Grief & Goodness

Over the last several months I’ve beheld a gorgeous juvenile red tailed hawk. I encountered her so regularly I imagined there was some force bringing us together.

Like we can tell with other humans, I could feel this bird staring me, and would turn my head to immediately meet her eye.

Or I’d be on the trail of something else, only to find the hawk instead. One time, I arrived at my car and found her perched on the fence directly in front of it.

A couple of days ago I found one of her feathers just outside my building.

Today, I found her dead.

When I saw her I gasped in despair and fell to my knees. I stroked her soft feathers and rested my hand on her silent heart.

The gorgeous waves of her browns! The downy bright white.

I put flowers in her yellow talons and made her a golden crown.

Speaking the mourner’s Kaddish over her, I shook with heartache, for the loss of this friend, for how inhospitable we are making this planet, and for how powerless I feel in the face of it.  

I felt this all in the wake of Joanna Macy's death, the wild woman who vouched that our pain for the world is a sign of connection, belonging, and goodness. If it hadn't been for my returning to her Work That Reconnects, I might have walked down the familiar path of folding my pain into a story of inadequacy, of personal and species shame.

This is a devastating psycho-emotional habit, a knee-jerk reaction to any negative feeling.

After a recent breakup I lamented, fearing I was unlovable or too avoidant or destined to be alone forever. A dear friend, bless her, asked "What if you're just sad?"

And what if that sadness is an expression of my deep caring and not my insufficiency?

I am working to rewrite my emotional stories, to not take every hard feeling to mean something bad about me.

In some ways it is insane to me that I do this. After all, I spent a long time with that body. I let that hawk's life and death affect me, shape my days. I moved it to a better spot and I will visit it, accompanying its return to the ground.

I wonder what it would be like to fully claim this care, this deep feeling buffalo heart, my beauty connection with the wild ones.

I am called to become yet more hawkish, to stand in and recognize my power, my goodness.