WINDRIDER

Up on the scaffold painting the trim yesterday in our part of the big clear blue sky, a sky brought fresh and unbroken to the mountain from Siberia by the strong autumn winds that worked all through the night and day to get the whole thing here...

Taking my breaks as they came, I just had to stop and watch, now and then, a wide-winged, feather-fingered hawk doing the flying he was built to do, riding the ripples in the down-mountain wind-edge, just the way it swirled off the forests and ridges and rose and swooped in big invisible curls of torrential air, the hawk playing the wind like a lifelong pro, living it like a holy text, sailing and plunging right above the treeline below, swinging back and forth on the wind's own waxing and waning, its left and right, up and down, toward and away... tail fanning, wing feathers grasping for every scrap of airy purchase, the hawk wasn't doing anything but that very thing; he wasn't hunting, he wasn't gliding idly, he was just using his wide, fullspread wings to the ultramax they were made for, and as I watched, feeling a tingle of that same feeling in my own very wingbones, I could tell by the way he went on and on, tirelessly doing what he was so very good at-- all the fancy stuff too-- that he was loving it, loving being the way the wind and his wings let him, wanted him, made him, be: his actual full and audaciously skilled windriding self: pure, feathered joy on wings, passioning all that blue sky.