Hawk redux

Driving northward today toward my What Comes Next, I saw my friend Hawk. He sat calmly in I-5’s manicured median grass north of Seattle, surveying his dominion with sharp brown eyes. He saw me but did not look. We nodded briefly at one another while I sped past at 70 miles per hour, his feather-blur held sharp by stilled recognition. My thoughts, immersed in the grounded action of how my next few days will be spent, flew on speckled feathers to Black Friday last when Hawk spoke words of promise to me and brought me aloft with him into worlds dreamed of but yet unreached.

My car flew silently on redbrown wings. In two minutes I passed another hawk, having entered a new dominion. Hawk #2. A sign? How could there be TWO hawks sitting silently in the median of I-5?  If this is a sign, I thought, let there be three. My thoughts continued flowing ahead in the river borne of the ancestors, our shared ancestral past, my shaman-selves. A river of anger, flowing into words of creation. I am a pioneer.

Three minutes. The wings beneath me flew higher. Faster. My thoughts grew stronger. THREE. The third hawk spoke as I passed, telling me all the secrets I have ever forgotten, reminding me to breathe into the punctuation wrought by ONE, TWO, and now THREE hawks, breathe IN your destiny, breathe OUT your story, tell it high and pure, sing it into the sky.