great horned owls and happy birthday to me.

in my household of 1 + dog, birthdays are a big deal.

Upcoming events:

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Register here (Sunday, 3/28, 10am - 12pm PST).

Glen Canyon owlets. Photo by Janet Kessler

Sunday evening I collected Tater for a pre-dinner cruise through Glen Canyon Park, aka, one of my primary pandemic sanctuaries. As you enter the park, there’s a couple of ball fields, a playground, and a rec center, but it’s the canyon further on, with its chert-rock boulders, ancient eucalyptus and cypress, my favorite two-or-three-story tall acacia, irises that grow in the dark mud, a whole hillside covered in wild radishes (invasive, but tasty), raptors that are never not soaring overhead, California sagebrush you want to bury your face in, and so much flora and fauna whose names I’m still learning, that calms my synapses and brings me to my center. I’ve seen a wild turkey three times, and for most of last year, a swarm of bees made their home inside a eucalyptus, and if you stuck your ear next to it, you could listen to the thrum and buzz, fantasizing about what that honey might taste like. Since we’ve had some rain, the creek is alive and rushing and everything is making it’s spring greening. My senses come alive when I’m in the canyon. I like to go at twilight because most people have left by then, and I can walk mostly maskless and listen to the evening chismeando of the birds and the wind in the eucalyptus and sometimes even the yip and howl of the coyotes that are hidden yet omnipresent (luckily, Tater is oblivious and not a chaser-after-er). Just past the rec center and right at the entrance of the canyon, there is a gargantuan eucalyptus where a Great Horned Owl family makes their annual nest. I knew they were back again this year, because the photographers were out with their big lenses.

I stood at the base of the tree, staring up at the little floofs on display. Near me were a half-dozen other folks, all of us with our faces upturned, marveling. Suddenly my chest caught and I remembered last year, the return of the owls and their owlets after three years away. This exact spectacle was happening in this exact way this exact time last year. This time last year was when everything started. When we stopped knowing what to do with ourselves, how to place our bodies in a way that offered some relief but did no harm to the people in our orbit. This time last year, twilight after twilight, walking and walking and walking the dog, I’d come upon maybe a dozen or so folks, set up in haphazard six-foot distanced spots on the adjacent hillside, watching the owlets and their dorky-ass faces shift and tumble about their big messy nest like they were vying for an Academy Award. We would just sit there and watch. We were shaky and nervous and confused. We exchanged furtive glances, knowing head nods, but if memory serves, there wasn’t a lot of chit-chat (and if you know me, you know that I am a High Supreme Chit-Chat Priestess). We were quiet, and scared, and watching the owlets.

All of this rushed back to me on Sunday night.

Saturday’s post mentioned the anniversary that no one wants to celebrate. My brain understood this: the reckoning of turning the corner of one full year in Pandemia. But Sunday was the first time it hit me, standing under that damn tree, looking at the birds just doing their bird thing. Something cracked in my chest and I began frantically asking the other birdwatchers, Do you remember this time last year? Do you remember? The owls were here last year too. It’s so weird to remember that time, isn’t it? What about you, do you remember? Were you here last year?

I stood there grasping, reaching, weaving together all the threads that connect me to you, us to the owlets, all of it and us wrapped up together in time and memory and grief and loss. And then you throw in the tooth-aching beauty of springtime—life on full, raucous, unapologetic display—and, yeah. I was overcome.

And then, a phrase popped into my head: We’re still here. We’re still here. We’re still here.

It feels impossible to express what’s on my heart these last few mornings, how to give language to that thing that burst open in my chest on Sunday night around twilight, and again yesterday over my work from home fried rice lunch, and right now, as I sit here typing, that thing that isn’t really a word thing, at least not yet, but rises up when I get present to this one year anniversary of When Everything Changed. We are still here. Those of us lucky enough to see the owlets made it all the way through. I am so emotional when I think of those early days and weeks of this time last year. I am so emotional when I extrapolate into the future and see that every single remaining moment all of us currently living will get to have will be in the shadow of having lived through a pandemic. That every single last one of us is wracked with grief in ways big and small. That our children had to experience this catastrophe. That so many things have been put on hold, or done away with completely. That we had to deal with this while being under the administration that we were, as if mass death wasn’t enough for our collective psyches to handle.

We’re still here. This is no small thing. We get to (we must) keep going, rebuild, stay in conversation with life. I keep thinking about the so many us us who are not still here. I am present to this unfathomable loss of spirit.

And to think. We thought we’d be able to “flatten the curve” and get a handle on things by sheltering in place for two weeks.

*

It so happens that another “this time last year” situation was my 36th birthday.

I don’t understand people who let their birthdays slide by with no fanfare or acknowledgement. Yes, I understand that we are conditioned to feel embarrassed about aging, and many of us don’t like calling attention to ourselves, and I’m sure there are plenty of other reasons one might have to prefer to let such a date just slide by.

Over the last five years, birthdays have taken on a unique weight and significance for me: after experiencing a few Big Life Events, I know that it is no small thing to stay here. To make it another year.

In 2015, in the early hours of my 31st birthday, I sat at the bedside of my beloved abuelo when he took his last breath.

Have you ever been with someone when they die? It is a remarkable moment. When my abuelo died, it was awful, of course, and it was also so beautiful. I saw with my own eyes the exiting of someone I love. He was there, and then he wasn’t—his body was, but he—his spirit—was gone. Immediately his eyes started to glaze over, which I know because I opened his eyeballs to see in. He was not there. I sat with his body for some minutes before waking up the family, and this is another crack in the chest, imagining all the thousands of people out there still alive who were not able to be with their beloveds in their last moments.

To stay this was a profound experience just sounds dumb and cliché. What I will say is that losing him, and being in that space of death and transition and witnessing, was the first spark that moved me toward taking back agency over my life instead of only merely tolerating it. I got back into writing. I placed my longing and desire at the center of my life, rather than the periphery. I began to think about legacy, and all the ways I could live that would honor the memory of my ancestors, particularly those closest to me, who worked so damn hard so that I could have a life where I might flourish.

Two years later, on a bright, sunny Sunday afternoon, the day before my 33rd birthday—and what I’d declared my “Jesus Year”—I was cruising home on my cute as hell, mustard yellow Vespa when a man driving a $300,000 vehicle gunned the engine through a left turn and hit me head-on. I flew twenty feet, landing on my back, with so much pain in my pelvis I couldn’t move. I was immediately surrounded by good Samaritans (yes, I’m really going for this metaphor, y’all) and though I did take me a ride in an ambulance, and spent an afternoon in the ER of SF General, somehow, blessedly, I was beat-up but not broken.

This is another type of experience that will have you rethink literally everything. What I didn’t know then was that my resurrection wouldn’t come for another six months, nearly to the day, when I took what ended up being my last ever drink. The six months between getting hit on the Vespa and being done with drinking were some of my hardest. I was dealing with physical pain, and many of the coping strategies I’d thought I’d retired came roaring back, full steam. And. The accident was an interruption that altered my trajectory, ultimately leading me to the choice that handed me back my life. Amen, hallelujah, gracias a todos los dioses, etc.

After I got hit by a car, I understood what folks say about nothing being written, about how truly possible it is to be taken out at anytime. Brains get aneurysms. Bodies get hit by cars. Any number of freak-ass things could happen that remove you from the world. These experiences revealed to me all that I took for granted, not least of which that it is no small thing to stay, to get to keep living. And I woke up to how badly I wanted to stay. I so wanted to stay.

You know what’s coming: 2020! My birthday is March 13. On March 12th, 2020, I had ten friends over to my house for a dinner party. On March 17th, San Francisco was ordered to shelter in place.

And now, here we are. Entering into Year Two.

Part of being human is that the edges of these experiences soften over time. They stay less close to the bone, and as life goes on, we forget, until the next Big Life Experience rolls in to snap us back to the present. I get it. I think it’s hard to manage day-to-day life stuff if we’re constantly carrying around the weight of our mortality front and center (though I am a Pisces and an Enneagram 4, so keeping my mortality front and center is basically my happy place). And. There’s something about the relentlessness of this past year that has forced us to deal with this whether we would have wanted to or not.

Alice Walker says, in “Living By the Word:”

“Some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don’t even recognize that growth is happening. We may feel hostile or angry or weepy and hysterical, or we may feel depressed. It would never occur to us, unless we stumbled on a book or a person who explained to us, that we were in fact in the process of change, of actually becoming larger, spiritually, than we were before. Whenever we grow, we tend to feel it, as a young seed must feel the weight and inertia of the earth as it seeks to break out of its shell on its way to becoming a plant. Often the feeling is anything but pleasant. But what is most unpleasant is the not knowing what is happening. Those long periods when something inside ourselves seems to be waiting, holding its breath, unsure about what the next step should be, eventually become the periods we wait for, for it is in those periods that we realize that we are being prepared for the next phase of our life and that, in all probability, a new level of the personality is about to be revealed.”

If I’m grateful for anything, it’s that this grand reckoning, this taking stock, this reflection, this reluctant transformation, this keeping on, this walking forward, is accompanied by the messy beauty of springtime.

*

I don’t know how this year would have been had I not had the ridiculous fortune of living equidistant to three large San Francisco parks, these places where I could walk and walk and stay present to life through the pain and terror of 2020. Traversing the same three parks, the same trail routes pretty much every time, over and over, and over, and over still, through a full year of seasons, through rain and wind and of course our beloved fog, kept me present to how a person might continue to live, which I’ve learned is that the way this works is that we must simply keep going; we must continue on being human. We must expand our understanding of what it means to be human, becoming more and more so.

I’m taking five full days off for my birthday. My goal is to not open my laptop even once. Over the five days, I’m getting my nails done, a tattoo, and a massage. I’m taking myself away for a two night solo writing retreat. I asked one of my favorite persons, who is a talented baker, to make me a cake. I’m going to read and write and walk and stare out the window and hopefully listen to some birdsong.

The smallest things make me marvel now. Entering into my 37th year, I hope that we find the ritual and space to face the magnitude of what we’ve lost. I hope we figure out how to be more human. I hope that we can find ways to practice joy, and celebrate these small things that are of course everything. I hope we learn to honor those who couldn’t stay, by holding our desires and longings at the center, rather than the margins.

May our aim be true.

Love y’all.

*

After three years away, the owls are back in Glen Park

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Slow Motion Sober is a newsletter and community for creative types who are sober or curious about sobriety, and all the life-y intersections along the way. It's written by me, Dani, a writer and sobriety advocate in San Francisco, CA. 

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