y encounter with the hawk during the mid-summer of 1998 was the first signpost to mark my way on the magical journey. It was a very clear sort of signpost; certainly not the sort of thing that could be easily mistaken for anything else. I am truly thankful for that, for I had been wandering a long time lost, and needed a clear sign to point the way.
One day, in the midst of a late winter thaw, I'd crossed a snowy field to an old bur oak, and there had come upon three red-tailed hawks. They had swooped low out of the upper branches and flown close over my head, then spiraled slowly upward to vanish into a hazy rainbow-ring around the sun. There was something decidedly magical about the moment---it had struck me as a Welcome. During the days of spring that followed, the hawks had become familiar; I had seldom ventured out across the field without hearing their cries, without seeing one or more nearby. I'd had a peculiar sense---perhaps not an altogether rational one---that somehow I was becoming a part of the bright world they inhabited; that some important bond was forming. As the days passed that feeling had grown, and the world had become ever brighter. There had come a remarkable morning when a hawk lit on a post beside the cornfield I was driving along. I'd stopped and lowered my window. Not ten feet away, the hawk had extended her wings slightly, dropped her head, and peered in at me. Briefly our eyes had locked together, and I'd had the distinct feeling that something had passed between us. I felt, somehow, that I had been blessed.
Now, there's a certain truth we've all probably encountered before, but sometimes still tend to forget: If you cease to believe in a thing it will begin to fade from your life. Love is like that, of course. Honesty is too. And---most certainly---magic.
Toward the end of the spring there came the loss of a friend. There followed a difficult time, for with her passing I lost the first spiritual mentor I'd had in my life. Alas, it had taken me far too long to realize that; in the end it seemed as though a light in my life had gone out, and as though we had only truly met in time to say goodbye. She, of course, knew better, but I had yet to come to that sort of understanding...
Another beloved friend, during that spring of 1998, was entering a time of increasing physical peril. Thinking about my loss of the first, worrying ever more about the second, I walked out of the spring and into the summer perplexed, troubled by unspoken doubts that struck to the very center of me. Suppose the world---after all---were nothing more than what my rational mind had always insisted it was? Only a brightly lit stage where I, and all that I love, have come to be together for a brief time, before fading back into a sea of eternal nothingness? Suppose those all-too-infrequent moments come of late---those moments that seemed illuminated with a sort of mysterious, magical light---were really nothing more than my retreat into a child-like fantasy of wishful thinking? What then?
I began to carry that question with me in my heart. And as I carried it, the newly found magical light of the world began to dim. All the shining things around me began to lose their luster. The creatures inhabiting the field became nothing more than creatures. And at last---on one grey and dismal morning---I realized with a shock that all the hawks had vanished.
What I didn't realize was this: Such odd vanishings are often an outward reflection of what is going on inside of us. Sometimes, such vanishings will herald our arrival into a time of deep spiritual crisis, and the dark passage that follows may then culminate in a moment of transition to a place of even brighter vision. This truth was a part of the lesson that I was about to learn...
For a long week following their disappearance, I walked the field and watched for the hawks. None were there to be seen. I wondered, and waited, and turned the unspoken question I carried inside over and over in my mind, still unaware that there might be some connection between inner and outer events. There was no one I could tell any of this to. The brightness of the field had gone, and it had become a sad and lonely place. I began to think that perhaps the magic had deserted me. Perhaps it had never really been there at all. What I was feeling... Well, I can only say that it was something very close to despair.
So that was my state of mind late one summer afternoon, as I stood on the edge of the field lost in thought. A storm was blowing up off to the north, deepening the sky behind the distant trees to purple. In the bright sunlight, against the dark sky, the trees stood out with a remarkable clarity. And in one---perhaps a quarter of a mile from where I stood---there was an oddly bright point of light.
Absently, I began walking across the field, glancing now and again toward the bright little point. There was something a bit odd about it; it seemed almost too bright. Curious, I began walking toward it, and a logical explanation quickly presented itself: It must be one of those silver party balloons. Helium lost, it had come to be snagged in the limbs of the tree, and was reflecting back at me the light of the sun.
Halfway across the field, though, I felt a sudden uncertainty. Then a wave of tremendous lucidity, as my reality unexpectedly began to rearrange itself. No. It was not that. It was not that at all.
I began to move as if I were in a waking dream, eyes riveted on the shining light. I was being drawn toward it by an almost physical pull. Soon I was only fifty yards away, and the light took on a definite shape. It was a small luminous sphere, alive and shining with a brilliance that seemed completely unrelated to the darkness of the sky or the brightness of the sun. It moved ever so slightly as I closed the remaining distance, and a very strange and startling thought came into my mind...
No, I told myself. It simply couldn't be. It was---utterly impossible!
But as I came up on the tree, the light suddenly dimmed, then flickered out. From the very spot where it had been shining, a magnificent hawk took wing...
really have no way of knowing how useful any of what I say might be to you. It is entirely possible that my words will seem to make very little sense. In truth, that really doesn't matter, for paths and journeys and signposts and such are all very personal things. The Light that shines from behind the world of outward appearances speaks to Its creatures in many different ways. All that really matters, I think, is that we take the time to listen, and that we try---each of us in our own unique way---to learn to understand. In doing that, we take our first steps on a magical journey...
© 1998 Gregory S Hargrave (Yopo)
(The large hawk pictured at the top of this page is from a 19th Century source, reprinted by Dover Publications, Inc. in Animals: 1419 Copyright-Free Illustrations, and is in the public domain. Alas, the name of the artist is unknown to me.)
