Since the spring I have been entranced by two fledgling great horned owls in our backyard.
I first spied them out of the nest about a month and a half ago, crying feeble squeals that seemed to beg their parents for rescue or food.
Now they stare me down in the evenings with piercing yellow eyes. Usually, they peer at me from high in an oak branch, but sometimes they squat on the dry meadow at the top of our yard or balance on a fence.
I accidentally flushed one of them from our citrus enclosure as I went to pick tangerines.
When we watch each other, I feel like we are sharing the space, co-existing in a way that curiously calms me. Paying attention to wild species brings me a sense of compassion for them that soon blossoms into a larger empathy for our broken world.
Thomas Merton, a 20th century American Trappist monk, wrote: “By being attentive, we can find ourselves engulfed in such happiness that it cannot be explained: the happiness of being at one with everything in that hidden ground of Love for which there can be no explanation.”
Contemplatives have long recognized this attention to and awareness of ourselves as part of all living things.
Fourth century Christian mystic Evagrius Pontius remarked that the goal of this intense awareness was knowing oneself, “not as a solitary, autonomous being but as one whose identity can only be conceived of as existing within an intricate web of encompassing relationships.”
Modern contemplatives like Merton, Dorothy Day, and Martin Luther King Jr. have recognized the “need to integrate contemplative practice within a sustained response to the needs of the world,” according to Douglas E. Christie in “The Blue Sapphire of the Mind.”
Practicing “this kind of regard and reciprocity,” to all of nature, Christie writes, contributes to its healing and helps it thrive and flourish.
I remembered Christie’s words of “regard and reciprocity” when I learned about a group opposing removal of nearly 200 trees from school campuses in the Pasadena area.
The trees were apparently in the way of a soil remediation project resulting from the Altadena fire. Two teenagers plus an arborist climbed a 100-foot pine tree outside a Pasadena high school to raise awareness.
“It really gives you a sense of being one with nature, even though Lincoln Avenue is right there,” said one of the tree-sitters from her perch in a lower tree.
“You feel like you’re far away from the urban environment when you’re up in a tree. It’s really special,” she said.
Novelist Wendall Berry would agree. “There are no unsacred places, there are only sacred places and desecrated places.” he wrote.
Listening and acting for the wild can lead to saving and rehabilitating desecrated spaces, saving ourselves in the process.
We come to realize we are not detached from nature or each other but an integral part of the whole.
The owl fledglings are still hanging around my yard. Their calls are still humorously squeaky to my ear. Until they depart, I will enjoy their breaking teenage voices and stern stares.
They are learning to navigate the web of oak woodland, suburban environment, and predator and prey relationships.
I’m trying to improve my listening and discerning skills too. As Rainer Maria Rilke writes, “There are no conversations in which the landscape doesn’t take part, from all sides and with a hundred voices.”