Magical visits from a Great Horned Owl and a young bobcat bring blessings

as I continue exploring and reveling in the extravagant stretching of time that comes with "unplugging" for some few days each month.

Ojai‘s hottest summer days seem inevitably to run from late August into mid-September. As always, I spend the 100+degree days in utter hibernation. I curl naked or in a sarong with just the right pillows on my shaggy flokati rug, under the wonderful ceiling fan! (Ojai summers are so very incredibly conducive to the practice of the sacred art of resting!)

As the afternoon heat overwhelms the night coolness I’ve captured by closing my windows early in the morning, I face a daily dilemma: Do I want to trade the heat and bird song for the noise and energy consumption that comes with a couple of hours of air-conditioning. More days than not, I choose for the birds and a splash of cool water!

When the sun goes down, the temperatures drop a full 40 to 50 degrees. My body emerges from its torpor, as though some enormous weight has been lifted from my head and shoulders. Suddenly I feel energized, enlivened—ready for walking or yoga or puttering or projects or for giving my gardens some attention. 

Especially at this time of year, I spend my “non-work” days living on the night shift, often wandering around the groves and creeks in the well-after-midnight hours, finally going to sleep just before first light. Napping becomes a daily hot weather “activity.”

One night a week or so ago, I was out on an after-midnight ramble when a car appeared (most unusual at that hour) and slowed to a stop beside me.  It’s so miraculous for an ex-New Yorker to be living somewhere in 21st century America where that is not something to strike terror in the heart of a woman alone!

It was an Ojai police officer on patrol, checking to make sure that I was okay, that I was out at that hour by choice. I told him I was just out for a stroll. He pointed at the time on his computer monitor (2:38 AM) and said, “ But, it’s so late and so dark!” (I don’t use a flashlight, though I do carry one with me for any emergency.) “Ah,” said I “but it’s so cool and so quiet!” He laughed, said goodnight and drove on. Just as on the other nights when this same thing has happened, I felt so completely delighted and blessed!

With the final harvest of some Damson plums this week, the season of “stone fruit” is suddenly over; no more “care packages” to be dispensed.  My Eden is “reduced” now to only the enormous variety of orchard citrus, my own still-producing strawberry patches and the Chard, bok choy, Armenian and European cucumbers, cherry tomatoes, purple onions, basil, oregano, anise, dill, catnip and mint that continue to grow in flagrant abundance in my vegetable and herb patches.

In these slow, sultry past weeks I’ve had two magical wildlife sightings while doing my morning Reiki meditation and floating in the hot tub. One morning I opened my eyes just in time to watch a great horned owl fly from my roof to a nearby tree, crossing just barely 6 feet over my head! Then, one day last week I heard some small animal race by the lattice fence alongside the tub. It was moving too fast for me to even glimpse it. But, just a few minutes later, I opened my eyes in time to watch a gangling young bobcat walking leisurely back past the opening in the fence.  She paused in her stroll to make brief eye contact (such an extraordinary experience) before she casually continued on her way! 

My new neighbors saw the bobcat a couple of days later, sitting on the stone wall surrounding their patio.  She was quietly watching their baby playing in her playpen. They took heed of the need to be not more than arms length away from the baby when the baby was outside.  Still, rather than feeling fearful, they were feeling awed and touched by what they experienced, much as I had, as a blessing.

It literally takes my breath away each time I get to be visited by a wild creature so close up in my home place!  It happens pretty frequently here, even though this place I live is not really a “wild” place.  It’s so extraordinary for this “little Jewish girl raised up in the concrete jungle of Brooklyn, New York” to find herself living in such a green, bucolic, sometimes wild-seeming place, sleeping safely outdoors on the earth most nights!

Because of how the Labor Day holiday fell, I was able to carve away a full seven days of being “unplugged” from almost any contact for this, my fifth monthly “time-out” this year. Since my ordinary life these days is so often very full of intense sharing (mostly by phone) with family, friends and clients, taking these regular monthly breaks has been unbelievably renewing!  It feels like a deep clearing in my psyche each time around.

My sister and one of my clients (like my sister, also a New Yorker) tease me about my needing to take breaks from a life that is a break compared to most people’s lives. Still, these “time outs” from intimate sharing seem to be critical for my well being this year. It’s been such a big year in every one of my friends’ lives. There’ve been so many enormous life changes, such intensity no matter whether about illness or about blossoming or just about huge internal/external shifts (including my own dealing with the enormous shift in my own living situation). I suspect it’s because we share so deeply and intimately in each other’s lives that I seem to keep feeling a recurrent overwhelming need for the periodic spaciousness of being cocooned in just my very own uninterrupted energy field.

I luxuriate, revel and rejoice in this extravagant stretching of time that, in my “non-work week” world, has already been much expanded by not being regulated or measured by clocks or schedules. Even though I may, as I did this time, have a call or two from a friend or my sister as they needed to touch base, it’s still such a significant and restful reduction in my ordinary level of phone contact. And, I keep getting better during these “time-outs” at putting down my side of the connection just when I put the down the phone,  

With each succeeding “time-out,” I’m seeing more and more clearly how much it feeds me to have both the exquisite richness of such ongoing intensity and depth of sharing and the equally exquisite richness of these interspersed, intermittent periods of an almost complete absence of contact. I’m incredibly grateful to my friends, my family and my clients for their flexibility and good-humored accommodation of this peculiarity of my nature! 

I don’t imagine that I could possibly be any other way than how I am.  Still, it’s so much easier for me to cope with being me when the people I love so dearly are so blessedly willing to cope so lovingly with how odd I am!

Originally published September 2002