I hadn’t heard of an “assassin bug” before I saw one on my wall.

Based on a search, it’s likely that the assassin bug that appeared one recent Tuesday morning is referred to as a “masked hunter” (Reduvius personatus) or a similar species. When it comes to the natural world, I’m often in the position of novice. I have read that assassin bugs are not uncommonly found in homes, especially this time of year in my part of the world, which suggests to me ignorance on my part. Maybe I have seen one before. Yet I don’t recall that; and I don’t know that a person hears the term “assassin” attached to a living thing and not recall an encounter with that thing.

Alas, when the assassin introduced itself in the late morning I felt like I was seeing a being I hadn’t encountered before. And I couldn’t miss it; I couldn’t not see this half-finger-long black bug planted on the far wall of my kitchen. It didn’t exactly blend in.

Most of my life my instinct when I encountered a bug in my living space was to stomp on it. Smother it. Put it in a finger vise. Eventually, my default posture evolved to that of an insect transporter: When possible, I would, as we say, “re-home” the critter to the backyard or some other outdoor space.1

A new instinct has emerged in recent times as I have begun to “see” bugs and, in fact, as I have had memorable encounters with a select number of them. Some of these encounters have occurred during nocturnal dreams while others have been in the course of waking life.2 The new instinct, to be oxymoronic, is neither to kill them nor to relocate them but to allow them to be. That is, after an initial impulse to rid myself of the sight of the assassin, I left the bug on the wall.3

Before images come to one’s mind about my living quarters, no, I’m not talking about a stance in which I allow bugs to invade my house and multiple as they will. I don’t live on the set of a Stephen King movie. Instinctually, I still similarly react to bugs in my house, often with some level of disgust and/or fear, and, to be sure, I don’t so much as like having a single gnat on my body.4 Yet, of course, insects do serve purposes. They are here to do more than just earn the moniker we give all of them — to “bug” is universally understood as word that means to annoy — and it seems a natural part of one’s increasing openness to the beauty of the world5 to learn a thing or two about those who give you reason to. Among the things some bugs do — and this is the case with my guest the assassin — some bugs eat other bugs. Ergo, if you allow certain bugs to live you have free pest control. For example, I am often struck by women who fear spiders who can’t stand the sight of a centipede despite the fact that centipedes eat spiders.6 Seriously, to kill some bugs is to promote population growth of other bugs.

Still, on sight, the assassin bug, even before you know its name (also not drawn out of a hat), naturally draws out the instinct to immediately rid yourself of its presence. With a bent-knife-shaped head, razor straight legs, and aggressive hindquarters — to say nothing of a solid color that, if found in a paint store, might be called “hell at night” — the assassin looks like a critter that could survive a nuclear winter. Not many people, I wouldn’t think, regard an assassin bug and think “time to cuddle.”

Upon walking into my kitchen mid-morning that Tuesday and seeing this “masked hunter” my reaction went something like this: It’s on my wall. I want it off my wall. I want it out of my home. I want it gone and I want it gone rightfuckingnow.

Call it growth. Call it laziness. But something in me also said, “let’s take a picture.”

As I said, I looked up the bug and found that the assassin kills cockroaches, bed bugs, and other creatures no one wants lurking about and so I let it be. I made no final decisions, mind you. I didn’t fill out paperwork with adopt-an-assassin. This wasn’t a new pet. I kept an eye on it. I just didn’t take action.

One thing that happens when I learn that there is good in what I had presumed was evil — when I discover that there is light behind what I consider to be darkness — is that my feeling on the little thing changed. As I checked on its whereabouts over the next couple of hours (assassin bugs walk deliberately; they aren’t shifty like the centipede; they don’t sling themselves about like a spider) I noticed my initial instincts of fear and disgust subsided. We might say that I saw something closer to the assassin’s point of view. Love might be too strong of word here but I don’t think it’s wildly wrong to say that some level of affinity entered into the mix.7

Since I had more to do with my day than hang with this killer on the loose I will admit that the assassin got away. What I mean is that it slipped out of my view. I looked for it but couldn’t find it and, more or less, I went on with my day. I had an early evening appointment. I left my house, I came home. Over the ensuing few hours I may have thought a time or two of my interface with the bug but otherwise I occupied my mind with other matters.

That is, until after the hockey game I watched on TV ended. Which wasn’t long after I had opened the windows to let some cool air in. While making my evening oatmeal before a late-night walk my new friend re-appeared more or less in the same spot as during its debut.

Something about this appearance registered differently to me. I re-looked up facts about the assassin and learned that, while they really don’t want anything to do with those of us who walk on two legs, they can, if touched, stepped on, or startled, bite. And their bite, apparently, hurts like a mother.

Add it up: I live in a small house, which means my bedroom isn’t far from really anything, much less the spot where the assassin sat. I was also struck by the fact of the second appearance in such close proximity to the first. In dreams, the psyche will often make the same point more than once or in more than one way. It’s like a tell: Don’t miss this, buddy. The psyche builds in repetition so we don’t not see what it wants us to see. The assassin’s unmistakable re-emergence felt something akin to this dream dynamic. Back from an undisclosed location, this appearance called on me to reassess the earlier decision. Maybe the encounter served its purpose then and now it was time for a reconsideration of this relationship. It’s one thing to not reject the darkness. It’s another to too closely identify with same.

This creature does serve a purpose — I’m grateful the world is home to masked hunters — but it’s also important to protect myself. And not just the observable me but the unseen parts, too.

That is, after I trapped the assassin with a Pyrex bowl and a hastily-attached lid I went into the backyard with the idea I would release the critter in the grass, away from the house, meaning close to my detached garage. Except as I got close to the garage I remembered the caterpillar that has been in diapause in my garage since the fall. Given that assassins like to consume soft and chewy larvae, me and my lidded Pyrex suddenly took off down the alley. Now in the dark and unable to see the assassin or any cracks in the Pyrex lid I suddenly imaged might be present, I walked as fast as I could past the row of garages and beyond until I landed on a strip of grass near a convenience store a half block away. There I released the bug. I lost sight of it. Then found it again. And wished it well.

To summarize (in self-congratulatory) terms:

• I encountered darkness and didn’t flinch (too much).

• I allowed death to be; I didn’t fight it or try to eliminate it.

• When the circumstances changed (i.e., when unnecessary pain would be possible — pain with no upside either for me or the creature that would, without malice, inflict that pain), I changed.

• Whereas I felt certain that ridding my space of this creature was the correct play, I also had to be mindful of my vulnerability (symbolized by my caterpillar friend) as I considered re-location options. A reasonable protective measure complete, I moved on.
  

Meanwhile, the meaning I glean from this encounter continues to pile up. Among the facts I picked up during multiple look-ups and the use of Bug ID, I read that the assassin bug is a predator, but it’s a subtle one — it doesn’t announce itself. It works quietly and alone. The masked hunter takes effective action that doesn’t need to be loud or showy. I like that. I like that a lot. The need for validation, well, that also bites.8

Such encounters prompt questions:

Am I hunting something? Maybe so.

Do I need to let that something out? Not sure. But there’s energy there.

It’s still soon after. I started writing these words the next day — a day I took off of work. With the capacity to do just about anything within my financial means and physical abilities during a free day my energy, after a bout of morning exercise, was squarely on the desire to write about this bug.

After writing the first draft, I read the words back to myself and, inevitably, I saw the effort’s roughness; its incompleteness. No way the words then (or even now after some rewriting) are perfectly coherent to anyone else and very likely the import of the moments themselves won’t translate to any would-be reader in any way close to the way that I wish. It’s like telling someone, “you gotta listen to this song!” The feelings that made you implore another person cannot possibly register the same with them as they do with you. We really never hear the same song.

Yet, even during a shitty first draft, as I wrote about the bug, everything in my head made sense — every detail funneled toward meaning.

I wrote until I became overwhelmed with the connections — a star burned out by its own heat. I will not lament this; there’s nothing I can do about it. But the response to this little creature crawling on my wall and sitting there for a spell … a couple of weeks later and I am still gobsmacked by my response.

Now that I have returned to these words I discover I am a different person. Not a radically different person but who cares if it’s not radical? I may or may not have made these words any more coherent to anyone else (and there is a limit to how much I will work on a short piece about short-lived encounter with a bug). Yet the act of sitting with these words — these thoughts, these feelings — is one thing that glues together parts of me that very often otherwise feel fragmented.

I imagine that statement — or this one — may seem hyperbolic based on an encounter with un ugly bug but in some sense the moment felt like a vessel for the chance to glimpse everything important to me all at once.9

But maybe you had to be there.

I was recently flipped off at the public library. Yep, in that way — middle finger extended. The digit-al effenheimer.

I thought on this later. Being flipped off that the public library seems akin to getting cursed out in church. Or mooned in the voting booth.

I mean, the library and vulgarity just don’t go together. It’s obscene in the extreme. Just ask every kid who tried to draw pee-pees and wee-wees in the margins of a book that had a due date. You might giggle but deep down you know your doodling doesn’t suit the mood.

We’re not supposed to talk at the library, not beyond a whisper anyway, and so we just don’t use get worked up about things of a nature such that F-bombs typically need to be dropped.

Personally, I always think the presence of books has a calming effect. Even if when I don’t read them. Just being near stacks settles the brain, in my experience. And if you do happen to pick up a title … especially one that grabs you … well, a well-read mind is a calm mind.

For those into mindfulness, the act of deep reading is considered by some researchers not materially different than meditation in its effect on the mind. Can you imagine the one-with-all-living-beings mantra maven sitting one cushion away turning to you and offering a nonverbal fuck you? No, you can’t.

Whatever urge we have to treat a human being as though we are at the moment posting comments on Facebook simply falls away in the presence of printed books.

It’s all thumbs-up at the local library.

For the record, when the northward digit was presented to me, I was not actually inside the library. I was just outside the library. Yet I was at the library — and so was the old bird who flipped me one.

We might say that I was engaged in library-centric activities. Specifically, I was on my way into the parking lot; I had pulled up to the return box. The return box at our library is placed in the same position as a drive-through at a fast-food joint. Except the depository is out of reach from the confines of one’s car. So I got out. I deposited my four items. I let the automatic door close.

While performing this act, which is not normally worth recounting in the course of one’s day, I noticed a car had come from the opposite direction and was now also stopped. The woman driving this vehicle faced me from about four car lengths away.

Maybe it my returns that offended: a Vince Lombardi biography (perhaps she rooted for the Dallas Cowboys in the Ice Bowl), two recent issues of “The Sun” magazine (“The Sun” gives life — and without advertisements of any kind), and a DVD of the best Labor Day movie ever, The Flamingo Kid.1

It wasn’t clear to me why the woman didn’t just pull around me. She could have. There was room to do so. And, in fact, that is exactly what she did do, eventually, after her stare down of me. That is, in fact, precisely what she was doing when she gave me the middle finger salute. Her car — big and white with silver trim — had tires that are possibly worth more than the Kelley Blue Book value of my old Civic.2 Possibly that is why I caused her to get so upset — her 90 seconds might well cost more than mine. Or maybe she didn’t want to be seen so close to my car — the mere proximity to it may have affected perception of value of hers. What I’m saying is that I can’t be sure.

I saw a news report some months ago of stealthy readers in Bonners Ferry, Idaho scouring all the tomes in a children’s library for signs of sexual innuendo. Maybe me lady here in the drive-through lane was on this team of do-gooders, far afield in Minneapolis, and she could spot me a mile away as a person who isn’t scared of the idea a kid might read Roald Dahl or Judy Blume.3

Up Yours. Half Peace Sign. Whatever you like to call it, the extended middle finger is a universal statement that has been expressed for millennia. The Romans referred to it as digitus impudicus: the indecent digit.

Even in this age in which our president’s indecency woven into his the essence and people in the tens of millions, many of them educated adults with offspring, engage in the equivalent of humanoid grunting at on a daily basis via social media, most people still consider a middle finger aimed at another person as a form of obscenity. Famously, British musician M.I.A. during a Super Bowl halftime show more than a decade ago extended a middle finger that caused many viewers to be up in arms.

Perhaps my most vivid middle finger memory occurred in childhood. During an NHL playoff game on April 8, 1984, Chicago Blackhawks winger Al Secord slashed Minnesota North Star Dino Ciccarelli across the back of the head. Fights ensued, penalties were assessed.4 As he was being escorted off the ice, Dino — possibly I was wearing my super-cool Ciccarelli No. 20 jersey that night, which I got for Christmas one year, but I can’t be sure — flipped off a Chicago crowd that was goading him for having the audacity to take a two-hander to the skull. As Dino sent pointed his indecent digits in the direction of the cheap seats, North Stars television color commentator Tom Reid said, with a straight face, that Dino was “telling the crowd, ‘We’re No. 1!’”

Rap concerts and hockey games. These aren’t places you go expecting middle finger shots to be fired, necessarily, but they are less surprising venues than is a facility that hosts a weekly story-time reading hour.

But maybe that’s just my experience. I do hear F.U.s verbalized more commonly in non-private company these days. Maybe this woman is plugged into the ethos of the moment in a way that I am know.

All I know for sure is that in exchange for the lady’s one finger I waved back with all five of mine.

Nearly every foodstuff I buy these days comes in a resealable package. Almost none of these resealable packages work. Or, if they do work, the reseals have a far shorter expiration date than do the edibles they are intended to contain.

What in the name of holy bologna is going on here?

It was more than 70 years ago that Danish inventor Borge Madsen messed around and came up with an idea that would later save all of us many messes. Madsen didn’t know why he made the first little plastic baggy thingy. There was no intended use. There wasn’t even an apparent use. That is, until a fellow named Steve Ausnit learned about Madsen’s invention and thought, hey, maybe there could be a use.

Eventually, after about a decade of tinkering, Ausnit came up with an add to the then open-ended plastic baggy thingy. He said, “Hey, let’s close that sucker!1

Hence, Ausnit invented what we all know as the Ziploc bag.2

When Ziploc bags first made their way into supermarkets — this was in 1968 — no one knew what to do with them. Five years later, no one knew what they would do without them. As Vogue told its readers in November 1973, there is “no end of uses for those great Ziploc bags.”

In the ensuing decades, we have stored our lipstick, our Band-Aids, our apple slices, and our salami sandwiches in the airtight seal of the zipper-like mechanism that makes the Ziploc the Ziploc.

This technology, if not the brand name, has been adopted by bag men (and women!) in way more industries than an English major could count.

As a single guy with no offspring, I don’t buy an inordinate number of processed foods. But it’s nearly impossible not to come in contact, nearly daily, with a zipped bag, circa 2026, if you are, in fact, an eater.

Coffee.

Protein.

Fiber.

Supplements.

Don’t get me started on dog treats.

I mean even the bird seed.

These days nearly any granular, powdered, preserved, or flaked food that sits on a shelf — and many that require refrigeration — has a resealable top.

I say resealable top but after the initial package opening that is really more of a theory.

At some point, the trajectory of human technological advancement of the resealable package hit a plateau. Regressed even. We have, in fact, fallen from the height of human sealable packaging ingenuity and currently live in a world in which many bags of goodies come packaged with the promise of resealability3 but, really, should include a legal disclaimer that says, in essence, “Don’t count on that, buddy.”

I mean what are we telling the kids — that it’s OK to lie?

Sometimes the press-and-slide re-seal will hold for a spell and then, poof, it’s gone faster than you can say “stale Doritos.” Whether immediately or some days into the shelf life, nearly always these bags fail to work at some point. That is to say, the seal doesn’t last nearly as long as does the product you bought the bag to consume. By definition, the contents of these foodstuffs are such that they are best not left in open air. Yet across product types and brands, I have tried many zip styles, some of them more than once, and the result is the same.

Fail.

Fail.

Works for a few days … fail.

So ubiquitous is the failure of the modern incarnation of the mock Ziploc I am left to wonder whether the people who manufacture the bags are in cahoots with the makers of the Chip Clip. Let’s face it, the heyday of the bag tong is over. If you can reseal a bag, you don’t need a clip. Ergo, I can’t reseal my bags. So someone’s got a scam going on here.

If that’s not it, then maybe this is four-dimensional chess involving the makers of GLP-1s.

Honey, we can’t store this food. Whatever are we going to do?

The only thing we can do, darling.

You mean eat all of this right now?

We can’t let it go to waste!

Our failure must be explained by a conspiracy of some sort — it would be far-fetched if it weren’t! — and you have to wonder why no other writers are willing to take up this topic. Have others been silenced? Paid off by the bag men (and women!)?

Otherwise, we’d need to take a long look in the mirror at our foodstuff stuffed faces and consider that maybe, as a people, this is the best we can do and, well — excuse me for a moment — er, someone is at my door — um, I’m afraid I’ve got to go.

It appears I’ve said too much already.

There’s something about a clear winter evening that hearkens the possibility of magic.

Steam rising from a chimney ... purple puffs on the horizon … in the day’s last light … I am sent — like that — to a frozen pond of my childhood. In a moment that passes nearly as soon as it registers I am thirteen again playing pickup hockey with buddies. Skates cut ice. Sticks break over posts. Smack-talk. Dramatic saves. Impossible goals. Stanley Cup-worthy celebrations. Sounds and scenes kaleidoscope in my mind. As much as I loved those games, the fondest of these memories stem from moments after everyone else went home and I had the pond to myself. I felt under my feet every minute bump in the glass earth while at the same time the heavens overhead seemed not more than a stick-length away. Skating under starlight is highly underrated.

Such flashbacks arise and fade as I step outside on just such an evening. I will neither skate nor play hockey on this winter night, however, decades beyond thirteen and a week post-surgery.

Before me: A new coat of snow. A clear sky. A big moon. Dusk — the hour between — the hour of transformation — is a favorite time of day.

I’m on the stoop of my Minneapolis city-block backyard. More than magic, I want a good bit of the unremarkable right now. I’m bundled as though braced for an arctic blast and, as I hold the railing to descend my small stack of steps, I move slowly enough to get an inkling of what it’s like to rapidly change my chronological age forward rather than backward: not younger but older.

I gingerly step onto the pathway that cuts through my yard, cleared by my kind neighbor, who knows I can’t do the job right now. I will walk back and forth, house to garage, garage to house, as many times as feels right. It’s a short jaunt but it’s far better than nothing. I put out seed for the birds in case they come around. My boots make slow crunches, the only sound around.

Walking is healing. Walking lessens the pain. I wish I could go on a slow loop through the neighborhood but a recent, sudden shift from fall to winter left the terrain uncertain. And right now I need certain. Slipping on ice wouldn’t be a good idea. So on this particular night I am out but I will not be going about.

I’m on my second of these short round-trips when my awareness turns to the clarity of the sky. (Crisp air makes for an especially clear view.) The hawk isn’t flying; it’s gliding, as if out of one of those purple puffs, right this way.

I’m no expert but I will later learn this attention-arresting creature is probably a Cooper’s hawk. Alternatively, it’s possible it’s a red-tail, though I don’t see a rust-colored hindquarters even as, if on cue, it spreads its wings full. The hawk glides over my fence, over my head, and past me. I turn to follow its path, as it settles high up on my maple tree, some forty feet from where I stand.

I had noticed a nest of some sort up there after the leaves fell in the fall. I don’t recall such a nest in the previous seven winters I have lived in my house. Several squirrel friends live in the area; their dreys are easy to spot in the white ash in my front yard. It seemed unusual if the squirrels did, in fact, change residences but I otherwise didn’t give the matter much thought. The specter of surgery has been foremost on my mind. Not a life-threatening surgery; life-interrupting surgery. The procedure was scheduled before the maple dropped her gorgeous red and orange leaves.1 Right now, the maple’s leafless — and center stage. There’s something about being in the presence of a bird of prey that changes the energy of a space, which in turn changes the energy of the witness.

I hear chirps the location of which I can’t precisely place. I assume they are from the nest. They resemble those of a cardinal but then not precisely so. I wonder if the hawk has offspring it’s back to feed. But that wouldn’t make sense this time of year. Perhaps the chirps are from other birds tucked in one or other column of coniferous trees nearby. Maybe the male in the cardinal family that lives in an evergreen just over my fence in the other human neighbor’s yard is sending a warning to fellow feathered neighbors.

Of course, it occurs this visit could be a raid. Except, I don’t hear squawking. The warning signals, I presume, would be palpable. A few summers ago, with the maple in full form, a hawk came through and stole a chick. I knew this was happening because of the noise — and because the parent bird desperately chased the hawk as the hawk left with lunch. The scene on this night isn’t that. The hawk sits on the assemblage of leaves and sticks for a moment, then slips into same.

I’m no naturalist. As I said, growing up I grabbed hockey sticks, not hugged tree trunks. Yet this moment registers on a level beyond the facts of the scene. So I want to know more about the those facts; I want to relish the scene. I will later learn that likely I’m wrong about this being a nest at all. Rather, it’s likely a roosting site. Hawks need safe places to perch, conserve energy, and protect themselves from the wind and cold of a Minnesota winter. They often reuse old nests, their own or another bird’s, as roosting spots during the off-season. This bundle of leaves in my maple, then, might be akin to the difference between a house and a cabin. The hawk may have built this haven months ago during breeding season and returned for protection from winter weather. It’s 14 degrees with a breeze and, with sun soon to reach the other side of the horizon, it isn’t getting any warmer anytime soon.

Until now, I haven’t been outside all day. Frankly, I already felt cold inside. My base sensitivity, high in normal times, is in overdrive. I didn’t want to come outside but I needed to move. In addition to the physical pain there is the mental strain. Given the myriad sensations that hit the body after your abdominals have been cut open, the opportunities to wonder, especially for a certified over-thinker, aren’t hard to conjure. As this pang or that stab or the shooting-throbbing-aching come and go from one spot or another I find myself battling doubts that healing is, in fact, happening. For sure it isn’t happening as fast as I expected. I had a dream not long ago during which I bought a new pair of skates — even though within the logic of the dream I knew I already owned a pair of perfectly good ones. In other words, I bought skates I couldn’t use. In waking life, I thought I would glide through this recovery, like a hawk in twilight or a boy on a frozen pond under the stars, and, alas, that hasn’t been the case.

The encounter with this hawk doesn’t tell me when my healing will be completed; it won’t erase all doubt that it will be completed at all. But I don’t have to look anything up to sense that the hawk’s presence has given me a bigger boost than any NSAID. For one thing, the visit makes me excited in a way I have not been in these early days of recovery. I will text that kind neighbor, who happens to be a bit of a birder. (He also witnessed the hawk theft from his backyard those summers ago.) I will start writing what will eventually become this essay. Of course, I will also look up symbolism because, for me, symbolism fuels meaning that touches deeper, and is therefore more durable, than logic.

Like many birds of prey, hawks symbolize liberation, self-reliance, and the courage to chart one’s own path. Hawks are territorial and protective, so they can also represent vigilance. Some suggest hawks stand for a guardian spirit that watches over something important.

Because hawks have incredible vision they naturally symbolize clarity and insight. They observe situations from a higher vantage point than I usually allow for myself. This sort of perspective is decidedly apt right now. Step back, we say. We can be too close to something to see it clearly. One of my favorite meditations is one in which the aim is to see oneself from the “10,000-foot view.” In this case, forty feet might as well be a mile.

I can’t follow the hawk’s literal lead but I can be open to this sort of wisdom. The hawk knows instinctively to return to its roosting spot, to protect itself and do little more than rest during an uncomfortable night. The hawk knows that what exists at present will pass. I thought I could, like a hawk, glide in my own way. I haven’t so far. Maybe I need to look at things from a different perch.

After all, the parallel is as clear as a winter night sky: the hawk and I are each in a period of vulnerability; both of us require a perspective that can only come with patience.

Patience is far from my strongest trait — especially when I’m ill or injured. When malady strikes, I am excellent at application. I ice my muscles as told. I swallow those meds right on time. I walk. I eat well. I … can … do. But sit and wait as nerves reignite, as neurons come back on line, as tissue stitches together? To me, that’s watching paint dry while sitting on a pincushion.

My default setting in that way is anathema to patience. For patience isn’t something you do; patience is something you have.

In his 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language, Noah Webster calls patience “the suffering of afflictions, pain, toil, calamity, provocation or other evil, with a calm, unruffled temper; endurance without murmuring or fretfulness.” It follows, then, that you can’t practice patience unless you’re already in a state where patience is called for. I meet that criterion but, decidedly, I don’t measure up in the other essential element in Webster’s definition: I’ve been doing more than mere murmuring of my fretfulness.

Yet something shifted when the hawk glided in. A few minutes ago I stood on my stoop not sure of my next step, my body tight, my head full of angst, and now I feel a sense that I am no longer alone with my feelings. While I’m not sure the change I feel since the hawk’s arrival meets the definition most have when they think of magic, I don’t suspect a waved a wand could change my mood more.2

What does old Webster have to say on the subject? His definition of magic: “The art or science of putting into action the power of spirits; or the science of producing wonderful effects by the aid of superhuman beings, or of departed spirits; sorcery; enchantment.” Next to this definition Webster adds a notation: “this art or science is now discarded.” Yet Webster offers a second definition — “the secret operations of natural causes” — a state very much in play: Natural magic, he says, is “the application of natural causes to passive subjects, by which surprising effects are produced magic attributes to spirits a kind of dominion over the planets, and to the planets an influence over men.” Yes. To call what I experience at present patience is correct and yet it’s not. In a way, I’m cheating.3 For I didn’t fashion this calm; I’m no picture of equanimity. What I am is a passive subject. A recipient. A lucky poser. But I am, too, decidedly, suddenly unruffled. Whereas I thought I was getting something done, my walk, now I want nothing more than to do, well, nothing else.

The point here — and I write this foremost to remind myself — isn’t to glean a single explanation. Or create a formula. Nothing about this moment fits tightly into a dictionary. To endure without murmuring or fretfulness … I think I can’t and then a hawk glides in and wisdom seems to be in the breeze.

There’s a creature in my space with a great capacity to see who is, literally, watching over me. The least I can do is try to see a little more clearly myself.

I’m so grateful for memories of games played and friends made; I got to skate under the stars more often than most. Even then, for sure, life wasn’t stress free. I probably should have been studying for a vocabulary test or a math exam and the very thought of school the next day would have brought about a pang of social acceptance-inspired dread. But as I skated and shot pucks and dreamed by the light of the stars,4 there was a sense of the “surprising effects” of Webster’s second definition of magic.

In some Native American traditions, hawks are seen as messengers between the physical and spiritual worlds, calling people to pay attention to signs around them and the intuition within them. Among the list of potential symbols, this one seems especially instructive to me at the moment. My intuition is one of my strongest traits. It should be a go-to, not a last resort. Standing in the shadow of my maple, I close my eyes. What appears is what I take to be the face of my deceased brother if he were the age he would currently be. I hear him say, “You are OK.”

Like the steam rising from a chimney ... the purple puffs on the horizon … the day’s last light … this form of patience will pass. In the coming days, I will have occasion again to close my eyes and conjure that sense of brotherly assurance. No doubt, I will yet again fret. I will again read too much into this sensation or that one. But what I will take with me is a model to make those moments less frequent or intense — and a new energy now in the ether, brought by hawk that is near.

I make my last loop in the backyard, put my hand on the railing, head up the back steps, open the door and slip into my roosting spot. I leave the cold, I unbundle, and I rest with the intention I will let the moment be what it is until it becomes something else.

Epilogue

It’s the day before the first day of spring. You can tell that a lot of snow used to be on the ground here. But that it soon will all be gone.

“Here” is on a path in the middle of a community garden. I am on that loop through the neighborhood. My jacket is in a closet at home. The hour of transition arrives at later hour now but is no less welcome.

Behind me over the hill I descended to reach this garden a big sun projects purple light into the theater of magic. I stop. A hawk swoops into the scene. A show-stopper: I stand right where I am.

The hawk perches at the top of a tall, leafless tree about a hundred yards from me. The hawk surveys the gardens. My role here is to bear witness and I like that that is all I want to do. Walking is still healing but my next steps can wait.

We’re both here, both still vulnerable, of course, yet in a stronger position. I will soon continue on my path through the gardens, past a small woods, around a primary school, along the Mississippi River in a circle that will eventually bring me back home. This I will do after I watch the hawk turn its head and — like that — between the trees and across the field spread its wings and fly with ease.