H is for Hawk, Humanity, Healing and Harmony

 

H is for Hawk, Humanity, Healing and Harmony

I have chosen an extract from “H is for Hawk,” by Helen Macdonald. Helen is a writer, poet, illustrator and affiliate at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. Helen Macdonald's memoir "H is for Hawk" is the author's personal account of training a goshawk as a way of dealing with grief following her father's death.

Here is the extract I have chosen:

    It is bright, after heavy rain, and the crowds of closing time have gone. On this second expedition from the house Mabel grips the glove more tightly than ever. She is tense. She looks smaller and feels heavier in this mood, as if fear had a weight to it, as if pewter had been poured into her long and airy bones. The raindrop marks on her tight-feathered front run together into long lines like those around a downturned mouth. She picks fitfully at her food, but mostly she stares, taut with reserve, about her. She follows bicycles with her eyes. She hunches ready to spring when people come too close. Children alarm her. She is unsure about dogs. Big dogs, that is. Small dogs fascinate her for other reasons.

         After ten minutes of haunted apprehension, the goshawk decides that she’s not going to be eaten, or beaten to death, by any of these things. She rouses and begins to eat. Cars and buses rattle fumily past, and when the food is gone, she stands staring at the strange world around her. So do I. I’ve been with the hawk so long, just her and me, that I’m seeing my city through her eyes. She watches a woman throwing a ball to her dog on the grass, and I watch too, as baffled by what she’s doing as the hawk is. I stare at traffic lights before I remember what they are.  Bicycles are spinning mysteries of glittering metal. The buses going past are walls with wheels. What’s salient to the hawk in the city is not what is salient to man. The things she sees are uninteresting to her. Irrelevant. Until there’s a clatter of wings. We both look up. There’s a pigeon, a woodpigeon, sailing down to roost in a lime tree above us. Time slows. The air thickens and the hawk is transformed. It’s as if all her weapons systems were suddenly engaged. Red cross-hairs. She stands on her toes and cranes her neck. This. This flightpath. This thing, she thinks. This is fascinating. Some part of the hawk’s young brain has just worked something out, and it has everything to do with death.

On my first reading of this book, I was completely stunned. There are passages that made (and still make) me stop, gasp, inhale deeply, and reread - just to be sure I had absorbed the wonder of the poetic prose, the profound spiritual synchronicity of the interactions between Helen and the Goshawk, and the transcendency (in the sense of extending or lying beyond the limits of ordinary experience) of the symbiotic relationship that had developed between a human and a hawk.

The irony of it too: Overcoming the death of a parent (or any loved one) by training a Raptor - a bird of prey, a member of Creation’s experts in Death! Astonishingly, though, the woman and the hawk exchange thought processes, see the world through one another’s eyes, and communicate kinetically.

I am used to living and working with animals of the traditionally domestic sort - dogs and cats, for the most part. I appreciate the bond that is usually formed if the relationship is mutually healthy, loving and trusting. What caught my imagination with this book, and this peculiar inter-species relationship, was how apparent the One-ness of all things became. This is partly down to Macdonald’s gorgeous writing, of course, but also, I believe, the tuning in of my inner ear – and my “third eye” - homing in on the Truth of the integrity, interdependence, and unity (“One-ing,” as the mystics say) of all that is in God and of God.

Until quite recently I had a ‘co-parenting’ relationship with a Romanian rescue dog - a Tibetan Spaniel which had been abused and brutalised, lost an eye and lived in absolute terror. Loved, nurtured, and surrounded with safety, she became lively, witty, and affectionate. She taught me beauty in her disability and disfigurement, and empathy so as to discover a rapport between us in which I could anticipate her moods, her “thoughts,” and her desires. I discovered ways of being her “Master” that did not involve domination, demands, or dictatorship. We did not always have to walk where I wanted to walk; she did not have to submit to all my moods and inclinations. We intuited one another’s being. We walked, sat, laid down, ate or snuggled up - harmoniously. This totally transformed my way of being with and thinking about other people. She was the Holy Spirit to me: healing, helping, inspiring, and instructing.

                                         (“Tori” - or as I called her, “Toodles,” enjoying a run)

Bonaventure saw all things as likenesses of God (vestigia Dei) and John Duns Scotus would later identify the univocity (one voice) of all being. Professor Beatrice Bruteau wrote an amazing book on the synchronicity of Science and Faith titled God’s Ecstasy (The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1997). In her preface, Bruteau explains:

“The divinity is so intimately present in the world that the world can be regarded as an incarnate expression of the Trinity, as creative, as expansive, as conscious, as self-realizing and self-sharing. I have called this creative act God’s ecstasy. Ecstasy means standing outside oneself…Ecstasy has the connotation of extreme love and supreme joy. That is right for the creation of the universe…Therefore, we are not to feel the universe as cold, indifferent, or alien. Nor are we ourselves strangers here, meaningless accidental products of mindless cosmic shufflings. We belong to the universe, a living universe; we are its own natural children - as the Desiderata says, “as much as the trees and stars [and Hawks!], we have a right to be here.” H is for Hawk, certainly. It is also for Humanity, for Healing, and for Harmony. Oh, and also for Heaven - so we discover that, “as in heaven, so also on earth.”