NEXT TASK

Cleaning off some garden nets on this cold, cloudy and rainy but sometimes abruptly sunny morning great for rainbow surprises, I turned to scan the scene and decide on my next garden task when I saw, about 200 meters away, over the long slope of rice paddies terracing down toward the Lake, a cloud of large hawks - with those broad wings they can make quite a cloud - circling and diving all in one area, taking sudden turns diving out of sight behind a ridge-- likely a farmer over there tilling a paddy.

I love watching hawks, they make great eye food. There's also a centering magic in seeing the way they know the sky by heart, the way they show the invisible wisdom of the air itself in how they tweak their wings to ride it with such cavalier grace. I just stood there watching, finally letting my sleevepulling mind go gliding and diving on its own wings amidst the hawks, there against the green swoop of the mountainside.

Next task? What next task?

SO DID YOU DREAM OF AN EGGPLANT OR WHAT?

Even better, you dreamed of a hawk; or if you had the best dream of all you dreamed of Mt. Fuji. No? Well at the very least, some tobacco or maybe a blind acupressurist?

According to the tradition of hatsuyume, the first dream you have in the new year is auspicious, and tradition covers some pret-ty weird corners of the old racial memory, as we all know. Probably the weirdest corners we all know. But tobacco or a blind acupressurist? Who could combine those things, let alone as sequentially auspicious, but tradition?

So here's to tradition for the new year. We could sure use more of it, by the look of the leftovers from last year. BTW, any traditionalists know if chocolate ice cream in a highly foreign country is anywhere on that list?

OF TOMORROW

Ah, the deep pleasure it is to sit here at the end of a fine hardworking day, entire body wrapt in that luxurious lassitude of labor (strictly unintentional alliteration) and watch the hawks riding the air swells in timeless professionalism, enjoy the swallows filling the still-blue air with their kind of writing, take part in the sun setting in its lightspilling way over the blue lake...

From here where I sit I also overlook the woodsplitting stump where I’ve just been laboring into the shadows, the wheelbarrow resting on tomorrow’s woodpile; with cold beer in warm hand I trace the striations of calm and turbulence wrangling their curlicues on the boat-empty water as the lake too settles from a day’s work, rolling over in shades of blue and gray toward tomorrow, its fluxing currents of warm and cold not so different from my own - we are ancient relatives, after all - it is a time of welcome solitude for the lake and I, its body knowing as well as mine the traverse of sun into stars, light into dark, warmth into cold, here in this now that is the source of all understanding, of genesis, of tomorrow.

Darkness: when at last
the hawks can't see
comes frogsong

THE BULLY CHAIN

Way up there, a passing crow with nothing better to do in the sky starts harassing a gliding hawk, the crow staying near the serene one and making sudden but not really genuine lunges at the much larger bird, who nevertheless must react, as the crow knows, by bunching its wings and twisting to raise its talons toward the floppy one, who by then is already at a safe distance, preparing to move in again when the hawk resumes its elegant flight.

On the face of it, you'd think it might be flight jealousy, what else could pertain way up there where winged bodies do business, the aerodynamically sophisticated hawk being crudely bullied by the ungainly crow, who flops across the sky like a feathered saddlebag. But sparrows and other little birds to the same thing to crows, so it's kind of a reverse bully chain going on-- seems if you can do it, you just do it. A back-atya for predation, too...

The hawk does alright anyway - as always - manages to keep an eye on his territory below well enough, but soon another crow who also has nothing better to do in the sky spots the airy argument and gallumphs over to join the action. The two crows gang up to give the taloned one a much harder time, coming from up-down and left-right, the hawk soon having to move away from these irritants in long glides, dragging the crows with him into the distance.

Into the spatial vacuum immediately glides another hawk with no intention of helping out his harried fellow, simply takes over the abandoned hunting ground; another big difference between crows and hawks. The guffawing crows, unlike the solitary contemplative hawk, seem to be having a good time at the bully business; their teasing movements have a clownish boisterousness to them, though the action is silent, no circus band is playing. Hawks, though, are the true masters of the sky; the crows just use it to get from place to place, with a now and then a spot of irritation along the way.

CROW REMEMBERS

Hurricane now gone by, trailing a heavily clouded sky. The big wind was called Man-yi or number 4, depending on whether it was Korean or Japanese - they both claimed it, had different predictions for the big windy spiral, neither of which panned out - the Korean weatherpeople expected it to plow up the center of their peninsula, the Japanese ditto expected it to roil its way up the center of their archipelago, posing a serious wind and rain threat to every major city, indeed, every village and house in the country, but they didn't give regular updates on tv as one in a focused world would expect.

Surf the tv channels urgently for the latest and all you got was it the usual celebrities cooking and eating, the usual celebrities in silly quizzes and the usual celebrities in hot tubs, they just carried on with the the always startling vacuousness of regular programming - such as that is - in the hours after warning the nation of imminent weather disaster. Which approach would have been disastrous had the hurricane performed as the weatherpeople predicted-- there would have been no time to batten down, evacuate, whatever; just thank the big wind (the weather-p as wrong as they so often are), that it pivoted slightly at a crucial point and just broadshouldered its way along the side of the country, with pretty strong winds and heavy rain...

Yesterday afternoon, after the rain had stopped, out in the stormedge, the sky was empty of life except for a crow, of all birds. As I watched him way up there quietly doing his thing, it came to me that back in the way-ancient days, when the animals made their early tradeoffs, the crows traded aerodynamic skills for the kind of lowdown savvy that enabled them to survive yet be lazy, a quality that over the eons of crow-cunning evolution has led to the uniquely non-aerodynamics that crows exhibit today, such as understanding the nature of trash bags and the potential value of shiny objects. But apparently they've never forgotten what they gave up in exchange, as I saw in the sky.

You know how crows have always flown since the big tradeoff, all wingknuckles, gawk and bentfeathers when it comes to serious aerodynamics, outflown and pestered all the time even by sparrows. Well that crow was recalling what joys his kind had once embodied, he was ecstatic at being able to fly so fast, even moreso that the hurricane was doing all the work. He wasn't about to go sit down in a safe tree like every other bird, including the hawks-- he kept gawkily climbing, spreading those big black wings and speed-spiraling in wide circles alone, now and then gliding straight then diving swiftly even as a hawk: he was remembering the ancient but alien feeling of speed and elegance, wanted to do so for as long as it lasted.

I kept expecting maybe a YIHAAA! or corvine equivalent, but being savvy he wasn't reckless. He was silent with a kindred to the concentration one summons in zen archery, after a target unknown but remembered, a black bundle of nostalgia in a darkening sky.

As for me watching - and you too, I hope - may we so savor own hurricanes...

HAWK IN LOVE: MOVE CAR

Last evening I was driving home when I noticed in the dim light of the rear view mirror something that looked like two straps hanging down from the interior ceiling rack in the back. I made a mental post-it to straighten that jumble out in the morning.

True to my note, in the morning I went out and opened the side door of the van, got in and reached to put the straps back in their places, at which point I found out there were no straps hanging down: it was something on the outside of the back window.

I got out, went around to the back and there observed in the morning sunlight that it was two impressive streaks of bird contribution. Just a bit of bad synchronicity. So I got out the hose and the long-handled car brush and began to scrub away what by this time was more like stucco. It ran from the roof down to the bumper! Then I got out the ladder to get at the roof part of the mess and when I got up where I could see the whole roof, it was like looking at the floor of Jackson Pollock's studio.

Turns out that during hawk courtship time, one of the taloned romeos had taken as his love perch - whence he sang his heartfelt laments to the seductively spiraling Mae Wests of his species - the long bare branch that shoots out from one of the tall hinoki trees in front of the house, right above our open-air garage. This effectively transformed our pristine red van into a hawk outhouse.

So I hosed and scrubbed the whole roof until it was as shiny red as the rest of the van, which took quite a while, but since I was up there... I myself was in no danger of a direct contribution, now that hawk courting is over for the season, but looking at the branch I could see that from that high up, and from that large a bird with that large a contribution, the impact upon the car roof must have been considerable, which explained the decidedly Pollock effect... and was that the strange distant booming I'd been hearing last week, that I thought might be a hearing problem?

Anyway, now I have to make another note to myself, on a large, long-term mental post-it: "Hawk in love: move car."

BIRD PARTY

Today I observed the first of the Springtime bird parties around here, when the birds really go wild. The party starts when the farmers flood and harrow their paddies, one by one down the mountainside. Today it was the paddy across the road.

Hearing all the avian commotion, I left breakfast and stepped out on the deck to behold a couple dozen hawks, wings wide, swarming the air directly over the paddy, doing their lazy lacework just above the farmer as he harrowed slowly back and forth with his small tractor. Now and then a hawk would swoop down and snatch a grub or a frog from the freshly turned mud that had lain fallow for eight months.

Over in the far trees some egrets were watching from the sidelines, waiting for the farmer to leave. Darkly prominent at the scene were a bunch of crows, who weren't dining at the moment (since they don't wade); their only interest was in harassing any hawks that weren't just sitting on the paddy banks watching with sharp beaks and talons at the ready.

When the farmer finally left, the egrets stepped in and slowly stalked the fresh buffet, selecting breakfast while the hawks kept gliding, swooping and grabbing at the sky-colored water, the crows now and then selecting a particular airborne hawk and closely following him around from above as he scanned the water, then at just the right moment swooping down and mussing up the hawk's hair.

When the hawks had had their fill and glided off into the rest of the air, the crows' fun was done so they left too, leaving the paddy mirror to the slow-motion egrets who, now having the serendipitous banquet all to themselves, took their long-legged graceful time until the entire paddy had been thoroughly enjoyed.

Tomorrow morning comes the next party, one venue lower.

BRIEF TRIPS TO HEAVEN

Within splendid lakeside breezes among famed black pines I watch hawks catch fish too big for them, then watch them react much the way humans often do with big ideas-- can't regain the elevation, the effort is too much and they have to drop the fish.

One such hawk flew close overhead and I could see that the fish looked amazed: it hung there stock still in the awe that comes with extreme experience; then the fish was dropped back into his world and said to his schoolmates: You're not gonna believe this, but there's another world above this one! They took him at his word, or so it appeared, because after that it seemed like a lot more fish were caught and dropped.

Before I let go of this idea, by a rough count I'd surmise that the hawks and fish have a deal going: one meal for every ten rides into heaven.