The Hawk and the Rabbit

Jan Weenix, Dead Hare and Partridges, c. 1690 (Wikimedia Commons)

People keep talking about the natural world becoming prominent now that self-isolating is firmly established. At my house, we’ve had no shortage of encounters with wildlife, as we’re surrounded by abundant foliage and creatures, but I’m beginning to think that the creatures are, in fact, bringing their dramas closer in.

The area where I live in Rhode Island is partly suburban and partly rural and tends to a certain natural shagginess. Lawns might be neat (or not), but even where home owners have tried to impose order on their particular property, there’s almost always nearby scrub or woods or fully fledged forest. My own backyard is edged by a thin but tangled woods that gets larger and curvier as it winds its way down the road. It’s lush with vines and shrubs and is home to deer, foxes, coyotes, cottontail rabbits, groundhogs, possum, wild turkeys, fisher cats, squirrels and a large array of songbirds. Our feeder attracts cardinals, white-breasted nuthatches, tufted titmouse, gold finches and purple ones, chickadees, sparrows, junco, wrens, downy and red-headed woodpeckers, and bluejays. Cat birds and mourning doves also sit in the nearby trees. A few years ago, a pair of great horned owls sat in the oak near our bedroom window and exchanged mating negotiations around midnight, night after night, until at last the rituals were complete. Sometimes in summer we hear shrieks and cries from nameless wildlife in that shaggy scrub and the sounds can be terrible and haunting. More often we hear a cacophony of singing birds, and cicadas, and frogs.

There are hawks, too. Lately there has been an enormous female red-tail who hovers on the air currents, scanning the ground. You can almost feel her pass over before you see her or her shadow. She seems bigger than hawks normally are, though this could just be the effect of her being closer. Perhaps she’s incredibly well fed, and maybe we’re seeing more of her as one of those abundant-wildlife-consequences of COVID time. The rabbits on our property are large right now and numerous, and on Saturday this particular hawk swooped down onto the grass right behind our house and caught one. I didn’t see the strike, but could see something on the lawn that I thought at first was a large piece of broken tree branch. I couldn’t see the hawk. I looked through the binoculars and saw that it was a freshly killed, full-grown cottontail, lying stretched out with its beautiful long feet together. It appeared to be lacking a head, but I saw later on that it was just obscured. A bright red gash on the neck told the whole story; that, and the gruesome entrails, which had already been extracted and scrawled on the grass.

In the time that I waited for the hawk to return, there was a lot of activity in the yard. Clearly the hawk and her kill had created a ripple. The songbirds were gone for a time, but eventually returned. A crow swooped in and took an acorn-sized piece from the rabbit (a kidney maybe?), then flew away and didn’t come back. A very rotund groundhog hustled from the woods across the open grass toward the house, which I’ve never seen before. He was really booking it, almost comically so, but if his plan was to avoid the hawk he was right out in the open. Clearly he wasn’t thinking right. Eventually he dashed under the back porch and then was gone from there in a blink. The presence of this dead rabbit with its exposed viscera was both rattling and a normal occurrence (though certainly not for the humans in the house watching). The songbirds blithely went about their business.

Hours later and I was still checking the backyard. The sight of the rabbit was beautiful and terrible. The fawn-like colours of the fur, those quietly elegant feet, the curled front paws, the long ears. The gash was red and magnetic; impossibly bright. The rib cage sat alone and emptied, and all the entrails were loosely coiled on the ground, all wrong. Poor rabbit. But now that it was so fully in this arrangement, there was nothing to do but admire how complex and baroque the scene was.

I was setting dinner on the table when I saw a flash and turned to see the hawk arrive; she sat on the fence a few feet from the rabbit. She looked at me through the glass, but I stayed very still and she eventually swooped down on the carcass. I watched for close to twenty minutes as she worked at it, amazed by how big she was, and captivated by the straight-forward brutality of her work. Her feathers had the same lushness as the rabbit fur and shared some of the same colours. The rich textures and almost opulent nature of what I was seeing made me think of Renaissance still life paintings. It was vivid and right there: the idea of being consumed. Death and aliveness. (Our own dinner was vegan and served in ceramic pasta bowls and not nearly so suspenseful.)

Eventually the hawk flew off but much of the rabbit remained. Things had changed though. Death had settled in with a dazzling completeness. The red blood was no longer bright and crisp, but ruddy and faded. The fur, too, seemed washed out and the body even more deflated. Much of what was left was earth-coloured and dulling. I hoped the hawk was going to come back and finish, or that some other creature would pull the rabbit, or whatever it now was, into the woods.

When I got up in the morning and came downstairs, I found the hawk hunched at her work, finishing up. She caught sight of me through the glass, which startled her, and she flew off for the final time. But when I looked to see what of her meal was left, I was astonished to see that there were only a few puffs of grey fur and what appeared to be a leg bone. Nothing more. Later in the afternoon, I was looking out the window (which seems such a COVID activity these days) and I saw her flying, riding the currents, perhaps on the lookout for more.

What I'm Reading

I do this: I read multiple books at one time, and I think I always have, or since university at least (and maybe that’s the genesis—reading various textbooks at once). I like the sense of freedom, and juxtaposition, how the books speak to each other, in a way, though it has to be said that in this case, each one is very distinct. It’s possible, too, that COVID is influencing my reading—well, I’m sure it is—or at the very least it forms a background against which the tone of each book is highlighted (for instance, I very specifically turned to Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning last week). Since the shut-down, I don’t actually have more time for reading, as the level of care-giving has risen, though it seems imperative, more than ever, to make the time. My initial restlessness and lack of concentration (or rather the concentration on many other things that were deeply important) has begun to be replaced by a desire to think, read and write. So this is my current (not quite finished) reading rotation.

Caitlin Doughty’s From Here to Eternity is a fascinating look at death practices around the globe, and in particular the corporeal aspects, as in what gets done with the body after someone has died (which also leads to the provoking question, in a few of the cultures she examines: does the body left behind in some way have life? I found this very interesting and unexpected, that the question of an afterlife in certain regions involves keeping the physical body in a kind of stasis, protected as much as possible from decay).

I found a used copy of Lewis Hyde’s classic The Gift a while back, long before COVID, and I’m utterly surprised by it, also. For those of you who’ve read it, you already know it’s a book about creativity, but also something more; it is an entirely unusual investigation of creativity. The first part of The Gift is a scholarly examination of gift practices, using the lens of folk and fairy tales, indigenous histories, and mythologies, to illuminate not simply the process of gift-giving or the why, but the energy and mechanics that enliven what passes from one person to another. He uncovers what is almost a set of rules for that energy, or if not rules exactly, tendencies. Hyde is setting up the reader to then understand creativity, which functions as a gift.

Claudia Casper’s The Mercy Journals is a bit of an echo of the times we’re in, as it’s set in a dystopian future (though the cause of the chaos and emotional isolations is environmental, rather than specifically viral). I’m enjoying it immensely (and there is a troubled character who is a contemporary dancer, who I can’t help but like). There is certainly something to be said for reading dystopian books during this particular moment in history.

I had started Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead and somehow got pulled away from it. The good part of that, I suppose, is the re-discovery. In fact, it’s the sort of book to come back to and write about with some depth, which I think I will do. I loved her book Flights, which won the Booker International Prize (this is a prize for books in translation and each year the long-list is a bonanza of amazing, intelligent reading). Drive Your Plow was likewise nominated. It was published in Polish in 2009, and then translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones in 2018. I discovered, too, that there is a film adaptation of the book (called Pokot), though it seems unavailable for streaming at the moment; hopefully that will change. At any rate, the novel, which is a murder mystery that doesn’t play to the tropes, has me thinking a lot about the experience of reading layered, meaningful, intensely thoughtful work and how to describe the mystery—not the functional one in the story—that seems to be in the spaces and margins. And how vital that experience of reading work like this seems. The writers I love, and this applies certainly to Tokarczuk, do a lot of combining and drawing on disparate fields of study and thought, and there is the combining, too, of concrete and more nebulous aspects (in this case, death is a literal and recurring event), the lived world and the dream world, or aspects of the real that verge on dreams or something archetypal or mythological in feel. In Drive Your Plow, Tokarczuk folds into the narrative not only the question of who is murdering hunters, but also feminism, animal rights, astrology, the poetry of William Blake and ageism, to name a few of the larger aspects.

I’ve also re-read Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, as many people are at the moment (among his wonderful observations of a time of terror, he touches on the psychology of not knowing when something will end, which speaks, in a small way, to our current situation) and Susan Sontag’s journal, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh (this is a great book to read in the small hours of the night if I happen to wake up, as her entries are already fragmented within a continuous flow of her ideas and the content isn’t the Holocaust or a dystopian world).

Anxiety in the Time of COVID

I ordered this Buddha months ago and didn’t imagine that it would make its arrival during a time when its box would have to sit in quarantine for a few days or that its presence would resonate so much.

I have an abiding interest in anxiety. I used to have anxiety disorder, and OCD as well, which began in early childhood (is there anxiety that doesn’t begin there, in some way?). I use the past tense not because I’m entirely convinced of it but because it doesn’t feel right if I use the present. I do still experience anxiety, mildly, but then more acutely, especially as of late, but it’s so radically different and mostly ephemeral that I consider the disorder part to be in the past (years of lifestyle and diet changes, plus heaps of meditation have been more effective than I can say). Regardless, I have a deep interest in the thinking mind, which is so often, for so many people, the anxious mind.

And this time, the one of COVID, is excellent for the study of anxiety; because wow. Every emotion, actually, seems heightened to the point of the surreal.

I can attest that each day here is a ferocious mix of being alive, gratitude, fear, sadness, anger, peacefulness, all of it on rotation. I saw the Instagram post of a friend who has a history of addiction and she talked about the full gamut of emotion, including swearing, picking fights with her partner, fear and anger, but also joyfulness and everything in between, how some of the feelings are reminiscent of the rawness of being newly sober.

Maybe a positive effect of this virus is that some of us are confronting, and possibly integrating, their shadow and the shadow side of our existence, what it is to be human. This seems to me sorely needed. As much as meditation has been so vital to me, and my teachers and fellow practitioners a lifeline, there is something about meditation communities as a whole (and this runs the spectrum from Buddhism to yoga to secular mindfulness practices) that gets in my craw a little, which is a misunderstanding of how we’re supposed to treat the stuff of our emotional lives. By “stuff” I just mean all the phenomena, whatever we experience, the full range. I notice sometimes an ingrained habit of rejecting and repressing what is negative, a denial especially of anger, but also anxiety, even as the teaching at the core of many Eastern philosophies is one of acceptance and integration. This is at work inside of Jungian theory, too, the need to acknowledge shadow content, the full “seeing” of both our light and dark selves (and by extension the light and dark sides of how we perceive the exterior world). But what I notice in meditators sometimes, and the western Buddhist community (and this is unavoidable, really, because everything contains its opposite), is a smoothing over of legitimate wrinkles and maybe even a vague competition to see who appears the most “together” and calm—the least wrinkled. No one wants to slip up and reveal the colourful, fiery array of experience underneath.

Perhaps a function of this virus (not that I’m claiming to know), now that we are all saturated in anxieties, whether they belong to us or to other people, is that it has become universally more difficult to ignore what is prickling or dark or molten. I wonder if there’s a prior belief at work that to acknowledge difficulty is to lack gratitude, but real gratitude includes all aspects. It’s perfectly okay to be in this situation and not feel joy. A fake smile doesn’t seem helpful to me. Maybe a better state to cultivate is something like peacefulness, though not at the expense of allowing the full emotional range, including all the feelings we find untenable, and chief among these are anger and fear. We have to acknowledge that these states exist in the first place, in order to let them go.

Oh, shame, too. This can seem to be a lot of work: untangling (which is really just witnessing) all those shame threads and allowing them to dissolve away. Many of us grew up in families and cultures steeped in shame; and we were taught to be deeply ashamed of well-earned anger and rage, as well as that background murmur of nameless anxiety that is the soundtrack in many human minds.

When I was ten years old I was placed in a hospital, in an oxygen tent, for three days, because I was having an anxiety attack. In rural Nova Scotia, at the the end of the seventies, there wasn’t much of an awareness of childhood anxiety disorder—anxiety was the very last conclusion the doctors came to. I wasn’t given any sort of treatment, just released from the hospital with the words to my mother, “Something scared her.” The only available response to that seemed to be distraction, and so I was taught to neglect unlikable feelings, hiding the anxiety away from myself rather than investigate it. Question it. I recall being asked what had scared me, but, of course, I couldn’t articulate what was going on. Anxiety is a nebulous territory, lacking edges and borders and sometimes even a name. It can be hard to see. Its root is often a field of experiences and impressions, not always a single event. Even a single traumatic event would fall against an already existing background of mental formations. So I couldn’t say what was going on, especially because I was only ten—how to account for that wordless, unshakable fear, the one that stole my breath and caused me to think unequivocally that I wasn’t getting enough oxygen? There is nothing more primal than that.

For people with anxiety, COVID is an especially potent enemy (though it’s not really an enemy, of course, just another life form doing its thing; maybe we should call it a teacher), because it’s not only invisible but can cause difficulty with breathing. The virus moves so stealthily and quickly that it has covered an entire globe. It travels by air literally—drifting on currents and boarding planes to cross oceans and jump security checkpoints. Its network has the vastly intricate pattern of our own blood vessels and neural pathways. We recognize it even if we can’t see it, we know its gregariousness and naked desire to spread. It appears to have our own predilection to be unsatisfied.

The thing about the emotional low points that many of us have been experiencing, or at least glimpsing, is that those of us who are sequestered with partners, children, relatives, roommates, etc. are having the experience of those emotions in front of other people. We are replete with witnesses; overrun with them, in fact. Which can feel rather raw, and further complicates the aspects of shame already present. Even asking for a figurative time-out reveals the need for it.

I attended sangha via Zoom the other night and it was amazing how well it worked. Meditating this way, seeing everyone in their own habitat, was incredibly effective and even joyful. But during the night, as with so many people right now, my dreams were vivid, difficult and seemed endless. When the sun rose and I finally got up, I felt better, and it strikes me that the relaxation of the night before served as a portal to an anxiety that needed to be witnessed. Pulled into the light. I clearly identified too much with the story of it, though, and wrestled, but eventually I was able to relinquish it and the need to control everything.

This is the background for so many of us: the need to arrange external events so they look more like something we would prefer or at least recognize. The practice then is one of letting go, over and over and over, each time the anxiety (and the shame about the anxiety) comes up. It occurs to me, also, that perhaps I was repressing the anxiety during the previous day because I wanted, frankly, to be alone with it.

Which brings me to something that has been tremendously helpful. I don’t know about you but I have rarely journaled so much in my life; I haven’t always ascribed to the use of journals—I’ve kept them on and off since age ten, but I’ve always had notebooks where I’ve used a looser format of drawings, diagrams, scribblings, notations, especially about books I’m writing. COVID-time, however, has given me a renewed sense of the usefulness of detailed journaling and, to sort of paraphrase Julia Cameron, signal one’s location to the universe.

Time and the Story of MOLLY's Date

New Release Date: APRIL 27, 2021

My novel has a new release date, as do many books right now, due to the stresses of our current situation, to which we all have to adapt. I think there’s something in here about time, too, and our perceptions of it. Does time seem different to you, too? As they say, the present moment is all we ever have. Time in the land of COVID is a different animal, though, and has taken some adjustment. Part of the reason for the discombobulation is no doubt due to the wearing of pajamas or yoga pants for extended periods or, heck, wearing them continuously. Also the eschewing of regular bathing in favour of radical cleansing and disinfection methods for groceries and packages. In my case I also have an old-school calendar book that I’ve suddenly stopped consulting, giving me that what-day-is-it-even feeling; although, as the weeks have gone by I’ve gotten better at keeping tabs on the date. (It’s as if I removed myself from the calendar’s reach or have no longer found a use for it, or maybe I don’t like being reminded of the world and the sense of time that the calendar represents.)

*This is a note from the future: tonight Saturday Night Live’s cast will create their show from their individual quarantines and Tom Hanks, the host, will declare that Saturday no longer exists. There! I knew it. I told my husband that there is only Today and I-Don’t-Know, and they alternate.

But maybe the larger problem at work here is the emotional dissonance that many of us are experiencing (or we’re experiencing the dissonance of the people we live with or friends that we’re waving to on video or those neighbours in the distance). At any rate, the effect is there, the time warp of this time, the way that it’s more elastic than usual, more Twilight-Zone-ish. Dreams, too, have been unrelentingly strange and vivid, so that sleep is less of a reliable blank and more yet another experience of narrative time.

All this leads to forgetfulness. I forgot to pay some of the bills that aren’t already electronic, which rarely happens. If I have a scheduled call with someone I have to write it in big letters on a whiteboard in the kitchen, where I know I’ll see it, because I’ve been forgetting things—events, places, thoughts, names, schedules, all of it falling into a COVID void only to suddenly bob to the surface later (and for whatever reason scheduling it into my phone doesn’t seem like a better response). Everyone in the computer screen world is wearing their pajamas and clutching a coffee cup or a martini glass, their hair askew, regardless of the hour. A friend and her husband were having cocktails in the morning, because time no longer made sense, or rather it made sense to have a cocktail when they wanted it; she napped at dinner.

All of this is to say that time, as ever, is malleable and artistic, and we are all Alice in Wonderland, and our immediate family is more immediate than ever, and our friends now live inside our screens, and we are all too big and then too small. Not that our perception of time wasn’t this way before, only that the particulars have changed. In the larger, outer world, the postponement and rescheduling of things has been rampant, for good reason. Everyone is madly scrambling to adjust, re-tune, plan for a later time when we can stick our heads up from our burrows and look around, and maybe—someday—attend concerts and go to restaurants, and the beach.

So my novel, also, is in this category of movement (and funnily enough, at the heart of the book is the individual, impressionistic experience of time by one woman). The original date was for the end of this month, but that was arranged long, long before COVID; now publishers, bookstores and the entire delivery system are under an unprecedented strain and so Simon & Schuster Canada has scheduled the release of MOLLY FALLS TO EARTH for April 27, 2021. Given the topsy-turviness of the world, and on a micro level, the fact that my home-life is filled with Gabriel-care at the moment, this is a good decision, and it makes for something to look forward to. So now the event that was on the brink of happening has made a leap in time; this reminds me a little of leaving a party one night as a teenager, very possibly having smoked some pot, and getting closer and closer to the end of a street where the end continually seemed to move out of reach. But I did eventually get there, my destination, and so will we all, and hopefully we’ll be in the present moment as we go. Happy Saturday (Sunday?).

The COVID experience so far

Goddard Park, the last time I was there before it closed.

Hidden talents as revealed by COVID-19 seclusion so far:

Focaccia maker (with the last known packet of Fleischmann’s in the Western world)

Grocery launderer

Gabriel hair cutter and stylist (turns out I’m an ace barber—who knew?)

Sleeping cat annoyer

This seclusion has been very revealing of everything, including the light-hearted, but more often it shows the fears and anxieties that growl there in the background. I used to grind my teeth every night, long before the virus, though years of meditation and body awareness have helped with this more than I can say; but I woke from a quick nap yesterday with my jaw clenched tight.

Nameless, shapeless anxieties have become re-articulated in the tendons of my back. I noticed this when I was in the kitchen this morning, but this noticing is helpful—the most effective thing, I think, to do with all the feelings and sensations passing through. Maybe the most fundamental skill is to learn to witness, to allow judgment to cool down, to be easier with not-knowing and uncertainty. Bare observation is evidence of that lovely paradox that shows up in the territory between our minds and pure beingness—you accomplish something by doing nothing. Except watch.

But speaking of doing, simple witnessing isn’t by any means easy to accomplish. I don’t always have the knack, and these are unprecedented times (not unprecedented in terms of horror, but in the way of the specifics; I think we can all agree that, in general, human atrocity is perfectly predictable). Things and attitudes change daily. The entire globe is now connected in this intricate net of sickness, anxiety and (maybe) hope. New York City, beloved by so many, is roiling in a fear so palpable that it’s felt everywhere, and each day of seclusion, regardless of where you are, is a rocking between catastrophic thinking and perhaps moments of peace or the ability to witness. I have found it’s a uniquely bizarre experience, for instance, to wash a load of groceries in the kitchen sink like so many babies, but on the other hand there is food, plus soap and clean water. My husband puts his arms up toward the ceiling every day and says, “We’re alive!” and then I do this, too, and we start laughing, not because any of this is at all funny but because it’s an entirely human thing to do, especially to ward off suffering. There have been many moments when I’ve teared up or been frozen with anxiety. “We have to be grateful,” says the mechanical engineer whose scientific mind is often the counter to my literary one, but lately he is philosophical. Gratitude is the best antidote, true enough.

The parks and beaches here in Rhode Island are now closed, which is a necessary measure, but a blow to people with disabilities (and their caregivers) who need a safe place to go to be outside. Gabriel’s world gets (inexplicably, to him) smaller and smaller, though he seems to be adjusting now. Music, as ever, is the saviour, as it has been for so many years for him (us). The accessibility of vast cathedrals of jazz, big band, funk, classical, and opera is a brilliant light in this whole business; it feels like a miracle, actually, to download lists of tunes, and to hear the intricate and soaring record of musicians’ personal suffering and hope—what is jazz if not the most ingenious telling of profound hardship made wholly listenable? I think the lesson here is that the suffering isn’t repressed or shoved aside or falsely turned into a positive, but rather paid attention to—witnessed. And allowed to sing.