Sunday, August 29, 2010

Bird Encounters

On Wednesday of this past week (08/25/2010), my husband and I drove an injured dove to a wildlife rescue center. The dove lives on our condo association property at the far end of our building.  It's mate has been staying near the place where I picked up the dove for the past few days. This little dove has been heavily on my mind, and I may not know for another week if it survived it's injury.

Yesterday, just past noon. I sat in my love seat near our front windowed wall which borders our partially enclosed patio. There is a roof that slopes down and 3 walls surrounding the patio.  You can only come onto the patio from one direction. I was sitting down to finish a book: The Portal; An Initiate's Journey into the Secret of Rennes-le-Chateau , by Patrice Chaplin. ( I was drawn to this book because of my interest in the  Reindeer Goddess. See my prior post here.) Before I could open the book, I was startled. A hawk had swooped under the roof over-hang, and landed on the back of patio chair. S/he sat there calmly staring at me through the wall length window. It was no more than 4 feet from me and level with my face. I was stunned. Then it turned, lifted off carefully, and glided down & out of our small patio space. I have not seen large birds on this patio before. It is very small,  9" by 9". The hawk definitely knew what it was doing: it didn't appear to be startled upon landing.

I wonder if what I was reading was part of the bigger picture in this encounter? Later that afternoon I read this passage in the book: 
"I talked about a french composer, Oliver Messiaen, and his music celebrating birds, his understanding of their existence as being partly in the realm of spirit." (page 312)
Also, the book is about ancient inter-dimensional doorways. I was sitting in a liminal space, inside looking outside.

Or could be part of the sequence of bird encounters I've had? In the past, this patio has been used  for hummingbird rescue and triage (see here) . The dove we drove to the wildlife rescue center was briefly on the patio table nestled in clean linens.

Does anyone have ideas what this encounter means?

*Above painting by Susan Seddon Boulet*