Meditation on a Cooper’s Hawk

I saw a Cooper's hawk today—Accipiter cooperii—perched on my neighbor's dead maple like it was auditioning for stillness. The way its slate-gray wings folded so precisely against its body, a masterclass in efficient design. What struck me wasn't the hooked beak or the rust-barred chest, though both were textbook perfect, but how it held its head: tilted slightly, as if listening to something beneath the surface of the air.

I've been thinking about that tilt all day, how it mirrors the way I've caught myself leaning into conversations lately, my right ear leading as if it could somehow pull meaning from the spaces between words. My body's been doing this more and more—compensating, adjusting, like the way a plant will bend toward light even when you're not watching. The doctors have a name for it: progressive unilateral hearing loss. As if giving it a clinical name makes it less like drowning in slow motion.

But that hawk, with its asymmetrical pose, wasn't diminished. Through my binoculars, I could see each feather articulated like fingers, the way they shifted in the wind like pages of a book being thumbed by an invisible reader. The bird wasn't missing anything—it was gathering, collecting data from every direction, its whole body an antenna for survival.

Sometimes I wonder if loss is just another word for transformation, the way a hawk's skeleton is honeycombed with air sacs, hollow places that don't make it less but rather lift it higher. Maybe my body, too, is learning to hollow out new spaces, to let sound travel different routes to reach me. When the hawk finally launched itself into flight, it didn't so much push off as release, letting gravity reshape itself around its wings. I stood there long after it disappeared, my head still tilted, listening to the emptiness it left behind, surprised to find it full of something like hope.