The Hawk Willow
Most mornings, I drink my coffee and with the extra lift of the flavor and its sustenance, I pull on my running shoes. I dial my sister’s number and as our talking rocks connect, we start our almost stream-of-conscious sharing. We talk about what we sense in the collective field, our griefs and longings, our joys and celebrations and our attempts to understand our own ways of showing up in the midst of it all. At about one and some change miles into one of my most common routes, I come to the Hawk Willows.
These enormous, towering trees, with mazes of thick branches and canopies, shower the land with their shade and offer perches and homes for the bugs and the birds. Two red-tailed hawks have been perched in those trees very frequently at the time of my morning run over the past year. Sometimes, I tell myself, it’s like we planned this.
The hawks often sit, watching as I approach, maybe eyeing the fields for movement, and the strange human moving down the trail in a rhythmic plodding. Often, as I get close to the base of the tree, one of the hawks will let out her cry as she takes flight. It is a sound that courses through my veins, vibrates through my being.
I always stop and honor the hawks and the beautiful willows that hold them with a bow, a prayer, an extension of my gratitude to them for showing up. I think to myself that maybe we are learning to watch together. Sometimes I stand at the base of those trees, on days when the weight of the world feels heavy and I’m not sure how to hold my part. I watch the Willow holding the Hawks, the Hawks holding the land around them with their attentive gaze, and I feel held too.
Yesterday, as I came down the trail, there was a blue genie lift, a contraption that magically moves humans to levels they can’t get to on their own. The man at the top was cutting branches from the Willow.
Oh no, I thought, oh no.
I tried to reassure myself, he is probably just thinning it, preparing it for new growth, and I kept running.
The next morning, the blue genie all but forgotten, I laced up my shoes and headed towards the Willows. As I crossed the road and they came into view, I stumbled. There was nothing left of that beautiful, flowering, sweeping tree but its trunk and some spindly limbs that were in the process of being cut into chunks of wood.
I ran past the destruction work, not caring if I got too close to the buzzing chainsaw noise and stopped at the second Hawk Willow. There were three Hawks sitting amongst her branches. One screeched and flew off, one sat in the branches and stayed hidden, and one felt like she was looking right at me. I wondered what they would say if they spoke English. What did they feel watching that place where they had surely built nests at some point and perched in every morning, topple to the ground. I wished I had something better to offer, but I just sat with her and watched.
I want to go ask the landowner why the tree had to come down. It certainly didn’t look diseased and it wasn’t close to any structures. I know that things are complicated in our current time, that there are multiple things to consider and that there are parts to the story I don’t know. But still...
In the end, I’ll put on my shoes and head back out. If I see the Hawks, I’ll tell them, I’m sorry you aren’t given a voice when your home is destroyed because it inconveniences a human. In another future, that sometimes I can see in my wildest and most hopeful imaginings, you will have a right to your place too.
