hawk

“the sky is the realm of the hawk.  Through its flight it communicates with humans and with the great creator spirit.  It awakens our vision and inspires us to a creative life purpose…those who have the red tail hawk as a totem will be working with the kundalini…it may pop up as a totem at that point in your life when you begin to move toward your soul purpose more dynamically…the red tail hawk is usually a permanent resident in an area, although occasionally it might migrate.  This permanency reflects that as a totem, this hawk will be with you permanently once it shows up.”  Ted Andrews, Animal Speak

It started a week ago, and now we spend a few minutes together every day--The red tail hawk that lives in our garden.  She is surprisingly tolerant of our presence here; in fact, I would say she has been pretty outgoing about it.  The red tail only appearing on full-grown adults, the hawk has many years of residency on this land prior to our arrival. 

Encounters with wild animals have long been interpreted for their spiritual and other worldly meanings.  Particular details about the encounter can color this interpretation.  Was the animal soaring over head or perched on a fence post?  Did it come from the direction of the east—inspiration?  Or did it come from the west—creativity?  Or perhaps from our collective ancestral elders to the north?

ever since the hawk presented itself for the first time last week she has displayed flights in and from all of the cardinal directions, as well as directly overhead—stimulating our conversations and imaginations to a higher level of excited consciousness.  As the introductory quote suggests, hawk has arrived in our lives at a guttural heave-ho forward as we are finally prepared to engage with the regulatory and permitting aspects of achieving our goals towards developing a sustainable land based business on our new land. 

It’s hard to believe that it has been nine full months of preparing for this application.  Although we did not officially purchase our land until October, our process of due diligence began way back in July.  From that day forward we have been involved in a relatively constant research and development stage preparing for this week—applying for our county permits. 

It is certainly the end of one phase and the beginning of another, as we now prepare for their responses, conditions, and highly anticipated approval.  This is all likely to take an additional six to nine months, during which we will prepare for how to actually implement our plans when the approval finally comes.

One big element of this process is introducing ourselves to our neighbors—one by one—face to face—meeting them, letting them get a feel for who we are as people, and introducing them to our vision and future goals on the property.     So far this has been a highly rewarding process filled with genuine support, bottles of wine, gifts of handmade pottery, and extremely helpful local advice.  We are extremely grateful that this has been the case.

our area is so sparsely populated that some of our neighbors actually live across a pretty large canyon.  Here we are at their vineyard pointing to our home.  Can you see the tiny white speck in between my fingers?

And here is a shot of their land from our garden:

if you look to the very left (above our fruit trees, and above the firs on our side of the mountain) you can see a clearing in the forest on the next mountain over--this is a portion of their ridgetop vineyard.  I only show this to point out the relative distance to some of our "neighbors" in the "area".  here is a shot from within their vineyard: 

our process of design and preparation has been and continues to be constant.  The trick for us has been mastering the timeline and schedule in as stress-free of a manner as possible.  Occasional sleepless nights and wakeless days have resulted from poor mastery in this field, however, the trend is improving. 

I hope this small update finds you all well, and I hope to get back into writing more frequently. 

Nine months after finding this land we find ourselves having birthed an official Use Permit application.  We have put it out into the universe, now, and with any luck, it will soon take life.