The Calling And The Presence

I stood at the back door and watched my dog. She cocked her head in that way that always makes me smile, first left, then right, her brows furrowed just a bit, as if to say, “What the….?”

The sound came out of the woods just fifty feet from where we stood. The trilling, trailing, utterly haunting cry. Every time I hear it, I think of a tiny ghost horse whinnying as he gallops through the moon-spattered forest floor. It was the call of a screech owl.

Such a cry carries with it the air of an omen, a harbinger. The crickets seem to turn their volume down when the little owl starts his recital; the surrounding farmland seems to listen and wait and gaze up into the pre-dawn sky, thinking its own collective thoughts and wondering what coming event might be foretold by the eerie song drifting out of the trees. At this time of year, as at the turning of all seasons, creation itself seems to be waiting…waiting.

Some people believe that the animals, the little creatures who surround us everywhere, existed in the presence of God before this earth was formed and tossed out into the starry blackness. I like to believe this. I like to believe that this is why I feel a kinship with the living things that watch me, unspeaking and cautious. I cherish the secret belief that I was there with them, that our bond is from of old. I long to tell them how beautiful they are, and how they decorate my days and fill me with awe and perplexed joy.

My dog listens to the screech owl, but she never turns to me to discuss it. She simply wonders at it, and occasionally glances at me as if to say, “What do you make of that?” None of the beasts ever speak to me.  Some of them, like the cattle, seem uncomfortable at the sound of human speech. They coexist with me, but they never communicate directly with the one who watches them. I wonder if someday I will come into a far country where we will have conversations, the animals and I.

In the meantime, I listen to them, and I suppose they listen to me. Perhaps we truly listen because we cannot communicate in the same language. Perhaps that’s the point.

~ S.K. Orr