WELCOME!

This website is for my family and friends, both new friends and old. I created it for fun because I like talking about things that I find beautiful. I hope you can find something of beauty on my website to take home with you. There are many things I'm interested in, including hawks and tigers, cats and dogs, computers, prairies, mountains, Alaska, and the Catholic Church. I talk about a few of them here. Please come in and take a look.

WHY THE HAWK?

The red-tailed hawk (Buteo jamaicensis) is my favorite bird. The redtail is a raptor, or a bird of prey, which means that it hunts for a living. It is very large, with females (the larger of the two) having wingspans sometimes approaching 5 feet. In flight it is magnificent, soaring on updrafts with scarcely a flap of the wing, and, when there are a male and female in season, flying in wide circles together in a kind of dance of courtship. The hawk is a beautiful creature, as is the eagle—but the hawk has something the eagle has not. Eagles are noble, and rare: hawks are common as the rain. The range of the hawk extends from Alaska to Florida, and you see them in places you'd never see an eagle.

The Catholic faith is more like the hawk than the eagle. For our Faith exalts commonness, the ordinary and the everyday. At Mass, wine (mixed with everyday tap water) and flatbread become for us the Body and Blood of Christ, the most extraordinary things imaginable. But they started out ordinary, though they do not remain so. We are like that. We are born ordinary human beings, but through the ordinary everyday of the sacraments, we become creatures like unto God himself. There is much more to the Church than meets the eye—sort of like the hawk, who is noble as the eagle, though he is just being himself.