Taken from the weekly email from Clarissa Pinkola Estes called the Sacred Vote: Elections'08.

Across the road, a man stood on his flat roof
at 9pm every night,
hooting a good sounding hoot at the owl
in the dark cottonwoods,
and he was so thrilled
that the owl hooted back at him.
Hoo Hoo, said one,
Hoo hoo, called the other...

and night after night this went on...

Hoo Hoo said one.
Hoo Hoo said the other,
and the man was so happy...
until another neighbor man mentioned how
at exactly 9 pm after dusk
he would hear a hoot owl cry,
and he would cry back,
Hoo Hoo
to each Hoo Hoo he heard.
And how wonderous it was, he said,
that he and the owl spoke to each other
every night.

It soon became clear
that the men had been hoo hooing
not with the owl,
but with each other,
each convinced it was the real McCoy.
and they laughed and changed the subject
to, How 'bout them White Sox,
and that was that.

But, meanwhile, before, during and after,
the real owls of the woods,
talked amongst themselves
about the humans hoo hoing to each other...
The owls nodded, not bad, not bad,
their accents were thick
but their phonetics are pretty good.

and the Queen of the Owls heard the story
of the two humans hoo hooing each other
thinking they were speaking to the real owl, and she saved up the tale
to tell the God of the Humans
and they both had a big gentle chuckle over
both the humans and the owls...
speaking long into the night with great tenderness, remembering
the thundering days in which humans
and creatures were first created,
about how glad they were
that the humans longed to speak
to animials,
and how glad they were for animials
who heard the humans trying,
and approved.

the sad part; the two men
were embarrassed over not knowing
the owl they were calling to
was another human being...
and they never stood on their or roof's again

crying out Hoo hoo, fot they did not know or
had forgotten that inside every man
is a great raptor,
one who can see in the dark,
one who can lift its tip-feathers
and fly through forests
without making a sound.

But the embrassed men had little sons and daughters
and the owls at night still practice their hoo hooings
as close to the children's windows as possible...
for he Church of the Owls
in their scripture scratched on bark
it says that the gaints walk the earth
and that the entire kingdom of birds
has been given dominion over the poor giants,
to care for them, to lead them, guide them,
to watch over them while on this earth...

to teach them, again and again, that inside
each soul is a great raptor
who can not only acutely see and hear during the dark times
...but also by merely landing,
with what seems so mere a weight
of the twenty pound of feathers, thereby
can cause the limbs of thousand-year-old pines to bend all the way to the ground