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.
I have the prettiest tree on my block and it’s not close.
Sometimes when I’m outside my house yet within my neighborhood, especially at night, I sense I live in a place I’ve come to call Magic City. This sense will no doubt be the impetus for other essays I publish on this platform.
Guilt-free.