H is for Hawk

Helen Macdonald’s ‘H Is for Hawk’

New York Times review states

"The premise of her memoir is simple: Macdonald loses her bearings after her beloved father’s sudden death. She retreats from the human world. She’s a poet, historian and longtime falconer, and for complicated reasons, she seizes upon a strange yet sublime prescription for what ails her: She will raise and train a young goshawk, a cur of a bird to some, notoriously difficult to tame. Bigger, “bulkier, bloodier, deadlier, scarier,” she says, than other hawks they are sometimes confused with."

The book is also a history and psyco analysis of t.h.white, how to raise a falcon, and her dealing with death, and she writes lovely prose. I enjoyed her writing first and then I became involved with the story.

I is remind him in the month book where she describes looking for the world through to buy two frame to capture it all and McDonald describes her father's approach to photography

"look through the viewfinder. Stops you being involved. Stops you being scared. You No longer possess a body to fall or fail; all that exist is a square and finally groundglass and the world seen through it,"

That allows you to be a watcher in being a watcher you can learn who you are and what you can be.

In dealing with her father's death she thought that to heal her hurt she need in the flee to the wild and that what you need to do was to turn to people and for holding other human hands wildness is not a panacea for the human soul too much in the air could corrode it  to nothing.

She cautions  against being a tourist in the world as opposed to been involved in the world and isolation can bring further isolation. That community brings healing: it is the place to heal a broken heart. " I must fight  always against  forgetting" truly a gospel axiom of telling us we need to remember !

You have to be patient. If there is something you want very much, you just have to be patient and wait.

On immunity an inoculation By Eola Biss

A well crafted , well thought out book, that reads almost like a collection of essays. She , while dealing with her own doubts , uncovers part of why people--privileged, educated people, no less--choose not to vaccinate their children, disregarding scientific evidence and social responsibility. 

She hooked me with her first metaphor of Achilles , and kept me from definition to definition. 

Definitely on the 'should read 'list . The following our conversation starters from her book:

Immunity is a myth the story suggest and no mortal can ever be made invulnerable. 

A trust – in the sense of valuable asset placed in the care of someone to whom it does not ultimately belong – captures more or less my understanding of what it is to have a child.

Heard immunity – thinking not in terms of how it affects a single body but also in terms of how it affects the collective body with community mass vaccination becomes far more effective than individual vaccination. Those of us who draw on collective immunity owe our health to our neighbors.

Their primary concern in other words was with people like them- risk groups. Vaccination works by listing the majority in the protection of the minority.

When we encounter information that contradicts our believes we tend to doubt the information not ourselves.

Metaphors of alternate medicine address our base anxieties when we feel bad we want something unambiguously good.

The purpose of heroic medicine was not so much to heal the patient as it was to produce a measurable and ideally dramatic effect for which the patient could be billed.

Refusing immunity the privilege 1% are sheltered from risk when they draw resources from the other 99%.

Paternalism is interference with the liberty of another for the purpose of promoting some good preventing some harm. Not always necessarily a bad thing.

The term conscientious objector, now associated primarily with war, originally referred to those who refused vaccination.

Think about the conscience is an inner voice to keep your actions in line with publicly defendable moral standards (which may shown the lack of conscience in today's society)

Stale metaphors reproduce stale thinking mixed metaphors confuse.

It Is essential to motherhood – we must live the questions our children raise for us.

Jean-Paul Sartre said "freedom is what you do with what's been done to you."

Community is shared space - a garden we tend together