At the battlefield’s edge Lookout Mountain was calling to me.
As I walked up the rocky mountainside, entering a powerful space, I passed a holly tree. Then drawing the Shaman’s Breath I prayed, asking for an answer to a frustration that was vexing me.
A few minutes passed. On opening my eyes, there was an odd sight; in the holly tree there now was a perfect rabbit’s tail, head-high, wafting in the breeze. I hadn’t noticed it before on the way in, but I knew this was meant for me; rabbit is one of my guides.
I considered this puzzlement for a long while.
I had prayed for guidance once before on this mountain. On my way down, there on the side of the trail, atop a sandstone rock, formed in twigs from the last night’s rain was a clear number fourteen–– the number of the Red Tailed Hawk. The Messenger has been with me my whole life. The thread lead to the Water Bearer. What was shared with me that day was a paradox of water; we are each vessels, sometimes filling, and others being filled–nothing is lost in the exchange.
The answer to my prayer was about destiny. My work there would not be in vain.
Then today on the mountainside the thought occurred to me––
The rabbit’s tail was no longer useful to the rabbit. And it is of no use to the hawk. It had to be somewhere, and it was here, in this holly tree, perfectly out of place.
I was soon to move to Vermont, my work here was complete.
––I had become a rabbit’s tail in a holly tree!
Relieved, I felt I had received the message and an answer to my prayer, prepared for whatever would happen next. In gratitude I gathered the delicate whiteness of the cottontail, like wrapping a breath of smoke with a scrap of paper, and slowly returned down the long mountain trail.
On the winding drive home, past old battlefields and bivouacs, aging factories of rust and smoke-stained bricks, the hawk appeared from nowhere.
He swooped in, just in front of my windshield, flying with me!
For an entire city block the red and black of his tail held me in his keep as he watched me, looking over his shoulder through the glass. I could have plucked a feather with my hand.
He was hailing me, brothers on a path.
Then he vanished with the blue gray clouds, and released me from that troubled ground.
