HAWK WINGS FOR SHEL

I know why I try not to have idle thinking. It’s a waste of my mind-time. Today while driving from Palm Coast, Florida, where I spend 4/7th of my week with Batina my love, to Gainesville, Fl. where I spend the other three days, I looked at the feathers I have hanging on my rearview mirror and thought about the closeness I feel towards the Native American way. That has been part of my way of life for many years. As I drove on I thought of my grandparents from Romania and Russia and how I knew so little about their lives and was never able to feel close to their way of life, although maybe that is why I identify with peasantry. 

            I know I’m one of many Euro-American’s of various backgrounds who feel the same way about the Native American legacy. It’s something that came into our psyche or soul, when we woke up a bit and realized we were walking on the sacred grounds of those early people on this continent.

            As I was considering that train of thought, I passed what looked like a dead hawk on the side of the road. I drove 50 yards or so before I felt an impulse to turn around and take a look. In my office I have tail feathers of a red tailed hawk and the wing of another hawk hanging above my desk. They were both from road-kill. I could see this hawk was recently killed by a car since its broken neck had fresh blood where it was hit. The ants were already on it but no maggots had yet emerged. I brushed off the ants, shook it clean, cut the wings and the undamaged tail feathers. I picked it up with a plastic shopping bag I put around my hand that I had in the car and put it into another plastic bag. I usually don’t have plastic bags in my car since I use reusable stretch bags. I was taking a bunch of bags for recycling. My two female housemates both have bad excuses for not using reusable bags. Batina, my partner, finally, after five years of me chirping about the importance to use reusable shopping bags is catching on, but only after I’d put them in her car or left them by the going-out-of-the-house door, which didn’t work as well as when I put one or two in the car for her. Years ago, I began to put mine by the door so I didn’t forget to put them in my car. It made easy sense. Now, in writing about the bags and considering the Native American ways, I am reminded of why I am so committed to reusable bags and other environmental issues.

             After I put the wings in my car I carried the body of the hawk away from the roadway, took it out of the plastic bag and did a brief prayer as I covered it with dirt and leaves right near the long horns of a steer attached to a fence. 

            As I walked to my car, I wondered about the impulse in me that has stopped for the wings of other road-killed birds. Not all, but ones for which I hold a special reverence. Years ago I hit an owl one night caught in my headlights. I had to drive on, since it was late at night and I had my children in the car to get home to sleep. That night and for a number of days after, I felt very uncomfortable, uneasy, disturbed, that I had killed an owl. I knew it wasn’t my fault. It just flew in the front of my car, but yet, I felt I was responsible. I know they are especially sacred birds. I questioned why this happened, knowing I had no answer.

            Early the next morning, after getting my kids off to school, I drove back to where the owl was killed. I brought a box with me to put it in. I found the owl and drove it to back to where I was living in Micanopy, Florida where I buried it under a very, large, old, oak tree that my friends and I considered a sacred marker on the earth. Micanopy is named after Chief Micanopy who was an early resident of north central Florida. Micanopy is close to Paynes Prairie that is named after another Chief, Paynes.  I have walked on Paynes Prairie many times honoring the Native Peoples ways. I didn’t take any part of the owl.

            With the wings in the car, as I drove, I reflected on this affinity I have for the Native People. They have showed up in my meditations many times. Sometimes in long headdresses, sometimes in loincloths with a single feather in his hair, sometimes on horseback, sometimes he stands and looks at me. Sometimes I ask for messages when I have these inner visitations, but their presence alone seems to be the message that I was with them in some other time or they come from where they are to share their presence with me. I am appreciative. 

            I like this part of who I am because I admire the way of life of the Natives from this continent. As a human, I have some amount of personal guilt for what white people and government have done to them as I do for the millions of tons of bombs our country has dropped on other people. Like most Americans I haven’t had a whole lot of contact with the American Native People. When I lived in New Mexico in the early 70s I did go to Pueblos near Santa Fe, when they had ceremonial events that allowed observers. And while living in Santa Fe I had the privilege to be invited to two peyote teepee prayer meetings led by Native American Navaho medicine elders. I appreciated the honor to attend the all-through-the-night-meetings. Both meetings left a strong impression on me, especially how the elders did prayers that honored the sacredness for all life. These meetings, when I was 30 years old, were the first times in my life that I was a part of sacred ceremony. I am thankful. They opened my heart in a way I never experienced before and enabled my life to honor the sacred in all life.     

            Very recently, now, forty years later, I’ve had much closer and more intimate relationships with the Native American People. My lady friend, Batina and her ex-husband, adopted two Native American children 45 years ago. One of these children, Shel, in 2008, returned to the Lower Brule Sioux Reservation in Southern South Dakota. This is where he was born. He was adopted at nine months old. He, like many from the reservation, suffer from fetal alcohol syndrome. He was hoping his life would take on new meaning. Instead, after two years on the reservation, and resuming his alcoholism with many others there, he was savagely beaten, with his skull crushed on one side. This beating put him into an intensive care unit of a hospital 150 miles from the Reservation.

            During the third week of his hospitalization, I went with Batina to that hospital where we spent a week being with Shel. We prayed for him and did healing services. He was no longer in a comma, but was unable to do any more than move a finger or his eyes, sometimes on command something nothing. His doctor told us that it isn’t uncommon for brain trauma victims to be brought to the hospital from the reservation after alcohol induced fights and car accidents.

            This morning at 1:20 a.m., the day after I found the hawk, the beginning of Rosh Hoshanah, the Jewish New Year, Shel passed from this life. Batina was there with him along with a few of his Native brother’s and sister’s.

            I’m never sure how events are connected, but here I am with the wings of Hawk hanging on a nail, curing in back of my friend’s home, while Batina and Shel’s native family are all deciding what ceremonies to have for him near the Reservation.  Batina will also be discussing what services to have for him in New York with Shel’s three children, his adoptive family.

            I felt honored this morning as I hung Hawks wings to cure. I knew there is some connection between me finding the Hawk and Shel. I hope in this life I have more insight to understand not only this life and world I live in but, what is beyond what we see and hear.

            I had the wings hanging on the nail on the side of the house for a few days then hung them from the end of a hammock frame where they could get more sun and finish the drying process. The second morning in the sun, I came out to see them and they were gone. I went into a bit of a shock. They were nowhere around the yard. Nor were any feathers on the ground if a cat or other varmint had taken them off the string I had put through their feathers. I looked and looked, but in vain.

            I was disturbed and dumbfounded. I wondered if someone had come into my friend’s backyard and taken them. It didn’t seem likely. Then during my meditation that morning I briefly had the distinct sensation I had wings. I never had this sensation before. I asked myself if my unconscious had given me that sense of wings, but naturally I had no answer. Later in the morning as I sat on the porch in the sunshine, musing over the disappearance of the wings and what had occurred during my meditation, I don’t know what to call what happened, but I had a distinct wave of a sensation moving through me, not seen, but felt, of a Native American Chief telling me he needed the wings for Shel. I tried to hold onto the sensation, but he was gone as fast as he appeared.

            At first I wasn’t sure how to integrate what I had experienced and let it go for the time being. But later in the day, after I gave it a lot of thought, I had to consider whether some one could come from another dimension into this one and take the feathers. I know that the ancients of many traditions teach that different dimensions exist simultaneously with our material world. I also know that quantum physics and string theory has found this true through their numerical formulas. It’s not easy for most of us to totally grasp these concepts being so attached to what our senses tell us. I know what I believe, so I’m going for it, and hope that the Chief and the feathers are making the transition easier for Shel.

 

            I like the world of mysticism. This past weekend, after I had hung the wings on the side of my friend’s house, I attended a Dance of Universal Peace four-day retreat. The DUP is closely aligned with Sufism, which is a spiritual path that embraces a mystical belief system. I have practiced and studied this way for a few decades along with other spiritual traditions. Maybe that is why I am able to get my rational thinking mind out of the way and grasp what I believed happened to the wings.

            I pray that in this life in the future, I have greater understanding of what I don’t understand about this world we inhabit.