Nature Talk And Voice Embodiment With Owl And Darkness

Hello Sarah!

Hi Lori!

Hi and hello cocooners and dear kindred souls who have been our friends on this journey.

We wanted to present Owl and Darkness,

Awakening Your Night Owl.

We are so excited to have this chat.

It's kind of like our seasonal story times if you've been with us before mixed with a little bit of our cocoon gathering intentions where we weave in vocal play and expressive arts activities which could be poetry or drawing or painting etc etc.

So Sarah do you have any words of wisdom that you want to share about our cocoon journey together?

It has been a journey.

A journey.

And what better animal to bring us full circle with the journey than Owl.

Wise Owl.

Stoic.

Calm.

Silent.

Yeah so we've been doing this journey for a few years now and the cocoon is in a cocoon phase of metamorphosizing into a another new journey called Nurtured Voices.

So we're using the cocoon as the seeds and the soil and this rich experience and support from the community and all of you to birth and take like another extra tundral more paths into other things.

It's so true.

What I keep feeling is like that launching pad that we've created and it's from doing this work together with seasonal living and also learning from nature and growing through tapping into how we feel through nature inspired feelings which is something that was birthed on this cocooning journey and then also just that sharing that we've had with community and finding kindred spirits online.

We've just redefined and restructured so many things in our lives I know together and with with others so yeah I think the main message is that we're really grateful for the opportunity to connect with you all and we are so thankful to those of you who have been on this journey for a few years now.

Since 2021 we've been doing this together and if any of you are old school I started it in 2020 alone so Sarah joined in and made the journey so much richer and it really did grow so much.

We grew our tree together so I'm excited for the next phase of collaboration and seeing how vocal play and communication and speech work shines through Nurtured Voices and so you can all expect to see beautiful things being birthed from our cocooning and yeah so this will be our final cocoon gathering and it is owl and darkness awakening our night owl.

And we've always felt the cocoon was like a living breathing thing like it all encompassed you all and Lori and me and other people just giving it life force and the cocoon kind of having its own and now I just feel like it's kind of like here you go and like I just get this feel like the launch pad the moving forward and so thank you to all of you who helped create that little cocoon bundle to now become the next thing which is our whole thing right?

A gentle reminder you're nature you're here to become.

Right yeah and in a way it's like we are we are both going into a new unknown which is what we've gotten used to and embraced through cocooning and yeah what a better guide than owl to show us how to do that gracefully and powerfully.

Where do we begin?

Do you want to do a nature inspired feeling that has to do with owl and darkness specifically?

Do you have a feeling?

Yeah let's feel into that.

Let's see nature inspired feeling inspired by owl and darkness.

Oh I am sitting as the owl in the silence in the darkness it just got cold here anyway so in the crispness and I don't necessarily like hear anything or feel anything but that whole like neck turning all the way around of like what's over there you know um that's how I feel right now like I haven't I can't see it I don't know what it is I don't hear it but I'm gonna turn in that direction that I as a human being our heads don't turn that way so it feels cool to turn your head as an owl.

I love that yeah I believe that it's 270 degrees instead of 360 it's almost a full circle but not a full circle.

I've been I've been like devouring owl content it's been lovely I love that and I feel that one too I can really feel that turn of perspective and looking over my shoulder and there's like this simultaneous like what's over there as well as like oh what was that all about yes I was just saying the past I was like as we were talking I was like and it's also about where we came from right we came from like oh what what yeah what was that what was that like this curious like huh okay how about you Lori how are you feeling?

Well I didn't actually have one pop in until just a second ago while we were talking about that and I I need to look this up more but I one quick fact that I learned was there is there might be multiple types of owls that do this but that they um I know that they mate for life and if um if a mate uh passes then they they do get a new mate but they stay together and they bow to each other and I need to find which owl does that if there's one type or if there's multiple types or if it's an owl thing but I'm gonna like owl bow what does it even look like I don't know I need to see I need to see what this is I just like I just that little that little like came through just now an owl bow I like that so I'm owl bowing to so many things like to the cocoon to you to myself as my own mate like I think that that's such a powerful thing to become the mate you know the partner that you desire and want to be I'm bowing you know owl bow to like my husband who's been so supportive and all of my friends and family so yeah that's my nature inspired feeling for this I like how you said becoming your own mate because we say that like I'm gonna date myself I'm going to marry myself I choose me as my mate I love that and inviting inviting anyone listening to really enjoy you know there's like some five minute ten minute videos where you can just see the beautiful diversity of owls and they are all so different and unique and just gorgeous it's quite quite the feeling to take in their beauty well it's owl and darkness awakening our night owl and I wanna I'll say my intention with it and I think we had the same one so then you can tell me yours but my intention when I was looking through this was how can I embrace being awake through sort of the dark night of the soul or dark times or you know not being afraid of the dark and darkness in general it's that darker half of the year for the northern hemisphere and yeah just having being your own guide and like being strong and also graceful and also vulnerable because it's not that owls are still very vulnerable in the dark leaning into the dark and not resisting it is where I'm feeling so yeah what were your intentions and adding on to that yeah very very similar and we've talked about fear a lot you and I and then just even leading up to this and there was that like fear of the dark and a lot of people right now at least here in Connecticut fear of winter right oh winter it's coming and it's cold and it's coming you know this anticipated fear and it's my favorite um season so yeah being inviting owl to be like within something that might be uncomfortable or make you afraid or fear and like twisting the perspective on it like well we'll get into owl a bit more um but yeah that that sense of ownership of it that it is just another time upon us that we can embrace and have magic within us you know okay so it's darker and and whatnot but there's so many cool things owl does at night when everything else is asleep with grace with strength with stillness and we can do that too I love that and I actually it made me think too I brought I brought a book with me that I felt I felt intuitively drawn to look inside with regards to these topics I was like I wonder what this book so this first one is um an immense world by ed young and um there's this really cute picture of a monkey looking up at a butterfly on the cover and it talks about just like in nature the multi-sensory experience like we can as humans we can never experience the world the way a butterfly can or a dog knows or bat echolocation or owl ears you know like there's just like it goes deep into all of that I haven't even read the whole thing but I picked out a chapter and let me see it's chapter eight and it's called all ears and it's about sound so something fun about owls that I think can help us in this embracing of the dark is to lean into listening and deep listening and so um I'll just kind of summarize but it's the chapter starts with a man named Roger Payne and Roger Payne used to be scared of the dark while in high school he tried to overcome that phobia by going on long nighttime walks through a nature reserve near his home during these solitary strolls he often heard and occasionally saw an owl that lived in a nearby building and his fear of the night subsided his interest in owls grew in 1956 he got a chance to study the birds as an undergraduate student and he leapt at it and it goes on to talk about the studies he did um with with owls and their their hearing and the way that they hunt at night is actually all based on how they can hear so we think that it's like their incredible night vision but it's actually their incredible listening and power of listening so I'm curious I don't know I'm just curious how that hits you and anyone listening if you are afraid of the dark to kind of be curious about that would you be up for walking through a nature reserve at night or is there a safe way that you know a safer way if you're not up for that to explore deep listening in the night for me like there's your whole like body and like filtering the senses within your body so like deep listening going out into the night like all like oh if you could have like the least amount of light pollution that'd be even better right night full of stars or clouds or whatever your like whole I think of it actually with my preschoolers whole body listening like your whole body is in it it's listening um so there's that sense this like connection with yourself but then it also brings up communication for me like how can we as human beings be whole body listeners to whoever we're communicating with our communication partner and so I'm sure if we develop that relationship with ourselves and hearing everything around us starting with nature like kind of as our inspiration then when we're around other humans taking these skills that we've strengthened and um you know tweaked a bit kind of using it in commun in a communicative communicative way I know for owl when I did my own research the thing I loved the most and it's kind of a weird thing but that owls give a warning sometimes um not necessarily to their prey but to others around them that's startling them or whatever and it could be um a sound or a hiss or um clicking of their beak um yeah a specific owl hoop or or whatever depending on the type of owl and to that for that that like gave me that nugget of like oh I wish we did that a little bit more as humans like really not like a warning but like hey like that hurt my feelings or I don't know what you would say but just not this surface level but a little bit deeper of you know there's something going on here I need to give a little warning or this is how that made me feel and even me and my husband did it the other day where you know we get a little salty a little edgy finally he's like oh you know I've been tired the last few days I haven't actually slept well I was like oh there's like his little warning like his little this is why my behavior is the way it is right now so that's kind of what came in when I read through all the owl stuff bringing in their senses and their communication and how we how we can just like absorb absorb that kind of wisdom into our own lives I feel like I'm getting better at that the warning that's so good I love that that example of noticing when somebody's giving you a little owl owl hiss or hoot or a sound coming your way like oh I think or like sometimes you have to be listening underneath you know hearing beneath the words going beyond the words like we've practiced so much with nature inspired feelings and all of the cocooning activities but like hearing beyond the words and listening for those warning signs of okay there there can be like a little bit of a frayed edge beyond this and yeah and I've been sort of tuning into my body and the hormonal changes that happen in my cycle and I have been listening to it more and more each year and just kind of like data collecting right like all of a sudden you're like oh it's this day again and I'm feeling the same way as I did last month on this day and I'm noticing there's this little block and it could change and I'll be open to this changing but you know just noticing oh okay I get extra frustrated like I have a shorter patient's time limit or something and just even telling giving myself a little owl hoot to be like it's okay that's what that is and then also communicating that to my husband like this is what I need at this time um so that's what you reminded me of um because yeah it can feel like it's like a little darker time of the month I mean and for a woman like menstruation is supposed to be their inner winter or inner autumn however you want to look at it but this time of like you know going in and you know allowing yourself to sort of like shed and move through that and embracing that I think that's a really nice model I mean I'd like to live that.

Yeah and I like how you said like there's like twofold to it of like being connected with your own body you need to be able to do that first right of kind of taking data of the time and how you feel and what's going on in your inner world and then you've got the outer piece of it and even giving it to yourself that little hoot um I like that and I know just the other day I was able to kind of be more in tune with my body I was on the phone with a provider and it wasn't going anywhere and like I could feel rushes in my body and I was like why why is this happening and I realized because this person on the other end like wasn't letting me speak or finish my question just answering a question that was not the question um that I was asking so first I had to feel the rushes then ask huh like why is that happening and then put it to oh I'm being interrupted and then I was like what are you gonna do with that and I could have done nothing I could have just done my own owl hoot like okay check in with yourself make sure you're not a certain way with this person um but I did decide to say something I said it we have this phrase in my house say what you mean mean what you say but don't say it mean I was like actually I keep trying to ask a question but you're answering not the question I'm asking I don't know what I said but I said something like that and I do think looking into owl over these last the last few days really helped me with that just that one circumstance so we'll keep we'll keep hooting away over here I just keep feeling their extreme alertness like being awake that night owl you're awake in the dark you can see past this surface you know illusion sort of that may be coming at you or that we live in even you know just being able to be extremely present with someone and being present with your body and having all your senses open I'm just gonna say that's a really courageous thing to do it's so much easier to dull our senses and keep the lights on for you know lack of better words it's like you know shine the light and don't be scared and don't walk down the dark hallway of our inner selves and you know what are we missing out on when we're only casting light everywhere you know so that's just what it's reminding me of like it is courageous to allow yourself to to speak about something that you're perceiving that may not be getting picked up on by others sort of a an awakened person awakening another you know also in that moment and it might not like hello do you see what I see right and you think of owl and like how many creatures are sleeping you know especially all of us humans my owl I've got barred owl outside that just hoots away it's like we're all trying to sleep over here so yeah being amongst the sleeping being awake amongst the sleeping and yeah you never know I mean by the end of our conversation we were laughing with that provider that I was on the phone with so maybe I shed light maybe I didn't I don't know but taking it with grace and awareness beautiful well I don't know Sarah I've got a few I have a few questions that I have and we could answer them ourselves I'm curious about that I want to ask you a few questions and I think yeah we can all ask ourselves so this part could be a little bit of a journaling section if we'd like to make it that so if you feel called you can grab your journal and then you can be ready to pause after each question and you can listen to our responses as well so my first one was how do you feel when you're awake in the darkness of the night and you can write down you know all of the things you know it might even be both good and bad things so just kind of being honest with yourself and answering that question about where are you at currently in this present moment with darkness so I'm curious what your answer is the first thing I came up with was insomnia like literally awake in the middle of the night while my whole house is sleeping I'm the only one that deals with that in this household which I'm kind of glad because it's my own time whereas if we had multiple people with it we'd have uh other issues but I had to learn how to embrace that being awake while everything else is sleeping and it is it's a quiet it's a stillness it's it kind of feels like magical and mystical too like um when you're a little kid and you're like oh I'm awake before everyone else so it does have that childish joy to it in a way and that's what I've been trying to embrace when I have bouts of insomnia so that I'm not resisting it and then getting frustrated with myself and then if I think about the darkness I do love darkness because I'm such a feeler and such a sensitive that when it's dark it calms everything down for me so I know you know my bathroom chats of just like being in the bathroom shutting the door lights are off and if it doesn't have a window even better and then outside you know trying to get out there at night and find places that don't have as much light I haven't done a dark forest walk that sounds scary so maybe that'll be my next adventure but I have gone out in the back quite late at night and just been in it and you feel like everything kind of melts away like the things that were worrying you like because you feel smaller because it's so expansive outside and I feel like it's even more so when it's when it's dark out so kind of reminds us where we're at in the world hmm you brought me there yeah for me when I was feeling this it feels the same as how I've been with two things roller coasters and public speaking or like speaking in groups or speaking you know performing there are times in my life where it's fine I have nothing it's like great wonderful let's do it let's take like the loop the loop big drop roller coaster and then there are times when I'm like absolutely not I'm not I'm terrified body shaking so scared unwilling so I would say for me it's just and I don't even know I think this is something I'll have to like learn about myself is like what makes me go from that fear of the dark to absolute peace with it and like almost like yeah let's go romping through the woods at night right because I used to work in an environment where we were camping and you know setting up a vending booth for an entire weekend starting on like a Wednesday or Thursday going to a Monday and I'd be living in the woods and you know or out of a van but like mostly in a tent and walking around paths and you just have a little flashlight or a headlight and it's very dark and I think anybody who's done any camping trips knows that beautiful feeling of being you know outside in the night it's just so different from being inside in your bedroom in the night both have benefits of being in the darkness but like it's so different like you said like there's an expansiveness and I've had times where I was like really scared you know while camping I'm like for no reason there's not anything like so it's just interesting it must be something you know where my imagination is taking me or you know maybe something that's going on in my life that's making me feel a little extra vulnerable so yeah I just I would say I have a like back and forth relationship with me in darkness although I know since cocooning I would I started doing the practice of like when I lay down at night I go completely under the covers so it's like complete darkness and I let I let myself just be in it and I have my eyes open but you can't see anything it's just dark and so I am safe in a bed in the dark but I choose it it's in my control in a way so I would say it's it's brings up a lot of different things to explore for me probably control being one of them well I was just thinking too while you're talking like there is so much surrender and letting go to being within darkness because usually a lot of times it's outside so you're already outside your home and yeah who knows maybe it's bringing up even a primal a primal sense that's within us all of like it's dark I need to get to safety yeah I think that about that often when I'm camping like animals and oh it's windy could like a rogue branch come and like yeah you start I start feeling my vulnerability and my life you know it doesn't feel as safe out in the dark it's such a such a big topic so I have another question and this one is are there times you've been through a dark night of the soul or a dark time in your life and come out the other side and you know are there any lessons that you can reflect upon or share from that yeah I would say what what did you say in your last answer that it's it's both like there's a struggle like oh like a love hate did you say love hate yeah it's kind of a love hate yeah yeah a balance I think that's a there's a waves of darkness of the soul with me in my journey here on earth where I will be on one path and then kind of get swept up in a wave and then slowly come out of it and then eventually swept up into another one but I'm trying to break that cycle um we'll see what happens in the future but yeah I had I would say like my um bigger darkness of the soul um was getting into my career and being done with schooling and having a house and being married to my first husband and just like a what now I just felt I had no guidance of what to do after you've actually like hit your goals that you wanted to hit which was weird like you would think that would be very fulfilling and yeah that was like a year to a two-year journey of just darkness within and I would say it was more being lost like I you think of it lost in the woods right it's when I'm feeling lost and luckily when was that um 2010 or so so it's been 14 years but the way of getting out of it was being found like finding myself like maybe I needed to tweak my career maybe I needed to tweak or find new hobbies or new ways to communicate with myself and connect with myself and slowly like it's never a quick thing but slowly I would come out of it it could be time I think time also helps like when we have a dark night how does it end it ends with time eventually the sun comes up you just wait so how about you Laurie yeah it's interesting and just well I was curious about like what is the dark night of the soul and where did that even start and it's an excerpt from a poem from the 1500s from a Spanish monk and mystic that wrote a poem and so I loved kind of learning about that because I had heard the term and I think when I had my spinal cord injury in 2011 I feel like I was kind of trying to force myself to be like you're in your dark night of the soul you know like but I actually didn't yeah I didn't actually feel like I was in a dark night I was actually so held I felt like I was brighter than I had ever felt um I felt so loved so held so supportive I had like all these healers and light shining on me there was no room for darkness actually at that time I feel like my healing journey crisis whatever you want to call it dark night of the soul came like after getting married and having the safe space to be vulnerable from the space created from that marriage and finding someone who like was willing to hold me and all of my wholeness and who I am and all of my facets and um yeah I would say when when you find people that like give you that space to be fully seen and appreciated and acknowledged you know that provided this like it was almost like a void being witnessed and by that like that I could then face these scary things um and I feel like I've yeah I've cried big big big tears and felt deep grief and just being willing to move through that um has been a deepening of the other parts of it the the love the reverence the beauty how amazing life is and the planet and every moment that you get to spend with people that you love you know like it's an interesting journey so I would say you know I have learned that there is extreme beauty on the other side of darkness and um yeah as hard as it is to go through it it's worth it on the other side to get through and you just never know how long that time period is going to be like you said but there is time you know time I do believe that time heals it does in a way it's interesting just to bring this up too that owls and darkness do get the wrap of evil or scary or ghosts or you know like horror movies you know like that is projected upon these two things um and I mean yeah imagine being our ancestors around a campfire in the middle of the woods you know and living out more in tune with nature and hearing these like screeches or seeing those like big eyes like of course you might project your fears onto that being but you know also there's these beautiful mythologies and stories of like Athena and her owl and anyway just kind of weaving together that we're creating what an owl is to us and we're creating what darkness means to us and what do you want those things to reflect back to you so just kind of putting that in the space too of like you know do you want an owl to be your messenger do you want how do you want your owl to be in your life how do you want to see owl rather than like letting stories or you know Halloween time tell you like owl is this so inviting us all to redefine what that means to us and do we want to believe those things so that was also a little something I I felt while I was doing all my research.

Do you have an answer to that question of how what you want owl to mean to you?

I liked this there was this story of Athena having her owl and the owl can see her blinds like her blind spots for her right we all have our our limits to perception we'll say rather than blind spot we'll say we have these like limits to perception to perception and owl has a wider ability to see and move and you know look than I do so I want to call in my inner owl when I need to like be more willing to sit in a dark moment and see into a place maybe I don't want to see and also to listen to different ideas before coming up with my own right like an owl's ears are asymmetrical on their head so they get sound at different times from different places and that's how they can pinpoint a location so like you can't just have one viewpoint coming in take in another one before you land before you land on a location for your your thought process so like that's how I want to use owl and then I think also the silence piece of like embracing being silent with myself and they just feel like magical magical companions yeah like who wouldn't want owl by their side right yeah yeah maybe like you know providing a place for owl to perch in your space little screech owl yeah I feel so good I'm just like yes please come on my shoulder yeah yeah I I like that and with darkness I think I want darkness to feel like a hug and a holding space and that's it yeah one of the things I was reading with owl was their feathers are very different than other birds and that's what makes them fly so silently when they're catching their prey and then the strength of their talons and that they do have the one that moves around like our thumb in a way and so I wanted to I think it's like confidence of like it just is right you can just feel it in people like they don't have to say oh I'm doing this I'm doing that like it's just a part of them um so with that strength and the silent like I don't have to talk about it I can just be silent but also catch what I want um with strength and stillness in a way and then devour it I love that yeah that's what I want to bring in um yeah a quiet but powerfulness together it's an interesting duo I love that yeah bringing in the silent hunter that was what I I wrote down in my notes yeah and kind of my background we needed to embrace that we're gonna have to yeah explore how to embrace that because my my background with being Italian and being a speech therapist the silence very different than what I'm used to well it makes me think remember like the movie Avatar when um she's teaching uh Jake Sully and he's like you're just like a baby right you don't know what to do because he can't be a silent hunter he's scaring off the prey and she's embodied being one with the forest and one with what she's killing and one with what she's hunting and you know embracing that so yeah it's so interesting to bring it bring it through that lens but also you know going for what we want in life are we you know trying to announce ourselves loudly into a new role or are we just humbly sort of silently and with precision going after what we want and I I don't know if that really yeah landed when you were sharing yeah that deliberateness of it of like when you hunt like this is this is what it is this is the target mm-hmm so do you want to move into some uh vocal play or expressive art type activities yeah I feel like we have to embody owl in some other way than our chatting although I did love our chatter so one way to express ourselves would be through the voice and by using our voice we're nurturing ourselves and our soul and bringing energy out and I I like played around with owl for a little bit but maybe we could just like see what we want to feel into and what we want to express and I made like a little tune or we could be hissing or clicking giving or a little who of our own that's just what's coming in is like just being creative with it and even the movements of owl whether it's you know doing our head bob like owls do I read up on the the youngsters do an exaggerated motion of this to locate sound and I tried it out a little bit like this is kind of kind of an interesting you know can you imagine coming up to someone and bobbing to like figure out what they want to say or where they're at I'm feeling I'm not feeling clicks and hisses for myself at the moment you want to sing you want me to sing a little bit sing a little and I'll bob my head okay so this is a little vocal play I came up with um embodying the owl bob which I realized we didn't really chat about but we did chat about perspectives and their ears so this is I mean we can't do it as much as humans but the turn or the bob um and so the beginning is the playfulness piece of it with the looking at things in different perspectives and then I'm gonna go into kind of the stillness the darkness the silence so maybe landing on something like a branch or a specific perspective so I'll just sing and Laurie can bob and if you want to sing along you can if you want to receive it you can all right here we go um um oh I love it looking at different parts of the room very deliberately like that was really cool because I saw different things that I've forgotten to see that are just right here in my room so kind of feeling the environment in a way very deliberately in different viewpoints how about you how was that oh it was so fun and playful I really felt like an owl like I felt the alertness and I felt the joy of being alert in that way and I really liked using my head to swivel and swoop and look in different directions so I also enjoyed that so yeah it had a youthful energy and I'm wondering if that's why I feel like stretching like yeah I feel a little bit more little vibrant little pep in my step yeah it's awakening it's it's a fun way to yeah so I guess if you want to bring some of their energy you can bring it into any time of your day little alert alertness boost alert owl yeah I really like that and I would invite everyone to feel into their own vocal play or you can sing along and also did you have some ideas of speaking into it so maybe like speaking what are you deliberately awakening within yourself or what are what are you silently hunting like kind of any theme that came to you and you can create little mantras around that chanting to the vocal play I bring in confidence and you can just speak it or pick a note and chant it I bring in confidence I bring in awakening I bring in different perspectives I bring in deliberateness my silent hunter you can even bring it in as a flow like a brain dump and just go and see what comes out not even having your mind lead the activity but more of your spirit of your soul I would say for me I'm bringing in newness I'm bringing in freshness I'm bringing in crispness I'm just feeling into like the you know the middle of the night feeling the crispy leaves and catching you know what they what they do is you know they eat what they've caught freshly so just bringing that in bringing in yeah bringing in new life so this is really amazing I know we did a lot of chatting and I hope that any of you watching and learning along with us feel inspired by owl and darkness to rediscover what they are newly and to grab your journal and contemplate to yourself and see what wisdom comes out from inside you owl and wisdom are always so deeply connected as well inviting that into your life and also another activity you might consider is to do some expressive arts activities so you could either create a drawing or a painting or just an energy sketch of how the feeling of owl and darkness feels to you and for myself I'm going to be I think embodying all of what we've discovered today with a poem so I just feel poet energy with owl and darkness and I want to bring that in and I'm gonna leave us with a question how will you bring owl and darkness into your life so with that thank you so much for being here with us do you have any last words Sarah for our swan song cocoon gathering oh just so much gratitude to all of you we've grown so much too through this opportunity and journey and experience and it's just going to keep evolving so if you want to keep evolving with us come along and if not you want to wrap it up and tuck it into a drawer that's okay too yeah all is well and we're just grateful no matter what so thank you all so much with care and connection from our cocoon to yours bye