Image credit: Jan Arendtsz
A few weeks ago, my friend Huda called me. She’s a fellow writer, someone who once lived in my city and spent hours every week sitting across from me in cafés. We drank cup after cup of tea, typed frantically on our laptops, shared book recommendations, and indulged in literary gossip. This went on for years, until she moved a few thousand miles away and we were relegated to using email and Skype to stay in touch.
On this day she called me to discuss an unexpected opportunity. She’d recently spoken with an editor who might be interested in her work. Not the manuscript she had spent years writing and revising, but rather another project—one that didn’t exist yet. Huda wanted advice; she felt conflicted about the timing and whether she should direct her energies to something new. I, meanwhile, could only see possibilities in this new path, and I was overcome with optimism for her career.
Just as I began to express this excitement, a hawk swooped past my writing room window and perched on top of a nearby telephone pole. It sat basking in the late January sunshine, regal and fierce and proud.
“It’s an omen,” I told Huda, laughing.
Maybe I wasn’t entirely joking. That was the first time I’d seen a hawk up close in my Cleveland neighborhood. Such a close sighting of a bird of prey—a hawk or owl or even a bald eagle—a bit farther outside the city, or in Cleveland’s extensive Metroparks, was expected. But here, in my neighborhood, and just outside my writing room window? The hawk sat on the telephone pole, seemingly staring into my house. I stared right back.
“There’s your sign,” I told Huda. “You need to do it. You need to try.”
2.
A former employer once called me “eagle-eyed.” Every month during the magazine production process, I proofed pages in a sort of editorial attack mode. That apostrophe isn’t formatted correctly. This author mistakenly used a hyphen in place of an en-dash. The kerning in this paragraph is a touch too tight. I could hold up a page and, with a mere glance, identify a single extra space between two words.
I was detailed-oriented. Perhaps too detail-oriented. Early in my editorial career, I spent so much energy focusing on those tiny askew details that I sometimes missed the bigger picture. I’d mark up a page with red slashes and carets only to later notice the image didn’t actually match the story. I had to be diligent to ensure that key details—the kind most readers would notice far before my nitpicky corrections—didn’t escape my attention.
There’s an expression for my failing: “Can’t see the forest for the trees.” Betsy Lerner borrowed this idiom for her book, The Forest for the Trees: An Editor’s Advice to Writers. The first edition, published in 2000, was required reading for one of my undergraduate creative writing classes (an updated edition was released in 2010). The Forest for the Trees relies on Lerner’s years of experience as an editor and literary agent to shed light on not only the publishing process, but also the different types of writers she’s identified over the years—the ambivalent writer, the natural, the neurotic, the self-promoter, and so on. She writes:
The writer’s psychology is by its very nature one of extreme dualities. The writer labors in isolation, yet all that intensive, lonely work is in the service of communicating, is an attempt to reach another person. It isn’t surprising, then, that many writers are ambivalent, if not altogether neurotic, about bringing their work forward . . . There is no stage of the writing process that doesn’t challenge every aspect of a writer’s personality. How well writers deal with these challenges can be critical to their survival.
I thought of Huda and her uncertainty about switching to a new project. It was true that she had many small factors to consider as she made her decision, but she also had the landscape of her career—the bigger picture—demanding her attention.
3.
A few hours after Huda called me, I took a walk in my neighborhood. I’d only gone a few blocks when a great cracking commotion broke out in a tree to my left. I watched, horrified, as a bird of prey dropped from the tree, crashing violently into branches as it fell. The bird turned over and over itself in a wild, uncontrolled freefall until it landed with a great jarring plop onto the ground. There it struggled for a few moments to right itself, holding one wing out at an awkward angle. It glanced at me. It attempted to flex its wing. It made no move to fly.
I took a step closer. This bird was a hawk. And maybe not just any hawk—it could well be the same bird I’d seen just a few hours before. The same hawk I’d jokingly told Huda was a good omen for her writing career. Now here it lay, injured and vulnerable and exposed.
I pulled out my phone and called a local nature center, where a wildlife rehabilitation specialist assured me they could treat the hawk. But there was a catch.
“We don’t have the resources to travel to pick up injured animals,” he said. “You’ll have to bring it in yourself.”
He explained that I could throw a cardboard box over the hawk, slide another piece of cardboard underneath it, and use duct tape to hold everything together. Then I had to somehow maneuver the box into my car and drive the twenty minutes to the nature center, all with a wild hawk as my cargo.
“Just be sure to avoid the talons,” he told me when I asked for safety advice. “They attack with their talons when threatened.”
I hung up and stared at the hawk, which had tucked in its wing but otherwise remained huddled on the ground. I didn’t want to leave this injured bird exposed, but I also wasn’t exactly eager to catch it in a flimsy box and wrangle it into my car.
No matter what happened, I decided I could never tell Huda about the hawk. I wasn’t about to admit that the bird I’d designated as the symbol of all her publishing dreams had come crashing down at my feet.
4.
Do a search online for “hawk symbolism” and you’ll find lots of earnestly spiritual websites that detail what it means to encounter or dream about or identify with a hawk.
The hawk is a messenger. The hawk is a protector. The hawk represents wisdom, creativity, and the freedom of flight. The hawk embodies intelligence and aggression. The hawk signals an awakening, a deepening awareness—a need to view things from a greater distance above.
I sought that greater distance in my own work. As I progressed in my editorial career, I consciously stood back and looked at the magazine from afar, seeing it for what it was as a whole instead of all its minuscule components. I improved over time, but I remain aware of this detail-driven weakness even today. Occasionally, I drop back to my old eagle-eyed ways, missing the bigger picture. Missing the entire forest that’s right in front of my face.
5.
The wildlife expert had asked me to email him a photo of the hawk. I walked up to the bird—it remained in place, glaring at me—and snapped a picture. While I waited for a reply, I took a walk around the block. I imagined hurrying home to find a box, cardboard, and duct tape. I imagined catching the bird and putting it in my car and rushing to make it to the nature center before closing time. I thought through all those steps with dread but also determination. If I had to, I decided, I could catch a hawk.
The wildlife expert looked at my photo and emailed me back. Perhaps, he suggested, the hawk had caught some prey and was simply feeding.
Feeding? I’d watched it tumble out of a tree and hold out its wing and refuse to move even when I approached. But I’m no ornithologist, so I returned to the hawk to reevaluate.
This time, I noticed the bird’s wing was folded neatly against its side, no longer bent at an awkward angle. And as I drew even closer, I saw it: a gray, feathery tuft on the ground. The hawk was standing on a dead squirrel, the tail clutched between its talons. The reality of the situation hit me at once. The hawk had captured a squirrel in the tree. Maybe its fall appeared chaotic and uncontrolled, but it was merely the aftermath of a successful hunt.
This hawk didn’t need to be rescued. It needed me to leave it alone, to back up and create some distance.
6.
In the introduction to The Forest for the Trees, Lerner writes: “At the very least, I hope that in contemplating your life as a writer you may get some perspective on your work, and in gaining that perspective, see the forest for the trees.”
I had been so focused on the steps I’d have to take to help the hawk that I failed to see what was right before me: a wild animal trying to feed. In the same way, I needed to put Huda’s new opportunity into perspective. I had to step back and view her career not as a single towering tree but as a whole forest, full and deeply rooted.
In the end, she decided not to pursue the new project, or at least not right away. The timing wasn’t right, and she had another manuscript to finish. But postponing this opportunity was not a failure. Her career wouldn’t be derailed by one spectacular fall—instead, she’d continue feeding her writing life day by day, word by word.
After that hawk finally flew away, healthy and whole, I told Huda the full story. I told my friend that the wild bird I’d used as a metaphor for her writing career wasn’t wounded or vulnerable. Instead, it grabbed its prey and glared out at the world, just daring someone to try to take it away.