Campus Hawk

This morning as I drove onto campus, I saw a car stopped in the oncoming lane and something on the ground in front of it. The something had a strange shape, and from a distance I couldn't figure out what it was. As I got closer, however, I realized that it was a hawk standing in the same position as the one in this picture. With its wings out like that, I thought maybe it was hurt, but when I got as close as the photographer seems to have, I saw its prey—a small dark-colored bird—lying on the pavement beneath it. The hawk spread its wings that way, I guess, both to protect its kill and to prevent its escaping (if the bird were only stunned or playing possum).

The hawk and bird created one of the brutal scenes of nature, right there in the middle of campus.

Then I had another thought.

In the mechanical uproar of this modern world, I wondered if the hawk knew that just a couple of feet behind it, looming over it almost in the same way that it loomed over its kill, sat a bright blue PT Cruiser. If the car were to have a responsive gas pedal, a quick press and the vehicle might have hit the hawk in the same way that the hawk had hit the bird. The hawk might have been thinking, on some level, 'Mine! Mine! Mine!' What if the PT Cruiser—or its driver—were thinking the same thing?

Then I had another thought.

All of all the things I think are mine, even the life that I live and think is mine—What is the PT Cruiser looming over me with the capability to take it all away, take it maliciously or thoughtlessly?

Then the moment ended. As I drove by and looked down at the hawk, it flew away, seeming to disappear—with its kill—right before my eyes. And the PT Cruiser edged forward in its search for a parking space.