Late last night, I was walking alone on a path leading toward a footbridge that crosses a ravine near my home. As I approached the bridge, I expected to hear the familiar echo of boots on wooden planks but instead I heard - in a moment of silence just before I walked onto the bridge - the first owl of the winter.

I looked at the shadowy branches but couldn't see him. Last winter I saw an owl only once. I looked up from the icy snow and saw him perched on a low branch against a full moon. Then he opened wings that expanded unimaginably as he lifted off into the darkness.

That owl is a bird of prey, not some cartoon bird wearing glasses.My wife recently attended a speaking engagement with me in Des Moines, Iowa. She had not returned to her home town since we buried her mother fifteen months before. We went to the cemetery and looked for her parents' graves. The markers were already overgrown with grass and covered with leaves. I pulled out the grass and brushed away the leaves so she could see their names, feeling like King Canute ordering the tide to recede. The grass will grow back but next time no one will be there to pull it away.

We walked afterward in a park where my wife had ice-skated as a child. It was one of those lingering twilights when we feel deeply the transitoriness of all things, that all sanctuary is a momentary turning from the wind toward a temporary refuge. We followed a path in the woods along the Raccoon River until it grew dark, and when we turned back, we saw against the sky the silhouette of an owl in the low branches.

Dylan Thomas wrote in Fern Hill that all through the summers of his childhood ...

"as I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away ... in the moon that is always rising ..."

Owls. Rising moons. Images of death but not of death only, images too of life, life lived on a razor's edge, life thrown at us, fired at us point blank from the barrel of a gun.

The millenium's end IS an ending, of sorts: We will never exactly come this way again, or if we do, we'll all be different. An owl in winter signifies the cold darkness surrounding the solace of our conversation, built of illusory pixels and made luminous by the sheer force of will and desire. Eros in its digital essence, binding us together. A fusion of fact and imagination.

I wrote a few weeks ago about Digital Autumn, and a reader said, it is one thing to embrace the ambivalent longings of autumn when love and loss are inextricably intertwined, when the wet earth is redolent of spring and autumn alike. But it's something else to embrace winter when it finally arrives.

How, he asked, do we welcome the real winters of our lives?

I thought of my first winter in England. At that northerly latitude, as the winter solstice neared, the sun rose lower and lower in the sky, looking like a distant pale candle seen through a frosted windowpane. I understood why Celtic legends tell of the twilight of the gods and eternal winter. There was an icicle of fear in our hearts that the sun would not bounce, but would sink lower and lower and finally disappear.

But the sun did bounce. Winter-blossoming cherry trees flowered. Love unexpectedly melted our hearts once again.

There is no yin without a dot of yang, no yang without a dot of yin. Winter and summer, fire and ice. A figure-eight held in paradoxical tension, traced by a skater on thin ice.

Leafing through a friend's fortieth high school reunion book, I noticed that almost everyone said the same thing when asked what made for a wonderful evening. It was always dinner with family or friends, a quiet evening at home, an afternoon off with someone we love. Now it sounds like many of us are planning the same kind of quiet celebration for the last night of the millenium, just as we would if the universe were ending. There will be parties too, of course, and a few crazies will do what they can to ruin everything, but most of us just want to be with people we love as we begin not so much the next thousand years as the next few minutes of our lives.

We don't live for millennia. We live for Now.

Digital winter is the hollowness we sense outside the warm glow of our ingathered circle. These digital symbols comfort us with intimations of promise and possibility. Sometimes late at night when we can't sleep, we sit in front of our monitors as before a dying fire, hoping for a sign of communion. We build a digital bridge but before we cross it, we hear in the late-night silence the sound of a solitary owl. We realize that loss and grief have built the hearth on which we light this blazing fire, made up of air, nothing but thin air.

The loss of those we have loved has an icy core but contains a trace of consolation, the suggestion of a tide that will rise once more. Winter-blossoming cherry trees flower. A river of fire flows through these wires. We are alive. Here and now, we are alive. The sun and the moon are rising. And the fact of our being transfigures the threat of annihilation into a bonfire celebrating the end of everything and nothing, destroying and creating worlds.

for Karin/Krystalia, in loving memory

December 17, 1999