Happy New Year, 01-01-2025
Greetings from San Cristobal, NM. A very Happy New Year from our family to yours.
This week a sunset to see out the old year and a Red-tailed Hawk to usher in the new year.
… and a Red-tailed Hawk to herald the new year, albeit a little bedraggled and battered but still with enough life left to do the things necessary to live life and do what hawks do.
As always thank you for looking. Happy New Year. I appreciate all the support, kindness, comments, and compliments over the past year and beyond. G
The Red-tailed Hawk is one of my animal totems, and I am uplifted every time one appears. What is your animal totem? Please leave a comment if so inclined.
Below is a poem by the Poet Laureate, Ted Hughes, a favorite of mine.
I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed.
Inaction, no falsifying dream
Between my hooked head and hooked feet:
Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.
The convenience of the high trees!
The air’s buoyancy and the sun’s ray
Are of advantage to me;
And the earth’s face upward for my inspection.
My feet are locked upon the rough bark.
It took the whole of Creation
To produce my foot, my each feather:
Now I hold Creation in my foot
Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly –
I kill where I please because it is all mine.
There is no sophistry in my body:
My manners are tearing off heads –
The allotment of death.
For the one path of my flight is direct
Through the bones of the living.
No arguments assert my right:
The sun is behind me.
Nothing has changed since I began.
My eye has permitted no change.
I am going to keep things like this.
— Ted Hughes
