Augury

Two nights ago, I had a conversation with a barred owl.  It was only singing in its ascending cadence, not its trademark “who cooks for you.” I answered back as best I could, using my cupped hands as a whistle.  That’s a trick I’m proud of.  The owl called and I responded, and we talked like that for a few minutes.

Then last night, as I drove past that same area, a barred owl swooped down from a tree and stood in the gravel road in front of me.  The intricate stripes all over its body made it look like a topographical map of itself.    Surely it was the same one I’d talked with.  It stared into my headlights with its perfectly round face for five or six seconds before flying away. 

I put the car in park for a little bit, unable to move.  The moment, locking eyes with that huge bird, was so pregnant with meaning, but I couldn’t quite grasp it.  Looking back now, in the light of day, I can feel that near-revelation slipping away from me.

But it left me feeling like I understood augury.  According to the Greeks and Romans, you could predict the future by watching birds, observing their behavior, listening to their calls.  They say Tiresias discovered how to do it.  An owl's call or a dove's flight could mean any number of things, for good or ill, setting new dates for battles or elections.  The Roman army used to carry chickens around, just so magicians could observe signs in when and how they ate.

And, like any other form of magic, it’s easy for us to distance ourselves from it, here in the 21^st century.  For those of us who mostly just see pigeons and grackles, augury seems wildly naïve.  Of course, like many elements of our mysticism-filled past, it still echoes in our language.  The word “auspicious,” for example, comes from Latin for “watching birds.”

But I think the Romans were on the right track.  In fact, after last night, I’m sure of it.  It’s not that the barred owl was trying to tell me the future, exactly.  But there was something behind it, some greater, wild, terrible something.  And the way to experience it is by carefully watching the natural world, turning yourself to the life that surrounds you.

Observation is the key to understanding, that much is clear.  Not just looking at the life around us, but paying attention.  There is some magic in the complexity of an ecosystem, in the vast sweep of geological time, that is invisible at first glance.  The more you look, the more you see, until you start scratching at Melville's little layer lower, tracing the features of the unknown as they slip from behind the pasteboard masks of the everyday.

Augury, at its literal and etymological heart, is just looking at birds.  It's a place to start.