THE COMPANY OF OWLS

One soul in an endless wood.

Many nature writers describe how humans are comforted by nature: its quiet forests, its vastness, its accessibility. But Atkin, a nature writer, finds more than simple comfort in nature. Due to Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, which affects connective tissues, the author’s head is disarmingly mobile on her neck, able to turn almost all the way around, like an adult owl’s. Her head is often too heavy for her neck, like a baby owl’s. Her thoughts, when she was young, could not coalesce into legible sentences because of the hypermobility of her oral tissues and joints, so the first language she spoke and “thought in and dreamt in, was one of my own making. I spoke and spoke, but no one recognized the words I was using….I spoke and my words fell somewhere between my mouth and the listeners’ ears, like birds tumbling from flight mid-air.” The bottom line, for the author, is that she sometimes feels “more like an owl than a human.” This book is more deeply felt, and thus more richly described, than many. In Atkin’s hands, owl parents are far more complex than depicted in science or children’s tomes, their heads often bent toward each other in conversation. The same is true of their owlets, which are so precociously self-aware that they stand at attention on branches in order of their age, engaging in behaviors that are by turns “stoical, playful, courageous and continually surprising.” The author’s powerful connection with nature has helped her transcend both illness itself, and the alienation illness can breed. “To think I am alone is a kind of arrogance. I am one of many beings breathing in the dark. Deeper and deeper, more and more relaxed. And so the owls sing me to sleep in the end. A lullaby about insignificance. A lullaby about being one soul in the endless wood.”

A meditation by a singular writer who is less affected by nature than she is of it.