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It was the 7th of July, 2024, a Sunday in a month that was to prove thoroughly REMARKABLE and LIFE-CHANGING, I first heard you. I paused meditating. I wrote in my journal, “I hear a hawk,” which is always a thrill. How many times hawks have visited me
Ah, but that dear branch didn’t last. As of this past spring, the branch snapped -- it hangs from the tree now, looking like a sorry, drooping limb.
The day I set off for Boston, Tuesday, July 9, 2024, on a Greyhound, to help care for my beloved grandchildren, Ronen, 10, and his sister, Dani, 4, I noted HAWK's arrival again: “Red-shouldered HAWK you keep crying and crying, do you miss me before I even leave for Boston? What are you trying to tell me?” Perhaps her cry was a warning, I wondered? Ah, but that sounded ominous. Looking back now, from the perspective of August 23, 2024, I now realize that the HAWK WAS BEARING GOOD – even AMAZING news!?
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July 16, 2024 8:33 a.m. “Red-shouldered hawk, you are crying again, please please just tawk to me please just tawk to me PLEASE!” Then I wrote down the word SACRED and then, SAC(RED)-shouldered hawk.
I decided to text my college roommate, Cathie Murray, who lives in Rockland, Maine. Cathie is very well educated in the natural world.
“Good morning Cathie! So I was just meditating for a long time and a red-shouldered hawk was crying and crying. Do you think that’s because the hawk is in stress? Do you have any ideas or suggestions as to why the hawk would continue to cry?”
She answered: “Thanks for asking about the hawk. I’m guessing it is a young one being very insistent about food. This time of year, young hawks leave the nest but are still totally dependent on the parents for food for quite a while. WaaaaH!”
A few days later, I wrote to Cathie again: “That hawk has been crying all week, Cath. Finally, we saw him (or her or they or whatever) sitting in a willow tree in the middle of the meadow. The hawk seems to like the third willow tree, consistently – and has visited it every single day this week!” She sent me back on-line information about why
Later, I texted Cathie about the hawk’s flight patterns – “sometimes the hawk is making circles over the meadow,” and its landing pattern: “This afternoon after my writing group ended, I saw the red-shouldered hawk sitting on a low branch of the third willow tree.”
On Sunday, July 21, 2024, a day that will go down in HERstory (and MYstory too) as it turns out, I wrote Cathie first thing, saying “you are on my mind once again this morning because this time I opened the front door and the red-shouldered hawk was over to the right in the pine tree, only 25 yards from me standing at the front door. The sound of his/her/their crying was SO incredibly loud that I called out to the hawk "Please HAWK, please TAWK! What do you want to tell me?”
Oh wow was I excited by the HAWK coming so close! When I went to sit down for meditation, I decided to don the exquisite red prayer shawl decorated in black symbols
So it wasn't until now, on August 23, 2024, that things came into sharp focus. Only now, as I am looking back over my journal for the last few weeks, I am piecing together the events of July, and in particular that day when the HAWK practically walked up to my front door. Only NOW do I understand why the HAWK was TAWKing, what she was saying, or trying to say, so desperately.
My life changed in July. So did the lives of millions of other Americans. It changed because on that HERstoric Sunday, President Joe Biden did the most selfless and the incredibly patriotic thing: he graciously stepped out of the 2024 race for President allowing Kamala Harris to slip in. (In my Substack columns, I call her CALM a La!)
But before that happened, something really strange, really hard to explain, happened to me in the middle of the night.
About four am on that Sunday morning, I woke up out of a dead sleep and pulled out the tiny black notebook I keep for just such nocturnal musings. Without thinking, without even looking at the page, I wrote down a haiku
On that very early morning I opened the little black book and in red pen I wrote across two pages:
CALM a LA Harris
maybe our next President
Blood, bullets may fly
I fiddled with the last line:
Blood, bullets, might fly
and then
Please God, no blood fly
and then just
BALLOTS not BULLETS!
On and on through the next two pages I wrote, playing with different third lines. I gave the poem a title, “Harris Haiku,” and drew a heart around it. By then I was exhausted, so I fell back to sleep. I didn’t think much about the Harris haiku until just after Rich and I finished brunch the next day, SUNDAY JULY 21st. I said to my husband, political activist Richard Kirsch, “hey honey I wrote a haiku about Kamala Harris in the middle of the night.” My husband is a terrific writer and particularly clever with haikus, so he took it up and produced the final draft:
CALM a La Harris
Maybe — our next President?
God, no bullets fly
We immediately texted the haiku to our son, Noah, a commercial solar energy consultant out in Colorado – he just loves politics. What he wrote back simultaneously was this:
“HE’s OUT!” Biden had, at the very same moment we sent the haiku, announced that he would step out of the race. I got up off the couch. Stunned. I opened my mouth to speak but nothing came out except a squeak (or was it a hawk-like squawk?) and then a cry of joy! The synchronicity of writing that poem on the very day the election went topsy turvy set my head spinning, and it hasn’t stopped since!
You might say that on that historic/HERstoric day in July, I quite suddenly and without any warning, turned back into the writer I used to be at the start of my writing career. All I know is that I started writing every day during that thrilling week that followed – as Kamala raked in a slew of campaign contributions, and earned endorsements all around. Once again, 40 years after retiring from daily journalism, I wrote “on deadline.” I “filed” a Substack story every day (in my previously unused Substack column called "Here, NOW!".
I’m no longer writing for Substack every day, but I am thinking like a journalist again, identifying story ideas that might work as blogposts. It’s so much fun write quickly, the way I used to in my newspaper days, before I quit daily journalism to raise my three children. It’s also wonderful to feel so hopeful and excited about this incredible election.
Moreover, it has become clear to me today, as I am writing this, that like the fledgling HAWK who was having difficulty separating from the nest, squawking the whole time as she has found her independence, I too have separated from the “nest” that for four decades –- my daughter Jocelyn
turns 40 in October -- I made a priority for my children. I am no longer the woman who, for such a long time after the nest went empty, was paralyzed by the need for my children’s approval and emotional support.
Finally, I can stand back, and look at Jocelyn and her siblings, Lindsay and Noah, and say, God Bless you all, I love you to pieces, but I don’t need to “nest” you anymore. I recognize that you are adult children and you have successfully fledged! And now, thank God, so too I have fledged!
Something else happened: I decided to do a deep clean of my office/art studio, which I haven’t done in many, many years.
Well, actually, there is a limit. I have no intention of flooding the website, but I will include, say, a dozen or so of my best stories, including the ones that won me prizes and a nomination for a Pulitzer (along with the other reporters at the Sun-Times who helped investigate illegal toxic waste dumping in Illinois back in the early 1980s.) Ancient history, all of it, but it’s my ancient history (or HERstory) so it certainly belongs in the website.
Meanwhile, I decided that I will publish, as an ebook, the novel “Finding Filomena,” a fictional memoir about my great great grandmother, Filomena Scrivano. Fi’s story – which I keep referring to as the inner story – needs another chapter (or two). As for the outer narrative that I have been writing to weave around Filomena’s tale, for now, I’m happy not writing it, or maybe writing it. I've decided that I'm not going to worry about it. Just as I sometimes let unfinished paintings “season” (or simmer) in my studio, I’m content just to let it be whatever it is, for now.
August 23, 2024 “I hear you HAWK. Loud and clear! Thank you thank you for tawking to me! Yes, I’m putting on the red-shouldered shawl again, which I do whenever I hear you. And I am lighting the red candle. I am HERE NOW, this morning, listening to you, as you keep crying, crying, I HEAR YOU, you, red-shouldered HAWK, HAWK, keep TAWKing!”
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