I\u2019m currently reading Helen Macdonald\u2019s H is for Hawk<\/i>. It is a memoir in which Macdonald, a naturalist and a scholar at Cambridge, recounts her attempt to train a goshawk while struggling to come to terms with her father\u2019s sudden death. The encounters I\u2019ve had with Maine\u2019s birds of prey since my move here from Los Angeles have increased my respect for these formidable creatures, from the osprey that raised their chicks near my husband\u2019s old house along the Kennebec River, to the Cooper\u2019s Hawk that has been performing fly-bys around my morning class at the top of Cole\u2019s Tower this semester. (I like to think he\u2019s finding the complexities of the passive construction in Italian fascinating. My students would undoubtedly disagree). These chance meetings and the loss of my own father last summer made me especially receptive to H is for Hawk<\/i>\u2019s unusual story.<\/p>\n
Forging a relationship of trust with a goshawk is, in Macdonald\u2019s telling, equal parts folly and deliberation. Her decision to engage in such a fraught pursuit springs from the inner turmoil she experiences in the aftermath of her father\u2019s death. While this initially seems like a peculiar response to the loss of a beloved family member, it becomes clear that Macdonald\u2019s taming of the hawk is analogous to the taming of a self unmoored by grief. \u201cHere\u2019s one thing I know from years of training hawks,\u201d she writes. \u201cOne of the things you must learn to do is become invisible.\u201d In these pages and elsewhere in the book, the reader comes to understand that \u201cmanning\u201d the goshawk requires its handler first and foremost to fall away. Yet falling away in H is for Hawk<\/i> is a form of mindfulness that is exactly what the heartsick Macdonald needs to regain herself after her loss. It is also a technique that honors the raptor\u2019s true nature and avoids the trap of anthropomorphization. Indeed, in the memoir it is Macdonald\u2019s younger self who assumes the attributes of the raptors she so admires. Despite the seemingly vast gulf that separates our species from that of the accipiter gentilis<\/i>, Macdonald shows a unique empathy for her ward and, ultimately, our fundamental interconnectedness.<\/p>\n
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I\u2019m currently reading Helen Macdonald\u2019s H is for Hawk. It is a memoir in which Macdonald, a naturalist and a scholar at Cambridge, recounts her attempt to train a goshawk while struggling to come to terms with her father\u2019s sudden death. The encounters I\u2019ve had with Maine\u2019s birds of prey since my move here from … <\/p>\n