mountainous highways, all open to her interpretation of them.

Appointment day arrived, and my anxiety pinged through every nerve as I drove through the heavy mid-county traffic. When I arrived on the Hospice campus where her office was located, though, a sense of peace and resolve settled in. I was safe here.

The doctor was petite, with short peppered hair and some owlish round glasses (yes, they were!). I have never felt more cared for than I did in those opening moments with her. She had such a kind, open face and I found myself telling her some intense touch points in my life: my father’s alcoholism, my late brother’s bullying, my mother’s sacrifices for her children, my wife’s behavior toward me. It all came tumbling out randomly, sometimes accompanied by tears.

She was gathering pieces of my story, but it was more than that. She was listening, she was going to help. She knew my pain.

She explained what she was going to do: Talk about my dreams, read tarot cards, do some drumming, put me on the exam table.

She started with the tarot cards. She said she had “scanned me” before I arrived and had pulled four cards:

Letting go. It had a photo of a water lily.

Intensity. An abstract, fiery looking image.

Schizophrenia. A triangle balanced on another larger one.

Courage. A brownish, neutral, calm image.

I was alarmed a bit over the third one. But she explained that it was my way of surviving. The heart knows what it wants, she said, and the head has been helping balance my circumstances until I can get there.

We discussed my dreams and she noted that I might be preparing for a long journey ahead. She surmised that it might be the path that I am destined to take — a path that might not include Renee.

As the session continued, she explained that the owl was my spirit animal, and she pulled out a little figurine and encouraged me to get an owl “fetish,” as she called it. She told me I would need to read and learn about the owl because it was there to protect me and help me on my journey.

Truer words never existed.

First, though, she had some drumming to do. As I lay on her exam table, she placed a feather next to my shoulder and started, facing East. I closed my eyes and tried to relax. As the drumming continued, vibrations began to enter my body.

She did seven stations, then placed her hand on my shoulder and told me she was summoning my allies. I felt my body start to twitch, shake and convulse involuntarily. It wasn’t alarming. It just was.

And then she told me my late mother was there. She told me my mother had a great laugh. And that’s when I knew that my mother WAS THERE. I had not mentioned anything about my mother’s laugh. About how I loved to call and hear that on the other end of the phone. I cried with happiness.

She told me my animal spirit was there too, sitting on her head. She told me my mother was there to help, that she didn’t want me to compromise like she had had to do with my father.

And then she told me she was going to get rid of the negative energy caused by my oldest brother bullying me. She placed a crystal obelisk in each hand and a heavy stone on my chest. I was not prepared for what came next.

As she went around the table, shaking a leather and feather rattle, my body began shaking and convulsing again, this time much more intense. My feet cramped and the backs of my thighs seized up.

I started crying, sobbing. My breath came out as rasps. It felt as if something was leaving or being pulled from my body. I felt that only the stone on my chest kept me from bouncing off the table.

And then things quieted and I grew calm. The shaman told me that I would not experience the terror I had felt since I was a child. She told me that he didn’t want to go, that it wasn’t easy to let go. I told her that I could see him that way. He was relentless in his bullying. I lay there, relieved.

Now, she said, it was time to retrieve the soul parts that carried away the terror to protect me when I was young. She had explained earlier that when these parts fled to protect me, they took my energy. She told me that when they returned, I might feel as if my energy had been restored.

As I lay there waiting, I sensed her presence had diminished. And then she was hovering again, letting me know she had found my soul parts. There were nine of them. And now they were in the owl’s nest, and the owl was preening and preparing them for a return to me.

Once they were ready, she blew sharply into my chest. My body again shook, but not nearly as intense as before.And then it grew calm again, very quickly.

And then I felt a lightness in my body and mind. She told me that with my soul parts returned, my carefree nature had come back too — the one that made me curious, unafraid and ready to jump into mud puddles.

She told me that she wasn’t sure if I had more soul parts out there, but that I could return if needed.

The experience came to a close as she expressed gratitude to those who had helped her. Still in a state of wonder over what had just happened, I walked into the bright sun and noticed immediately a sharpness in my vision. I could see clearly. It was a definite sign.

On a mission, I went looking for an owl fetish. For the next hour or so, I popped into every gift or crystal shop in the downtown woo-woo zone. There were owls, but nothing seemed to be the right choice. I resolved to go home and journal about the experience.

It seems ridiculously obvious now, but when I pulled out my Hospice book study journal, there were the owls, waiting patiently. I looked at them in wonder. After the intensity of the shamanic experience, this seemed unbelievable, over the top, eerie and exhilarating at the same time.

The owls had been on my journey all along, witnessing my hesitant and halting steps as I went deeper into myself to find who I was.

I marveled at the synchronicity of it as I documented on the porch that afternoon. I still do.

The owls were not done witnessing, though. They emerged like old friends as I began navigating the implosion of my relationship of 26 years. By the summer of 2022, the ending was all but foretold. No amount of patience or love on my part could stop the acceleration of animosity and anger.

At my wit’s end one day, recovering from Covid, I took the owl journal with me to an overlook on the Blue Ridge Parkway and read it from start to finish. Tears flowed the entire time. Then I listened as Chelsea Handler told Glennon Doyle on a podcast that she ended her relationship because she had lost herself trying to please someone. And that wasn’t something anyone should have to do.

I sat, breathing in the cool mountain air that’s found at 5,000 feet. On such a beautiful day, it seemed surreal that I at last knew the answer to the question I had been asking myself in earnest the past few months: Do I stay?

As if to punctuate the absolute finality of it all, I was called a “fucking idiot” when I got home later that day. As she drove away, I calmly went inside and moved my clothes up to the second floor. A week later, she would scream at me to get out of the house or she would change the locks and throw my stuff on our porch.

It would be several weeks before the wheels were in motion for a divorce. In the meantime, I stayed with family and friends and tried to maintain a sense of equilibrium. A long-planned trip with my hiking sisters arrived, and so did news from my lawyer that the papers would hit the court file that Friday. Would I like to have papers served, or did I want to call my wife and tell her that I was divorcing her? I’ll call, I told her.

As we drove into the driveway of the rented home where we were staying for our hikes, I looked up and saw its name: Owl’s Hoot Chalet. No way, I thought as I hurried toward the door. Outside, owls watched over our arrival from all directions. Inside, they adorned walls and shelves and towels and plates and myriad other things. I started counting and easily passed 100+ owls. They’re here, I thought, to surround me when I make that phone call.

I went outside before dinner to talk privately. It was over in 5 minutes. She was quiet as I sped through the particulars of the filing and her responsibility to respond as quickly as possible. Her voice trailed off as she talked about someone’s new baby. And then I hung up, flooded with emotion that should have been sad, but was actually relief and awe that I had gathered my courage and done it. I had chosen myself, with my owl guardians there to remind me that they would always be with me on my journey.

Less than a month later, I was in my shaman’s new office, explaining what had happened with my wife, the owl journal, the delivery of the divorce news among the chalet owls. She listened with understanding and explained that everything that happened was meant to be, nothing was wrong. She told me that I was meant to have my heart blown up so that I could be receptive to love coming into me. It had to humble me and hollow me out so that I “could receive all the love that was going to come into me.”

She told me she believed I was meant to be a “spiritual warrior” who had a calling I might not yet have seen. As before, she had pulled four tarot cards before my arrival.

Experiencing. It featured a singular figure surrounded by a glow in the fall season, hugging a tree.

New vision. The figure, who is on all fours, is waiting to grow and evolve into one who is triumphantly reaching to the heavens, eyes on the stars, wing unfolding. This is still manifesting, the shaman told me.

Conditioning. This was a lion tethered with leather bands to sheep. It was puzzling until she told me her ceremony would break the bonds that tied me to my wife.

Change. This was a huge vortex of energy that somewhat resembled a hurricane or a galaxy of some sort.

As before, she beat a feather around me and summoned the ancestors to help. She explained that she was going to go with them to retrieve a part of me that had been left in the mountains when I was told to leave.

She led me through a beautiful reunification of my longing soul part, the one who came home to me when I needed to be whole again. Next, the shaman said, she was going to remove and sever the bonds that were tying me to a person who no longer resembled the person I fell in love with. She noted that these bonds were like hooks peppering my body like so many paint splatters. As she “collected the darts,” she explained that I could have Universal love for her, but I would no longer have to bear responsibility for her. And then she blew the darts into the air and sprinkled water all over me.

And then as before, I started twitching, shaking, convulsing, sobbing and wailing. It was her energy leaving my body.

NOW SHE IS GONE FROM ME, reads the owl journal. FREEDOM!!

Two days later, I had just finished sending my hiking sisters a short version of what happened with the shaman. Right after hitting send, I heard it: the beautiful call of an owl. And then the distinctive smell of burnt sage, like she had used in her ceremony.

This message from the Universe was a nice coda to the shaman story, to be sure. But the owls were not finished. There was still the matter of love finding me. Would it? And how?

I threw myself into my Hospice volunteering to fill my days with purpose. I had been trained in reiki, and now I eagerly accepted any assignment to practice it with renewed energy and focus. And as I traveled in and out of patients’ homes, I found myself looking for signs of owls. And the Universe did not disappoint.

An agitated dementia patient rocked and wailed as I tried to soothe her with healing energy. An owl sculpture came into focus underneath the television, and I was able to calm her.

A cancer patient who had very few days to live accepted my appearance with quiet vulnerability as I gently explained what I was going to do with my hands to move the energy in his body. I took note of the owl figurine in a curio cabinet in the living area where his hospital bed was set up. It steadied me as I tried my best to comfort his mother and his partner, who were filled with worry and grief.

And then came Jackie Mirkin. 92. Failure to thrive. Edith F. Daly, caregiver.

Knocking on the door for my appointment, I took note of the rainbow colors and the peace signs and prayer flags. Two older lesbians, I thought. How sad that one is dying now after all of their years together. Edith answered my knock, then quietly led me back to Jackie’s room. After introductions, I set up my tiny stool and hunched over Jackie, moving my hands to various points along her small, frail body. She was unable to eat a lot because her liver was in severe pain. Later, Edith would explain that Jackie was going to voluntarily stop eating and drinking to end her life. I nodded approvingly at the news. Her death would be hers to control, and Edith would be there at every step to surround her with love.

As I moved around to the other side of the bed that first visit, I looked up to get my bearings and could hardly believe the magical place I was in. We were surrounded by owls, Jackie’s spirit animal. Tiny little figurines rested in a wooden cabinet. Owls made of seed pods amused me from their perch near the door. Framed owl feathers hung on the wall in front of her bed. A surge of awe swept through me as I began the reiki down her left side. This had to be a sign of some sort. It just seemed too fantastical to not be.

I left that day feeling uplifted and hopeful for myself. After the intense machinations of my divorce mediation, this felt meaningful and gave me purpose. I hoped I would get to return and find out more about her and Edith.

I would soon get the chance. Apparently, Jackie believed I set her heart back into rhythm after it had been haywire for awhile, and she let the volunteer coordinator know that she wanted me to come as often as I could. No one else. Just me.

No pressure there, I thought.

As I visited, though, we fell into a rhythm. I would disappear into Jackie’s room as Edith padded around the condo, with its sweeping views of Boca Ciega Bay. A sewing machine was set up on the dining room table, and she often would return to it. I grew curious one visit and asked about what she was sewing.

“Jackie’s shroud,” she said. My heart leapt with that act of love. She explained that she had asked friends and relations to send a piece of clothing with their DNA on it so that she could send it up to the skies with Jackie’s ashes after she died. My heart did somersaults inside of me. I was enamored by this devotion and thoughtfulness.

I returned for the next visit with an owl feather, which I placed near Jackie as I moved around her now clearly failing body. She rarely spoke because it took too much energy, though she did explain a little of her Jewish faith to me. Edith filled in a few of the gaps in my knowledge of her. A social worker and school counselor in New Jersey for most of her career, she had spent her life asking, “Who’s not in the room that needs to be.”

I found myself captivated by these women. But I knew very little about them and how they had come to be together. Then on Valentine’s Day, Jackie told me the story when she sensed I was a little down.

We had always thought of Feb. 14 as our anniversary, I explained as I told her about my severed relationship. I told her we’d been together 26 years.

“That’s how long Edie and I have been together,” she told me. They had met on an outing with mutual friends in Greenwich Village and had been together ever since. I brightened and did the math. So Edie was 60 and you were 66, I said. A bit of hope about my future pushed into my mind. If they had such love late in life, maybe I could too, I thought.

As I left, Edie told me that Jackie was going to have her last meal that day. Matzoh ball soup that a friend had brought, with a little Prosecco. Their plan, long talked about and discussed, was going into effect. I felt honored that she had included me in her team of friends who were going to walk Jackie home.

I would see Jackie only two more times after that. On the first as I was leaving, I said to Edie, “I’ll see you next week.” She calmly said, “Probably not. She’ll be gone by then.” I immediately made plans to come on Sunday on my way to a gathering.

Jackie was wan, spent after two weeks of VSED, voluntarily stopping eating and drinking. She asked for a sip of water, making sure to tell me to bring a spit pan. I gently lifted the cup to her and she swished it in her mouth a couple of times and spit it out. Even small amounts of liquid can prolong the process, Edie had told me. The urge to swallow must have been overwhelming.

I moved slowly through my reiki, not wanting to rush our last time together. I told her I was sure we would meet again. “I know I will see you when I’m out in the forest,” I said. Her beautiful, soulful eyes would let me know it was her, I told her. I believed it then, and I believe it now.

She died late the next day, a Monday, loved so fiercely it makes me cry to think of it even now. I so wish I could have been there, but I was just a Hospice volunteer, not part of the core Jackie Team.

When Edie texted me the news, she asked if she could tuck the owl feather into the shroud. “Absolutely!” I said.

We would be forever bonded in that way.

And, as foretold, in another.

I became Edie Daly’s lover and partner, just as she had been those 26 years before.

The shaman had said my heart needed to be empty in order to receive all of the love coming my way. Looking back on the past three years, I can pinpoint the exact moment when my heart overflowed with that love, Edie’s love. It wasn’t something she said or even did. It was the soul I heard speaking softly to mine in a poem she texted me shortly after Jackie’s death.

Pink streaks, like
Lines on the heart
Opening to morning
And the day
My lover
Turns to ash
Sending heated molecules
Skyward
Changing form
To mix
With the air we breathe.
The changer and the changed.

Now she is the changer, and I am the changed. And the owl journal’s remaining blank pages await the rest of our mystical story.