Owls

It’s difficult to know how to restart the blog. When I last posted, I was out of the hospital after my transplant but still in Edmonton for the requisite three months of physio. I think it’s obvious that I eventually left the hospital and got on with my life but so much has happened since that time it feels like a lifetime ago.

The past two years have been interesting. So much has happened that it would be impossible to encompass it all in a single blog post. Ok, it would be possible but horribly, horribly long. In short, I bought a car, moved out, did some volunteer work, sisters got married (not to each other), became an aunt, made some friends, lost some friends, buried some friends.

I remembered a moment in my first year of university when things felt so insurmountably hard that I just wished that I could go in to some sort of coma and go about my life and wake up 10 years in the future when I really had to together. If that had actually come to fruition, I would have been totally pissed at what I saw when I woke up.

All these years later, I still don’t feel like I have it together. Sometimes I feel like I suffer from a lack of inertia and other times I wish that life would just slow down so that I can keep up. I have moments when I feel like a blank canvas ready for a delicious new adventure but then suddenly realize the burdens I drag behind.

I’ve had the kind of year that really makes me regret running over that gypsy woman with my car. The exact inventory list of misadventures is of no importance. It’s a random series of personal loss, minor tragedy, and medical instability. It’s a series of events, which are perfectly manageable when doled out one at a time but the consistent pattern of misfortune makes me wonder what it is that I am karmically paying for.

The totality of it all is so stupendously ridiculous that you just have to laugh. Other theories involve me unknowingly stealing something from a grave or one of my enemies fashioning a voodoo doll in my image from my discarded pubic hair.

Of course, I hesitate in even mentioning my misfortunes out of fear that my adversaries might draw fuel from it and delight in my misery. Don’t furrow your brow at me; everyone has enemies, for what is life without a few nemeses to keep things spicy.

Last week, I was leaving my parent’s house in Airdrie and as I walked to my car, I looked up at the exact moment when an owl had taken flight from a neighbour’s tree on to a nearby roof. I watched it for a while and called out a witness just to ensure that this rare and unexpected sight wasn’t a figment of my imagination. I watched the owl watch me and hoped that it was sign of the end of my wretched luck and better things coming my way. I had also just finished reading The Alchemist a few hours earlier and my brain was swimming with poetic thoughts about your own personal legend and following life’s omen’s as they come.

So I went home and looked it up on the Internets, only to find that in many cultures, owls are harbingers of doom.

A friend of mine, while delighting in my tales of tragedy (because it is just damn funny after a while) put things in a new perspective for me. She reminded me that even Death in tarot cards isn’t literal but can just indicate change and that I should just own it and my the owl my spirit guide.

I think, ultimately, that is what life has taught me; I can handle the shit life chooses to dole out, what is going to happen it going to happen. It is up to me to embrace the mess, explore the lessons it is teaching me and find the humour in it to make my life story more entertaining.