So, yesterday, I was in the Garden. I had sat Zazen and was walking Kinhin (walking meditation). I was just about to leave the zone I was in, when, suddenly, a huge Cooper’s Hawk »very nearly landed right on my head. As in came within an inch or so of landing there. I felt the power of its wingstrokes, and was completely surprised.

At the last moment, the hawk diverted to a nearby tree and we looked at each other briefly. A bit later, it flew to another nearby tree, and appeared to be hunting. Before I left, it did a flyover on the way out of the area.

Afterwards, I was reflecting on this. Of course, I »wanted to believe that this was a secret metaphysical experience. That the hawk was somehow deeply connected to me. That I was a bird-man. All kinds of things. But I remained open and curious. At the time, I couldn’t come up with an explanation. My simple explanation was that the hawk had been momentarily confused, or perhaps thought my head was a prey animal?

I had to sleep on it to understand a more likely explanation. Which is that there are a few tall stumps in the area that make pretty good overlooks for hunting. I suspect that, had I been standing still, it might have landed on my head. I was wearing a thick, brown hoodie at the time. But what I think happened was this: it mistook me for a standing stump, and was about to land on my head for purposes of terrain scanning… when it suddenly realized I was an animal/human, and not a stump.

This doesn’t exclude metaphysical glosses… but had I started there »first, I would have become largely deluded. Because hawks are not likely to risk their lives in metaphysical adventures with humans. This doesn’t mean it never happens, but rather, parsimony is a good place to begin to try to understand a novel experience… find the simple, reasonable explanations »before you go inventing wild spirit stories. There will be time for those later, and I consider it wise to resist their invention prior to trying to understand situations with a clear, coherent mind.

Of course, I am pretty tight with the birds… but I think what happened here was mostly ordinary, with a few branches of the nonordinary tangentially involved…

… this leaves the terrain of what I will make of the experience open to me… in many ways… more open… than if I had collapsed into either explanation or fantasy…