Hawk reminds me we can fly

 

I am drifting around dawn in the liminal state between sleep and awake, where I recommend that you learn to spend more time because it's a natural launchpad for lucid dream adventures. It's a place where creative connections are made easily. It's a place where you are highly psychic and your psyche - come on, let's call it soul - can be quite mobile. 
     I am drifting around dawn. The image of a feather floats up on my inner screen. I see the pattern and I know it is the feather of a red-tailed hawk, a bird that has played an important role in my life.  Suddenly, I realize the feather is attached to a live bird, to a wing that is quivering in mid-air. I look at the wing, at the back of the bird, at the silver-white belly feathers.I look ino the intense yellow eyes that are looking at me and I feel an invitation. To do what? To lift up, to fly with the hawk.
    Now I am floating over the rooftops of the city and over the green park. I have gone through my window without noticing. I am vaguely aware of the body I have left in bed, but my focus is on the adventure ahead. Extraordinary things have happened when I have flown with the hawk before. This already feels so good.  I, am enjoying going with the wind, the pure freedom of flight. The hawk is no longer separate. I think the hawk and I have become a hybrid. Or I have taken the form of a hawk.
     Frequent flyers beyond the body do it in different ways, Some fly Superman style, arms out, straight as a rocket. Some swim through the air or go doggy-style, or pedal. I often find myself winging it like the birds. So maybe I am a hawk now.
      But I am distracted by mechanical noise. I have not lost track of the physical environment. I am in two places and two states of mind at once. I am floating above the city and at the same time I am aware of my body in bed and the physical life of the night city below me. I search for the source of the noise and see a helicopter, probably going to or from a nearby hospital on an emergency call. I tell myself the noise will go away. Let me stay with the hawk in flight and find out where it wants to take me this time.
      The noise of the chopper blades does fade. But now there is a louder, harsher, churning noise, I think of a military aircraft. This is really pulling me out of my lovely aerial experience. As soon as my attention shifts, I drop back in my dormant body in the bedroom with a soft thud.
      This is a small anecdote, nothing important going on, but little incidents like this remind us that in dreams and dreamlike states, we can fly. This is a talent to be grown and to be mastered. It has been valued in most cultures as far back as we can track even if many in modern society have forgotten.

Call of the Hawk

Many years ago, I spent a weekend driving around the upper Hudson valley of New York. I was profoundly dissatisfied with my life. From the outside, that life may have looked like a dream fulfilled. I was a bestselling thriller writer; publishers competed to offer me high six-figure advances, laid on stretch limos and made sure the Dom Perignon waiting for me in the hotel suites they paid for was perfectly chilled. And my life felt hollow. I knew I had to make a break with big cities and the fast track I had been on and get back in touch with the spirits of the land and my own deeper creative spirit.

      On that upstate weekend, a few miles from the village of Chatham NY, a Realtor showed me some land with a run-down farmhouse that might be available. The house would need a ton of work, but as I walked the land, half of it still primal woodlands where the deer drifted in great droves, I knew in my gut this was a place I needed to be. I sat under an old white oak behind the house, feeling the rightness of the place but also that I needed a further sign.

     A red-tailed hawk circled overhead, dipping lower and lower, screaming urgently at me in a language I felt I ought to be able to understand. I did not speak hawk, but I could not fail to get a message when she proceeded to drop a feather between my legs.  That visitation by the hawk was the clincher. I purchased the farm, moved to the country, and soon found myself changing worlds, which is what can happen when we radically change the way we inhabit the world.

     When we had restored the farmhouse and moved in, I was drifting one night in that in-between state of consciousness the French used to call dorveille, sleep-wake. I found myself gently rising from my dormant body on the bed, in a second body, a dreambody - not an exotic experience for me, as far back as I can remember. I floated out over the night landscape, and found that in my dreambody, I had wings - the wings of a red-tailed hawk, scaled to my size. I had a marvelous time enjoying a highly sensory experience of flight, riding thermals, swooping and soaring, seeing the world at different angles.

     I found myself flying north, over Lake George and then Lake Champlain. I noticed the Northway and modern towns were missing from the landscape below me. I felt the tug of someone else's intention, and followed it, out of curiosity, to a cabin  in the woods somewhere near Montreal, where I was received by a beautiful, ancient indigenous woman. She spoke to me for a long time in her own language, her words like lake water lapping, while she stroked a beaded belt that hung from her shoulder, with the design of a she-wolf and human figures. I was fascinated, but did not understand a single word, any more than I had understood the language of the hawk. I knew I had been in the presence of a woman of power, and I hoped that, since this felt urgently important, more would be revealed.

The design of the belt, in my night vision, proved to be the equivalent of the hawk's feather: a way I could receive and confirm a message even though I lacked a necessary language. My first Iroquois friend - met later through an interesting series of coincidences - was able to show me a wampum belt identical to the one in my vision. It was in the archives of the New York State Museum at that time; since then it has been returned to Onondaga, the traditional capital of the Confederacy of the Six Nations of the Iroquois, or Longhouse People, among whom the Mohawk are Keepers of the Eastern Door. He told me it was believed that the belt was the credentials of an ancient mother of the Wolf Clan of the Mohawk People.

    I entered deeply into the study of the traditions of the ancient dream shaman who had called me, when I was flying on hawk's wings. This opened to me ways of dreaming and healing that were possibly shared by all our ancestors, but which have become atrophied, when not actively suppressed, in modern society. I came to call the ancient shaman Island Woman; this  reflects the fact, which I was able to confirm through historical research, that she was captured as a young girl from the Huron/Wendat, called by the Mohawk the Island People, to be raised as Mohawk. In order to receive her teachings fully, I had to study the Mohawk and Huron languages, and reclaim terms from early sacred vocabulary.

     New dreams eventually called me to leave the land to which the hawk had called me and teach what I had learned about dreaming the soul back home and dreaming for our communities. We sold the farm to a woman who promised to conserve the land.
    As we were leaving the house, after our final checks, I was inspired to go back inside for no reason I could express. I heard a scuffling in the family room we had built, overlooking the old white oak. I found the noise was coming from the hearth. When I removed the firescreen, I found a young red-tailed hawk - a fledgling - that had somehow managed to fall down the chimney between my last two visits. My last action, on the land I acquired because of the hawk, was to carry the young hawk outside, next to my heart, and release her. She flew straight into the branches of the while oak where the first hawk had delivered her message.

The red-tailed hawk has become my most important bringer of omens. A hawk in good shape, flying my way or grabbing a good meal, will give me a surge of confidence for the day that has yet to be disappointed. A dead hawk in power lines will make me batten down the hatches and watch out for challenges.
    I was once very late for a phone interview with a California journalist who was irritated and pressed for time. I wasn't sure the interview was going to go well. She asked me to give an example of how I navigate by synchronicity.

    I was standing on the balcony of a villa overlooking Long Island Sound. Right below me, three bunnies had been scampering about in the grass. As I considered my response to the journalist's question, a red-tailed hawk made a vertical ascent, talons outstretched. It grabbed a bunny and shot straight up with its dinner in its clutches.
    Given my affinity with the hawk, I took this as a good sign, indicating that despite our bumpy start the interview would turn out fine. I was about to recount what had just happened when some inner caution made me pause. I was talking to a journalist for a Californian holistic magazine; for all I knew, she was a vegan who might be horrified by the scene of the hawk taking the bunny rabbit, especially if I reported it with the relish I was feeling. So I told her a black dog story and she loved it and the interview came out just fine. The hawk sign was, once again, reliable.

For fuller versions of my encounters with the red-tailed hawk and Island Woman, please see my books Dreamways of the Iroquois and The Boy Who Died and Came Back.

Drawings by Robert Moss

Wings of the hawk

Members of my dreaming family are helping me to put on the wings of a red-tailed hawk. They are perfectly fitted to my size, and are part of a full outfit. The plumage covers my chest, my back, and my whole head except for the face. Now the dreamers are helping me to put on the face mask. I notice the curve of the beak, and the enormous holes for the eyes. I shake out my wings and tilt forward. I lift up and fly over the furniture, laughing.
    Other dreamers have put on garments and power objects associated with their own allies among the bird tribes and the animal powers. We are together on the sacred mountain where we have gathered for seventeen years to deepen our practice as dream healers and dream ambassadors, to commune with the spirit of the land, and to share adventures in the multiverse. This is so right. There is such joy and excitement among us.

The joy and excitement stayed with me as I rose from this dream last night. 
    I was filled with gratitude for all that Hawk has shown me - and shown to others, through me - since I got in a car and drove 120 miles north of Manhattan in 1986. I was ready to change my life, and was seeking the right ways. I though they were likely to involve putting down deeper roots in my adopted country, living close to the land and its seasons. I had dreamed of an endless struggle that was finally resolved when I followed the counsel of an old poem - Antaeus-like, grow strong. In Greek mythology, Antaeus is the son of Ge, or Gaia, our ancient Mother Earth. Whenever he is thrown in a fight, he rises with renewed and even greater strength, because of his renewed contact with Earth.
   

So on my very first weekend in what I learned to call "upstate" New York, I found a falling-down farmhouse on many acres. Half the land was virgin woodland that had never heard the sound of an ax. When I sat under an old white oak behind the house and watcheda red fox trotting to or from his earth at the edge of a cornfield, I knew this was the right place. But in rational terms, a snap decision to move to this area, where I knew no one, too far to commute to the City, seemed nuts. I needed a confirming sign. As I leaned my back against the oak, a red-tailed hawk came circling overhead, squalling at me in a language I felt I would be able to understand if only I spoke hawk. She dropped a feather between my legs. It was the clincher; I bought the property.

    In the farmhouse, in nights of adventure, I found myself rising from my sleeping body in a second body equipped with the wings of the hawk. It was on hawk's wings that I flew to the ancient arendiwanen ("woman of power") and atetshents ("dreamer") I have called Island Woman in my books. She began my instruction in ways of dreaming and healing that went far beyond anything I had heard about in Western society. She insisted that I learn her language, an archaic form of Mohawk laced with Huron. I discovered that she had an historical identity. She lived in the early 1700s, captured as a child from the Hurons and adopted by the Mohawk people, who eventually raised her up to be Mother of the Wolf Clan.
    In night visions and shamanic journeys over all the years since then, I have found myself flying on the wings of the hawk to perform rescue missions, to scout out the possible future, and to enter the sacred realm of the Peacemaker, from whom we learn that we must seek to heal the minds of our enemies rather than kill them.
    When I have been uncertain of my way, or have simply needed further confirmation, hawk has appeared on the roads of my life in quite literal ways. A hawk going my way is always a good sign for me. So is a hawk having a good breakfast on roadkill, or something livelier. Once, when I was leading a fire ceremony above a waterfall in the western Connecticut woods, a red-tailed hawk came circling overhead, dropping lower and lower, screaming at me like the one above the white oak at the farm. There was again the gift of hawk feathers, not from the bird itself but from a man who had come from Akwesasne, the Mohawk reservation on the Canadian border. He chose this moment to offer me hawk feathers as a gift from Island Woman's descendants.
    We'll gather again on the sacred mountain this weekend. I look forward to fulfilling the dream of putting on the wings - and keen vision - of the hawk again, where my second self met some of his dreaming family last night.
    

Drawing: "Dreaming in Hawk". (c) Robert Moss.

Presence of the hawk

I have taken the red-tailed hawk out of my drum bag. He's a stuffed toy, but when I squeeze him he delivers an excellent recording of the hawk's skirling cry, Keeyrrrrr. When I want to save my vocal chords, I squeeze him instead of attempting to mimic the cry myself. I also use him to appeal to the child selves of participants in my workshops, and to encourage them to connect with the bird tribes - and remember they can fly - for shamanic dream journeying.
    I am sitting on the floor of a workshop space with some of the participants. Nearest to me are a young Asian man and woman. I am delighted to see that the idea of the hawk has come fully alive for them. Each of them now has a living red-tailed hawk. They handle their birds gently, though they are clearly very excited. Equally gently, I rub my toy hawk against the live birds. This is so good, so happy. My toy hawk - should I now call it a hawk fetish? - is bringing living hawks to those who are learning to fly.

I wake from this dream into the golden morning light with the sense that there are hawks in my house. I can feel the stir in the air where they passed. I track, with my inner sight, into the upstairs library, illuminated by a large skylight. I sense the hawks flying up, through the skylight, into the clear blue sky.
    I am always open to friendly visitations from the red-tailed hawk. I moved to a farm in upstate New York after a hawk dropped a feather between my knees when I was sitting under an old white oak behind the house wondering whether to make the move. Later the hawk appeared to wing the lucid dream journeys in which I met the ancient Native shaman, called Island Woman in my books, who taught me that dreaming is the key to soul healing. When I was engaged in writing my new book, Dreaming the Soul Back Home, hawk came to me, batting my arm with its wing while I was drumming for a circle, to carry me to a place of vision where I could renew my contact with Island Woman and her indigenous tradition of seeing and healing.
    Hawk brings the gift of vision. Look at the skull of a red-tailed hawk and you will find that half the space is reserved for the eyeballs. Like all the high-flying birds, it also brings the gift of being able to see what is going on down on the ground from a higher perspective and from different angles. And, at least for me, it is second to none as a mode of transportation.
    Tekateweiarikhtha, as Island Woman taught me to say in the Mohawk language. "I take off now beating my wings."

Wing of Hawk brings me back to basics

Gore Mountain, New York

When we gather round the great fireplace in the meeting lodge on this magic mountain, our assignment for the first group journey is always the same: to re-connect with the animal powers and the spirits of the land. Their presence is palpable even before the drumming begins, a benign wind scented by woodsmoke, pine and spruce.

On Friday night, my assignment for the second journey is to gather tools and resources to deepen our understanding and practice of soul recovery healing. As I drum for the group, there is a great stir of activity in my inner sight and my attention shifts at high velocity between many scenes and sources of guidances.

Then I feel a soft slap on my upper right arm. My eyes remain closed, as I continue to focus on my drumming and pursuing my own visions. The soft slap is repeated. I open my eyes and glance at my neighbor, Carol, who has journeyed with me in this way for nearly 20 years. Is she trying to alert me to something, or has she just lost sense of body space in the grip of her own visions? I see that Carol is motionless, a couple of feet away, absorbed in her own journey.

I close my eyes and once again feel that sensation that something is gently slapping my upper arm. It feels like....a wing. I see it now, and then the whole body of the red-tailed hawk rises before me in a glory of feathers, wings outspread. As it goes up, I feel a stir about my shoulders. Once again, red-tailed hawk is lending me wings. I allow myself to rise up, in a subtle body, while my physical body maintains the drumming and part of my awareness remains focused on the group.

I am carried, at great speed, to a place I know well. I was brought here, to a place in the northern woods, nearly 25 years ago, on the wings of hawk for my first encounter with an ancient Native woman who began my education in her ways of dreaming and healing once I consented to learn her language and change my life. I have called her Island Woman in my books *, because she was brought, as a child captive, from a Huron village on an island in Ontario to become an adopted Mohawk, and eventually Mother of the Wolf Clan of the Mohawk people. When I enter her presence, I am within a blaze of white light. White Wolf is here. To the north, at the source of the light, I see the radiant form of the Peacemaker. Great antlers rise from his head like living candelabra.

Information streams into me, as fast as a burst transmission. I am here to reclaim what I learned in my past studies with Island Woman. Dreams show us the secret wishes of the soul, and in a community that is spiritually alive, people will gather round those who have seen dreams to help them discern the wishes of the soul, as revealed in those dreams - and to take action to honor the soul's wishes. We must move with the soul energy that becomes available through dreams. It is not enough to sit around talking. Soul wants to clap its hands and sing. We want to embody our dreams by singing, by play-acting, by dancing, by every form of spontaneous creative expression.

I am reminded, also, of the great teaching stories of the origin myths of Island Woman's people, and especially the story of the real Hiawatha. Before he became speaker and champion for the Peacemaker, Hiawatha was a fallen man. He fell so low he dined on the body-parts of fellow-humans. His transformation began when he saw his true face in a mirror - the reflective surface of the water in the pot in which he intended to boil up the organs of a butchered enemy. When he saw the radiance and beauty of his greater Self, he gave up his old habits and committed himself to a path with heart, and eventually became the "man of good mind" who led his people out of the Dark Times.

When Hiawatha overcame his most terrible enemy, the tyrant-sorcerer Tododaho, he did not kill him. He combed the serpents of evil out of his hair. After this spiritual cleansing, he raised up his former adversary to join the men of good minds, the rotiyaner, who are confirmed by the clanmothers as the traditional chiefs of the Haudenosaunee, or People of the Longhouse, among whom the Mohawk guard the Eastern door.

There are tremendous lessons here about soul awakening and soul healing. It was hard for me to hold back the tears as the truth of Island Woman's way streamed through my mind and my inner senses. The most important knowledge, it may be, comes through reclaiming what we already know.

Time to return to the circle. I enjoyed riding a thermal over Lake Champlain, and then the view across the mountains to our lodge. My traveling self rejoined my drumming self. drummed the recall, and our dream travelers all came home to the circle, charged with energy and insight for the extraordinary adventures that unfolded over the weekend.

* My fullest account is in Dreamways of the Iroquois.