Change

The afternoon my dad died, I was walking along a dirt road

to a building at Shambhala Mountain Center, in Red Feather

Lakes, Colorado. It was near the end of a program. As I was

walking, I looked up in the dead tree in front of me, and there,

on a branch, was an owl facing me.

I had seen the movie, “Thunderheart”. In that movie, about the

A.I.M. struggle in the 70’s in North Dakota, is an image. The

image is that if you see an owl, that means that someone has died.

Owls don’t usually come out in the day, sit in a tree and look at

you. And, yes, shortly after that, I heard that my dad had died.

It was a sign of not just death, but change. Over the next

couple of years, my relationship to the organization that I

had been involved with for thirty years would end, and I would

move to Mexico, as my teacher had predicted thirty years before.