Moose, quail, owl, thief

A few years back while driving with a couple of friends near Placerville, I leaned into a curve and came out the other side to find a gargantuan moose crossing the road in front of us.  I slowed to a stop a few yards before him. 

He turned his great head toward us and gazed, it seemed, for a lifetime.  A silence had fallen over us all.  Under the spell of twilight, the long-legged animal appeared to be both curious and quietly communicating.  

The moose is a being who can embody presence through sheer magnitude, yet their remarkable size, I quickly learned, can be accompanied by an unexpected stillness. 

Even as this magnificent creature resumed walking and vanished into the woods, none of us spoke for a long time. We continued driving on into the evening’s fold.

Several minutes passed before my friend in the backseat whispered, Holy Ghost, Holy Spirit, what a gift that was. 

Thousands of years before scientists mapped neural pathways and psychologist studied the mind, human beings have sought spiritual guidance and beauty in the living world.  The first temples were forests, deserts, bodies of water and grasslands. And the first teachers were often animals. 

To encounter a great horned owl at dusk, a covert of quail at dawn or a moose casually crossing the road is to linger in a moment that feels both deeply biological and deeply sacred.

Neuroscience helps us understand why such moments are often unforgettable.  When we encounter a wild animal, our attention intensifies. The brain’s orienting response is activated, drawing our senses fully into the present moment, whether we are suddenly experiencing fear, awe or a mixture of both. Background thoughts fall away.  

In meditation traditions, practitioners spend years cultivating this state of focused awareness.  Yet a single encounter with a wild creature can induce a similar experience in seconds.  The mind becomes still because something wholly alive has entered the field of perception. 

Here on the Western Slope, I’ve seen great horned owls hunting out on the back forty, and I’ve watched baby owls fledge from nests down by the river.  Each encounter is magical, but I’ll never forget the time I was leaving the memorial service of a dear friend and  an owl swooped down in front of me, stopping me in my tracks.  She moved upward then and perched in a nearby tree, watching me with eyes that have stayed with me forever.  

Emerging from nowhere on silent wings, the owl seems less to fly than to materialize.  Her feathers absorb sound, allowing her to move with extraordinary stealth. Any encounter with an owl can evoke awe, mystery and reverence. Psychologists describe awe as an emotion that expands our perception of the world. Spiritual traditions have long understood this phenomenon.  When the owl’s eyes meet ours, we feel ourselves become smaller, which is to say not diminished, but properly situated within a larger living reality. 

The language of science calls this Attention Restoration; the language of spirit calls it returning to oneself. Both describe the same phenomenon: the soul, or nervous system relearning how to be present and in full connection with the living world. Both pathways appear to guide us toward the same destination: a fuller experience of presence. 

Prayer, like owl-flight, is not always speaking upward. Sometimes it moves downward, into the leaf-meal of reality. 

The animals are not delivering messages in any literal sense. Rather they reveal qualities of awareness already present, but perhaps forgotten, within us. They remind us that spiritual practice is not confined to monasteries, churches or meditation cushions. 

Even watching the quail come and go out in our backyard feels very much like receiving an offering.  Their small bodies dart through sage and bunchgrass, their calls stitching together the fabric of a landscape.  

Biologists note that quail survive through cooperation and vigilance. Individual quail benefit from the awareness of the group, particularly of the look-out quail, who usually positions himself at a midway point near an abundant food source. From there he lets his kin know when it’s safe to emerge and feast — and when it’s time to flee. A quail’s life is a low lying choreography of belonging.  

I’ve witnessed a quail with a bum leg keeping up with his counterparts as they surrounded her and slowed their pace for her.

These moments illustrate a principle increasingly supported by neuroscience: humans, too, are social creatures, whose nervous systems regulate through relationship and whose survival depend upon it. 

Last month while presenting at a writers conference, I found myself  keeping a pace that was unsustainable. During a much needed break, I drove up into the higher elevations just outside the town where homes were sparcely scattered, I parked and sat myself on the hood of my car, just to collect a little quietude. 

As I sat there, eyes closed, I heard a rustling and the sound of paws trotting quickly past.  I opened my eyes to find a red fox — with a foot-long sandwich in her mouth —still half covered in tin foil — scurrying down the path. Mid-crime, his eyes darted about and our eyes briefly met before he disappeared into the brush. 

I laughed out loud.  

Such good fortune for both of us! He with his easy lunch, clearly plucked from somebody’s backyard or picnic basket, and me, simply being witness to the getaway. 

I was immediately transformed.  I laid back onto the hood of the car and basked in the glory of good timing. 

I returned to the conference that afternoon a new person, ready to make offerings again, fully ready to laugh at myself again. 

These are the moments I live for. 

But nature is not some kind of scenery for spirituality. Rather it is one of its scriptures. When we enter wild places attentively, our own minds begin to follow ecological forms: quieter, more flexible, more relational, more practiced in communion.  More willing to laugh out loud. 

Science confirms that such encounters calm the body and restore the mind.  Sprit adds that they may also soften the heart. 

Between the measurable and the immeasurable mysterious, the wild world sings to us — and invites us all to learn the changing lyrics of the song. 

The Owl

Beneath her nest

a shrew’s head,

a finch’s beak

and the bones

of a quail attest

the owl devours 

the hour,

and disregards

the rest.

Wendy Videlock lives at the foot of Thunder Mountain in Western Colorado. Her poems and essays appear in Best American Poetry, Poetry Magazine, The New York Times, Hudson Review, Rattle and other venues. She serves as poet laureate of the Western Slope and advocates for the arts across the region. Her upcoming book, Desert Kin:  Speaking Animal in the Southwest,  will appear from Able Muse Press in Sept of 2026.  To find out more about Wendy go to wendyvidelock.com.