There is a Ruru, a small, native New Zealand owl who spends her nights perched in the tree outside my office- calling out over and over, like an album that’s playing on repeat. Her voice is distinct, a sound I find both ethereal and grounding. An anchor, a lighthouse. When the darkness pours her inky black body over the whiteness of mine, the sound of Ruru is a reminder I exist. That I’m yet to be absorbed completely by the night.
Last night, when I heard her, I sent my husband a message.
A Ruru, I said. That was enough.
Both hearing and marking bird sound is a pastime we both approach with a childlike enthusiasm and the necessary reverence. An owl of any sort is always special. I turn off the lights, everything that seems to make a sound. I step outside, push off the edge, swim away from any light.
Once, when driving up the long and windy hill that leads away from the tidal estuary we live on, I saw a Ruru perched atop a fence post on my way up. I put my foot abruptly on the brake, slowed down almost to a stop and I stared, enraptured by the sight. Her eyes followed me as I drove past and when I reached the top of the hill, I turned the car around and drove all the way back down, but she had gone. Flown into the lower branches of the road framed Macrocarpas and out of sight.
In Aotearoa New Zealand, the Ruru is a forest guardian, a protector of the great Tāne Mahuta, or the Forest God. Some Māori traditions say that the ancestral spirit of a family group can take the form of a Ruru, known as Hine-Ruru, or Owl Woman. It is believed that these owl spirits can act as kaitiaki or guardians and have the power to protect, warn and advise.
I wonder what it’s like to be Hine-Ruru. To have eyes, green and yellow. To witness in a way where nothing and no one remains unseen. To be surveyed by the gaze of an owl is an undressing. Of everything that’s unimportant, superfluous, untrue.
Hine-Ruru, I read, traverses the corridors of the underworld intently observing from afar. But there is little more I find beyond what I’ve shared here, or perhaps, that I’m privy to. A story, a mythology, after all, is a passed on, knitted thread of legends, experiences, embellished truths that I have neither the ancestry, connections nor bloodborne requirements to have heard or held.
And yet, I wonder if there is a Hine-Ruru, an Owl Woman, that could be mine.
In the early hours of yesterday, I was up and working when a large ginger and white cat strolled across the deck outside the glass doors of my office and sauntered out of sight. Owl Woman spread her wings inside my chest, her outer feathers reaching shoulder to shoulder. A human and owl body, formed of feather, blood and bone. I pause, and catch my breath. When Owl Woman flies, the only room that’s left is for the needed and the true.
Pay attention, she called into the dark, to both the Ruru and to me.
Pay attention, I echo back, deep into the night.
My focus falls back to the cat. There she was, belonging only to herself, doing what cats do best without thought of goodness or deserving; just simply being a cat.
But to my Ruru friend, her presence equals a likely early death. The birds of Aotearoa New Zealand are unique; they have evolved without the presence of predators, a situation that’s a one-off to these island shores. As a result, their nests are often low or ground dwelling. They trust their place to hold them, seek out the natural, low lying coverings for their young. A trust that still lives in the clay of their ancient, sacred, hollow bones. Their vision both expansive and yet still to understand the hunting ground their nesting spaces have become.
They are susceptible, vulnerable in the place that is as much formed of their feathers as it is of leaf and dirt. They do not think to be afraid. The domestic cat, or the similarly introduced rat, stoat, or possum is not their friend.
The Owl Woman in me considers what it means to live these two realities. To inhabit a feathered, skin covered body attuned to times long passed. Like the owl, beyond the edges of my skin, I have a nervous system simple in design. One that still speaks to and with the land, that seeks to build her nest within places that she hopes are safe and known.
There are some landscapes I walk through where I know that I’m little more than a very brief visitor. You’re not meant to stay here, the hills and mosses tell me, and I respect them, making my footsteps lighter, my strides slightly quicker.
The landscape does not need me here, want me here, I know.
And then in the same way but altogether different, there are places I pass through, buildings I see, stories I hear, and I feel an instant kinship. My body knows, recognizes, calls out, I’m so glad to see you again, it’s been ages. I’ve missed you. Despite the fact we’ve never even met. Perhaps this is the presence of the Owl Woman within me, connecting the seen with the unknown.
It seems when in the company of the sacred, our thoughts almost always turn to those of death.
Hine Ruru traverses the corridors of the underworld intently observing from afar, I read again.
Owl Woman reminds me of the cat who also stalks me, remaining just outside my eyeline but still within my sight. I feel the presence of her paws within the rattle of my own, internal chatter. Within the call to push, do more, be more as though the days that we’re given are not finite.
I wonder what it would look like to approach death of all her kinds with an embrace and not a holding back. I learned recently about imaginal cells in a conversation with a good friend. Imaginal cells are the genome of the butterfly, planted deep within the body of the caterpillar. Paradoxically, they are both part of the caterpillar and yet at the same time, unknown to it.
In the beginning, the caterpillar plunders over ground, eating everything they can within their way, consuming food that’s hundreds of times their own weight in a day. Eventually, too swelled up and bloated to continue, they hang themselves up; it’s at this point, the magic begins to take its place.
Their once soft outsides reconfigure to hard skin. A chrysalis is formed, and it’s inside this deeply cocooned place that the imaginal disks begin to form. But the caterpillar does not recognise them, refuses to accept them. Their body rallies, fights, attempts to snuff them out as quickly as they are born.
But this is a process that the imaginal depend on. They produce, reproduce, proliferate faster and faster until, exhausted, the caterpillar’s immune system dies out from all the stress. The resulting breakdown, the remains themselves of the caterpillar’s body is the necessary surrender that builds the butterfly.
The caterpillar is programmed to resist. The butterfly relies on the pushback to her destiny determined advance.
I wonder if it was also Owl Woman that brought me to this story. I think about the imaginal cells inside myself. The things that I resist, am afraid of. Of the moments that I try to prevent my body or my mind turning into necessary mush so that it’s free to shape-shift, reconfigure, become changed. Owl Woman reminds me that resistance itself is part of the sought out transformation. An inevitable push so something else is free to pull.
I listen out for the call of Ruru once again, take my body and step outside into the night.
