Tonight, while returning from a dinner with Kim, Kari and Mari to officially launch Kari into the world of the Germans for a year and change, I stepped out of my car, my mind whirling with thoughts. It had been a profoundly joyous evening for me with these beautiful and amazing women in whose company I was lucky enough to spend a few hours of friendship. It made me think of this post and this night, and how happy my mother would be of the man I've become and the way my heart has opened wide to allow love in.

On the way home, my mind started to churn about many favored anxious topics of late that build up and entangle and rob me of sleep. And when I stepped out of the car, my emotions were a mix of happiness and confusion, and a general overwhelm that whined in my ears like a television test pattern. I took maybe six steps, hardly paying attention to anything before me, when I saw him.

( I saw... )

I saw the shadow of his wings first as the feather tips kissed the glass. But maybe that's what prey see too, a darkening of the sun before the talons and the beak close in. And then the hawk landed on the lantern post and stared in the window at me.

Hawk was the herald of my path, some twenty years ago now. We had a conversation that day, the first conversation of it's kind I had since I was a child, since I was allowed to believe in things childish. I was twenty three and it was in the middle of a college campus on a snowy day. That hawk was grey, and I was brought to tears before it.

We have had more conversations in the years spanning, but only when he comes to me, which he does rarely.

Today we had another talk from across the glass, him nodding his head in the breeze, me cross-legged sipping coffee in front of shiny boxes and radiating screens. He was red-tailed, this one, and sleek, a juvenile.

The content of the conversation is unimportant. But what I've come to realize in the hours since, is that I'm missing something.

I need to take some solitary retreats in the spring and summer, just me and the wind and the earth and the animals and the water. Because I've been talking too much and thinking too much and talking about how to think and thinking about how to talk. And there rises this buzz of noise and distraction, the attempted capture of what is ineffable, and the wheeze and blindness of struggle. I'm missing something along the way, the thing that I suspect I always miss. And maybe it's time to stop missing it so often.

In the interim and around the margins, I need to start my real practice. And I need to balance out my time better so as to give myself those quiet connections, to have time for remembering how to breathe and time to simply roll on my back in the clover, all four paws waving. Because who knows what else I'm missing.

Thank you, Hawk. I do try, but maybe sometimes I don't try as hard as I could. We'll see what I can muster in the coming season.