Day 118

Ran/walked 3.5km through the greening grass, my path becoming clear again.

"To be fully human is to be wild. Wild is the strange pull and whispering wisdom. It’s the gentle nudge and the forceful ache. It is your truth, passed down from the ancients, and the very stream of life in your blood. Wild is the soul where passion and creativity reside, and the quickening of your heart. Wild is what is real, and wild is your home." ― Victoria Erickson

I went to a funeral yesterday, a memorial service for the husband of my friend and colleague.  Funerals are such sad occasions, because you imagine yourself in the position of the bereaved, or you are the bereaved, and life will never be the same, someone has suffered this terrible, unimaginable loss, and grief fills your throat.

And because everyone is feeling similar things, a kind of sad cloud develops, under which everyone is enveloped in melancholy, and tears which most people usually keep at bay, are freed to run down cheeks, and noses are blown or wiped with a sleeve. 

I think it is true that a lot of sex is had after attending a funeral.  My friend Maureen said that her last child was conceived right after her father's funeral, because her husband was doing his best to cheer her up.  I think it is also that urge, the most primal, most alive thing you can do, after having stared right in the face of the man with the sickle.

I have been loving these webcams streaming the little lives of the barn owl and the osprey.  Barn owls have these beautiful little heart-shaped faces, and apparently human beings are fascinated with them because they have large heads like us, and these big expressive eyes which look forward, and a beak structure which resembles a nose. 

The male barn owl spends most of his day away from his mate, and she seems fairly content and drowsy all day, but in the evenings she calls to him and he always comes flying down, landing, then waddling into the nesting box, to immediately leap up on her and copulate, after which they sometimes preen one another, and then he flies off to bring her a mouse or two.  She leaves the nest very briefly every now and then, then flies back in, once more rearranges the eggs, and carefully, delicately, settles her soft downy undercarriage over them. 

Male preening with female sitting on eggs in background

Lighter smaller male leaps on larger, darker female

male about to fly off to catch supper

Barn owls are dependent on farming which brings about a large rodent population, and are considered endangered in various parts of the world due to the use of pesticides.  Since 2002, a group of farmers in Israel and Jordan have been using barn owls for pest control instead of poison, in a wonderful project called the Barn Owl Project.