The Hawk's Insistence

Yesterday on the way home along route 117 I saw a juvenile Red Tail Hawk perched on the eastern most of the silver maples lining the roadside just west of nine acre corner. They say when a hawk is sighted, you should think about whatever you were thinking about at that moment. The hawk reminds us to pay attention to what we are doing, thinking, and saying. It sat with its eyes to the northwest, its back to me. Mottled and checkered brown and white. The snow tumbled into the night all around him.

The sun comes earlier every day, perceptibly now. First it strikes the clock tower behind my house, then it lights up summer hill out my second story window in orange and yellow, and then it settles on my house, shining in the back window of the kitchen and then, when it has crested the garage next door, right onto my kitchen table where I sit and write. Not long ago, I didn't see the sun until I drove east to work at 8:00 a.m. Today, it greets me before I get dressed. Longer sun, longer days, active trees. The buds are pushing everywhere out of the branches. Every large tree is get pimpled in growth. Pushing, pushing, pushing, the gradual accumulation of cells, circulatory systems, life. There is a foot of snow on the ground and it is 20 degrees this morning, but spring has sprung.

Does that make for a nice metaphor for those of us defeated by the culture of greed? Charlene Spretnak, in The Resurgence of the Real thinks so. She detects an underlying culture of place and person and identity persisting against the totalizing force of modern culture - market culture. Buds on the trees, gradually, cell by cell, building the leaves that will fuel the summer's growth at the same time an icy chill grips the landscape. Summer nested in winter. Hope nested in hopeless times. May the sap of truth fill the leaves of justice before this winter of barbarity kills us all.