Vintage National Geographic Archive

I grew up in the brief millennial bubble of the audiocassette and the boom box. Eventually, I had a folio of my favorite CDs.  By the age of ten, technology was leap-frogging every year and my Walkman transformed into an iPod nano and then an iPod classic and a library of music I ripped from music blogs and downloaded from iTunes with my babysitting money. I still feel a sense of wrongness when I realize my music collection has no heft – no physical folio I can pick up with me and leaf through.

But as a child of five I prayed at the altar of my cassette collection. My favorite tape was Jim Dale’s version of Mediterranean mythology – in particular Egyptian myths. No matter how hard I search now, I can’t locate this tape’s name or the book it was based on. I listened to it so many times I had the intonation memorized. I spoke alongside Jim. I thought the Egyptian god was called ALMOND RAW for raw almonds instead of Amun-Ra. My favorite snack at the time coincidentally.

My favorite story was that of Isis, Osiris, and their theriomorphic offspring - a hawk-son Horus. My Jakata-Tale loving, ex-Buddhist environmentalist parents instilled in me a deep and feral animism. Animals were alive. Trees were alive. When I was three, we moved into the fir-furred shadow of Overlook Mountain. Into Bear Country. The land of Manitou as the Munsee Lenape refer to the lightning-struck aliveness of the glacial-riven Hudson Valley.

I spent most of my time outside. And I kept my eyes out for hawks. I loved Horus the hawk. And whenever I saw the blonde underside swing of a hawk wing clearing a circle of blue sky above me, I felt that Horus had come to me personally. I took to waving and saying, “Hello, Horus!”

Red-tailed hawks were my good luck charm. I felt they personally showed up for me – often to underline a new way of thinking or gestating creative project. I called them “the punctuation” of my life. I felt they showed up when I needed confirmation of something. And with them they carried the magnanimous curl of Jim Dale’s English accent and the glyphic-star of the god Horus’s all-seeing bird eye. For me they were redolent with meaning: so heavy I was surprised the symbolically burdened birds didn’t fall out of the sky.

A hawk dropped a mouse on my car like a gift when I met a new boyfriend. I noted nine different cream-breasted hawks fluffing their autumnal feathers in the white pines lining a drive to a life-changing doctor’s appointment.

When I had an abortion at the age of nineteen, I imagined the child I’d decided not to keep sprouting feathers, taking form as the kestrels and hawks that wiped sun-spun moisture from a snow-smudged horizon.

I wrote hawk poems. I kept hawk feathers that fell from the sky into my open hands – sure they signaled my spiritual specialness. Perhaps I needed that. To clutch the keratinous calamus like a flotation device, like a magical wand. To move my fingers over the black and white patterning like I was strumming harp strings.  I was very sick. I was very uncertain. I wanted a diagnosis. An answer to my pain and heartbreak. I wanted certainty so badly that I painted certainty over uncertain, wild things.