The Eye of the Red Tail

Red-tail hawks are everywhere. Four of them once lived along my route up 222 North to Reading Area Community College.  Now there are three.  I wondered about  the fourth when I didn't see her on her branch one morning.  When she wasn't there again the next morning, I was sure.  She'd gone.

Two live along the road to the YMCA, where I work out.  One of those two is rarely perched.  She spends most of her time in the air, her wings still, her eye on the ground.  She once took a mouse as our car passed her by.  The other, closer to home, dives brazenly into our neighborhood sometimes.  She took a mourning dove this afternoon.  Young and uncouth, she fails to understand that she does not belong in backyards like she does in the wide open fields that surround us, nor did she understand why I stopped and stared at her from across the road as she tore into the feathers of the dove in her talons.  She let me stare only a moment before she took off into the sky, dove in tow, and found a quiet spot in a secluded backyard where I wouldn't bother her.

Many Native American cultures believe that visionaries are surrounded by red-tails.  And perhaps to earn my right to be in their consistent presence, I have begun sharpening my eye for the world, looking around when I would rather close my eyes, breathing in when I would rather stifle my breath.

I have fallen in love with these birds like they fall in lifelong love with each other, finding each other in flight, the male plunging downwards then ascending above his female before plummeting again, this time reaching his talons for her with whom he will live out the rest of his thirty or so years.  Sometimes, high in the air, they will entangle their talons, spinning themselves in one cycle of circles toward the earth before they will, just in time, release themselves and then glide away into their own swells.

I watch them as they look down over us all, and in their elegance and beauty, I find grace.  In meditation, I soar with the red-tails in their smooth circles, plunging low then rising high, riding invisible waves, hollow bones light as feathers.  My breath feels as clean and strong as the wind, and my closed eyes feel open.  

***In the picture above, you will see the young hawk who got herself a dove this afternoon.