ONE

           Everything about the Sonora Desert is exaggerated—the heat, the sun, the dust, and the mountains. The saguaros, the creosotes, the palo verdes, and the mesquites; everything makes that desert landscape so surreal that one can never know where dreams begin and end. Seventy-five years ago, the desert north of Tucson was cut with remote landing strips by the Army Air Corp, but that great basin between the Tortolita and Picacho mountains has recovered. The desert plants and animals, devastated by overgrazing, has healed.

            I ran in that desert for nearly fifteen years as an Army pilot when most people said the sun made it a place too hot to run. “You’ll die running out there in the desert sun,” they said. But I was drawn further into its essence. And so, in the same way someone closes the blinds to block out the sun, I chose to open them to see; and it is there in that desert that a friend met me every day.

            But that was then. Now, I am at the desk in my office with computers and books all around me. I open a volume of Heidegger and feathers fall from the pages, dust deepens the wisdom in its spine, and leaves of Texas sage stain the passages of memories and heighten my senses – and I remember the desert where my friend came from and how it has changed my life.

             Last night, I dreamed I was running along an old trail in the desert. I noticed a brown bird floating in the air, the updrafts gently rocking its wings. I entered the land of palo verdes and mesquites, with a quickened pace, and the bird circled above as I ran. The brown bird turned golden and white, stretched out its wings, and began soaring higher where it disappeared out of sight. I ran back. It was dusk. But the next day, I returned to the desert where the bird circled above. A wooden fence post standing upright and stripped bare of its barbed wire became a ladder which I had to climb. Suddenly, it was transformed into the peak of a mountain, and the Cooper’s hawk was gone. I was left pondering what did it mean. In the next segment of the dream, I was running again. He said, “I am circling above,” and I awoke to the sound of a hum.

            Now, I am telling this story because sometimes I miss my friend, to talk with him in the way that I did, to find him again knowing I cannot. He taught me something. This story is my attempt to say what.

            I don’t have a photo of him, but do you see the flicker of light in the desert? And the way the wind quivers the leaves of the trees? If you quiet your mind and listen, you might be able to hear the sound of his wings. Anyway, that’s where I first saw him. In that flicker where two worlds collide. I was running through the desert when the shadow crossed over, and a winged creature swooped down and landed on the fence post nine feet beside my path. He was a magnificent Cooper’s hawk.

            It never occurred to me to act human; I was in his world, his umwelt if you will, and it merged into mine. And here’s the surreal part I thought… Here’s what it felt like to be, there were no thoughts of a subjective mind; there was only the umwelt of his and mine.

            I think I kept running, but I don’t remember if I did; time didn’t seem the same, the light seemed to make things iridescent, and it all became so clear. I didn’t tell anyone; somehow, I knew that I shouldn’t. They would have laughed and never understood. “Sure, it happened” they would have said.

            It was the next week in the very same place that he revealed himself to me again. I think it was important that I never doubted. Because after that next time, I saw my friend almost every day, at least every other day and never missing more than three. It wasn’t necessary for me to run to provoke his emergence, for his emergence was my lure and I seemed to come to him. Sometimes he spiraled overhead as I ran; sometimes I’d hear him call from a tree. Even miles and miles away from home, I’d catch a blur in the corner of my eye and turn my head to see him. He became a source of inspiration. He was saying something; he wanted to communicate, and I had to turn off the internal dialogue of my mind to understand. Running helped me do that, and the soaring helped him. He lived, in harmony, my consciousness knew, in that desert that was an inseparable part of him; he belonged to the desert, and the desert belonged to him. He was always there when I ran and at those special twilight times when thoughts are left behind. He was created there, and the desert was created with him; it was I who came there. Once, as I was running, he swooped down plucked the rattlesnake from my path. It reminded me, that he, my hawk friend, was very special. And so is what he taught me.

            Maybe flying an Apache for the army had something to do with it. Perhaps he saw me as another hawk in his presence. Then one day he said that God chooses who will be your friends when you are born, and He points out “that one, that one, and that one.” And he found it funny that God had pointed at me and said, “that one too.” I asked him then, and he tried to answer, “What is it that binds human beings and animals? It was something about communication he said.

            It felt good to run as he flew. “It’s almost like this is our tether,” he said, and for the first time ever, I felt like running and never returning. Before, I always knew I would go back, that I had to go back. That time I didn’t feel that way. I closed my eyes as I ran and I found that I could do it, and I didn’t know if it was the wind or his feathers that blew through my hair. My friend, the Cooper’s hawk, was part of me.

            I was driven by the affinity: I just wanted to be with him. He would be there sitting on the fence post or in a mesquite tree waiting, and then he would fly and hunt as I ran; we communicated. He was an independent thinker – his feathers were nerve receptors, his perception extended into the currents of air, and his temperament was wound tight with rapturous instincts ready to burst out never willing to be tamed. He was everything I imagined him to be – solitary, self-possessed, free from self-doubt, and one with his world. His essence was the mirror of his environment, and the environment was the mirror of him; there was no boundary between the one and the other. Before I knew him, I never realized how estranged the earth is from the sky, but with him, for the hour or so I ran with him each day, I was part of his hawk thinking, and he was part of mine. There was shared empathy, I lived in his world, and he lived in mine, and both expanded in the sense of self where existences converge.

            It was more than meditative, that word cannot describe the shimmer of the ethereal experience. The Cooper’s hawk is not like us, he was the essence of what he was, and he was so incredibly far from being a family pet that I never even thought to give him a name. He was the wilderness, an animal and his environment one and the same. At first, there was a distance, a boundary that had to be crossed. We had to gain one another’s trust slowly and patiently, by special thought, by no thought at all, by giving, by having the faith to receive; if I ever held a negative or self-centered thought he would fly away. If my intention treated the world well, then he responded with benevolence and affinity. He taught me, for he already knew, it’s about letting things go, and once I understood that I never feared to let go of the hoping that he would come back. It established the sense of return.

            It was an enlightened relationship; he could just fly off whenever he wanted. He wasn’t there each day from any coercion of my will; he was there because he wanted to be, because I helped him hunt by chasing up small animals and birds as I ran, and because he liked me. Through his sense of perception, I was aware of the world from a different perspective. The details in the desert, the plants, animals, and the land itself became more receptive; there are things never noticed until the mind lets go to. Understanding became more than just simple truths about the way the world is; it became the truth about us.

            He followed me to Texas, or maybe he led me there; I am not sure. There was a profound reason for it all. Our trust preceded the journey. This we knew: that in our friendship we experienced a oneness. By this, I mean not seeing ourselves as being separate from each other; it began with a feeling of empathy that grew into experience.      In Texas, I found a Comanche medicine wheel on the floor of the updraft where he circled. It was a magic circle hidden by hundreds of years long since gone, and it was a place filled with colors and sounds emitted by living things. There he spiraled overhead as I stood in the center of the circle, and in the fading away of a separation that seemed to have never really been there, we unlocked the gates of another world. It was a place where something hummed, a sanctuary I spent hours in,  where trees had personalities, and the wheel spun as the stones rolled on their own. It was a place of disintegration and reintegration. I had two selves, really: a human self to care for worldly obligations and a hawk self that soared in the spirals that rose from the wheel.

            Dawn to dusk. I spent whole days with the hawk. Running through the sage and then laying in the medicine wheel soaring on his wings and seeing through his eyes. It was so easy for him to fly. His feathers sensed the air. He moved just one and he turned. He extended a few more and he climbed. He breathes and he sees, and we breathe through the climbing spirals together.

Together in the clearing, environments entwine
circles of spiraling thought that mingle in the wheel;
like mists concealing the hollow, their glowing
flesh forms in patterns where once was only thought.
Words become lines by which they have measured
warm winds that blow softly through the spokes of the wheel,
through luminous bodies their minds forming the words
not lost forever, but remaining in time, they rise up
into the vault of heaven speaking in heart-whispers,
as if living an eternal dream beyond the passage of time.
And now silence in that magic circle of spirals
where the breath of distant memories echo
in the whispers that float over the horizon
leaving only the feeling of the umwelt hovering in light
for those who come to feel them, knowing within all
the sensations, the memories that float in dreams
of the mind that circles and twirls in moments of forever
vibrating in the visions of the hawk and the man –
as one translucent presence sails on wings of the light.

           A Buddhist might call it a place with no words. A Catholic might call it communion. To be able to see through ochre and deep orange glow of his eyes and feel only one experience without any other was the humming sensation of grace. To be fully in the moment and not aware of one’s self is to be free of one’s self, and one with the graceful hum. The hawk was me, turned inside out for me to see, yet transformed into another type of energy that existed inside of us both.

            Soon after our times in the wheel, I went away for two years across the ocean, where I used what I learned with him: patience, penetrating perception, and rapturous instinct wound tight in the hunt. I came back, and he came to find me. He landed on the porch of my treetop home in Prescott, Arizona that looked a canyon, and there he stood looking through the open door not more than five feet away. He brought his mate to show me, and I knew it was the last time I would see him. She was larger than him and peered through the door looking at me even more curious than he had ever been. He stayed for at least an hour, and it seemed like much more as he peered through the open door looking at me so intently and puffing up his feathers with pride. At last, I turned away not able to take the goodbye any longer, and when I turned back he was gone; he didn’t want me to see him fly away.

            A person once asked me, “What did the hawk want? The answer was clear to me from the beginning, for this is no fable that has reached its end because it is no fable at all; for thoughts become words become things, and we are made of the stories that are told through us into the world. The hawk wanted to be a hawk, his essence, all that is a hawk one and inseparable with his world… and my Cooper’s hawk friend wanted to share that world with me.

            Now I put Heidegger’s volume away, and a feather still floats in the air that blows through the window. I lean back and close my eyes.

            “I remember,” I say as I spin in my chair underneath the feather that floats in the air.

            I say, “The breeze feels good. I feel like I could fly.”

            With a brown, white, and gold Cooper’s hawk in my mind’s eye.

            Then something happens… “I see you Cooper’s hawk,” I look up and say.

            Then he moves just one feather, “I see you too,” he says as he spirals up and away.