When planning our 4th trip to Ireland, the thing we most wanted to do was fly hawks. We had read Helen Macdonald’s astonishingly moving book about training and flying a goshawk, one of the most challenging of the raptors. It helped her grieve the death of her beloved father. The Financial Times calls H is for Hawk “… a dazzling piece of work: deeply affecting, utterly fascinating and blazing with love and intelligence” in their excellent review.
I had recently lost people myself, my mother, my brother, a good friend, and the suffering that Macdonald so eloquently and painfully wrote about spoke to me. She learned about loss, death, and herself while training Mabel, her goshawk. For me, flying a hawk seemed like a small way to touch what Macdonald learned and have a rare opportunity to look wildness in the eye.