I see red-tailed hawks a lot. I can't help it. They are everywhere and my eye seems automatically drawn to them. It's gotten to the point where Susan doesn't like me to look up for fear that I will see one. So I don't, but then I see them sitting on fences or telephone poles. I have seen them flying alongside my car, which is particularly freaky, seeing this bird of prey keeping pace with you at 40 mph. The most disturbing is when I come to a literal crossroad and a hawk is sitting on the fence or pole in front of me.

I never saw red-tailed hawks until I was 13. Of course they existed, but I never saw them. At the time, I was living in the suburbs of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Our house backed onto woods that went for about two miles before coming out on a road. When I was 13 they started clearing those woods to build a new housing track (the building of houses seems to be another reoccurring theme in my life) which cut the woods down to about a quarter of a mile behind the house.

The time from 13 to 15 was probably the loneliest time in my life (with the exception of maybe the first year in LA). My parents separated when I was 13. "Separated" probably isn't the best way to describe it. What actually happened is my father had taken a job in Minneapolis and was spending the weeks there and driving the 500 miles home every weekend. One Friday he came home to find a process server waiting on the doorstep to give him divorce papers. I find it odd that I describe this experience through his eyes. I suppose I do because I don't really remember what happened myself. I do know that we weren't home. My mother had taken me and run across the border into Arkansas, fearing that my father would become violent. This wasn't a realistic fear. My parents' marriage had been coming apart for years and I think Dad wanted out. He just didn't have the courage to pull the plug himself. And my mother wanted out. She wanted her own life free from him (and eventually from me as well).

This was my first real exposure to the concept of my parents as frail and human, as needy emotionally as I was. Later I would learn that my father considered, on his drive back to Minneapolis (he had nowhere else to go), driving his Corvette into a telephone pole at 80 mph.

He didn't, of course. He sped past countless telephone poles on his way back up I35. I wonder if there were any red-tailed hawks looking down on him.

My mother seemed desperate, although not out of any fear for her safety. Her desperation was deeper than that. If Jani was able to keep her schizophrenia at bay until 3, my mother was able to do it until her early forties, at which time she began to descend into paranoia, believing my father was a Mafia hit-man and had millions of dollars stored in a Singapore bank account (if you know anything about finance, you will know Singapore is about the last place you want to stash ill-gotten funds).

At 13 I did not understand why we were running to Arkansas. Now I do. Now, having watched my daughter grow up in the shadow of mental illness, I understand that what my mother was running from, what she was afraid of, was inside her own head. Jani is calmer now but as a young child she described her legs itching, which could only be relieved by movement. At first it was moving all the time, clapping her hands, flapping her arms, running, climbing, swinging. Then it became hitting herself.

And then hitting us. It was heartbreaking to watch Jani hit herself repeatedly because she was trying to not to hit us or Bodhi. When Jani hits it is not rage or hatred. It is to her like scratching an itch. When you get an itch, your skin will crawl until you scratch it. Scratching for Jani meant hitting. It was how she relieved the itch inside her head.

My mother divorced my father, took me, and ran to Arkansas trying to scratch an itch inside her own mind.

Arkansas was a mystical place to me as a child. I know we Californians think of it as hicksville and it is, but Arkansas produces more semi-precious and precious stones than any other state in America (it has the only diamond mines in Americas). A land of thickly wooded mountains and deep green valleys, we traveled across the peaks of the Ozarks and let the dark green forests close in on us. You could drive miles without seeing another soul. At the side of the roads were often little stores selling all manner of crystals mined from the surrounding caves. I threw myself into those crystals. Smokey Crystal, filled with carbon, which the Kansas Tribe believed if sucked negative emotions out of you into the smokey brown crystal. Amethyst, rose quartz, tiger eye. I still have many of them.

You could lose yourself in the Ozarks. It was powerful country.

I clung to my stuffed bear throughout the trip. I knew the end of my parents marriage was for the best. I had been waiting for it for years. But I suppose it felt like going in for a necessary operation that you had been avoiding for years. I think what rattled me was the sudden loneliness. I had already essentially been alone with my mother for years (my father was always escaping on business trips) but I always had his return to look forward to. Now I was completely alone with my mother in primordial woods, with the tree canopy closing in on us the further we moved into Arkansas. I was afraid of us losing ourselves. No, check that. I was afraid that the woods would speed up the loss of my mother, not my father. I knew my father would go back to the world. But my mother was racing headlong into her own world and I was the last line against her madness. She was ceasing to be my mother and becoming something else. An entity not my mother but wearing her body.

By the time we got back to Tulsa, I knew I was alone. Again, I didn't feel bad about losing my father. I knew my father would be okay. I was losing my mother, even though she was still physically there.

I have never realized until tonight how much my experience with Jani has been an echo of that with my mother. Jani helped me to understand my mother emotionally. She helped me, more importantly, to forgive her. That has been Jani's gift to me, the greatest gift a child can give a parent.

So I left my house, in which I felt very alone even though my mother was there (she was not there really) and went for long explores in the woods behind our house. One day I hear a cry. It is type of cry you hear in movies attributed to bald eagles (bald eagles do not actually have very majestic cry at all so Hollywood sound engineers have used red-tailed hawk cries in lieu of eagles for decades). I looked up and saw a red-tailed hawk wheeling in circles above and about a hundred yards in front. I watched the hawk turn circles around the trail in front of me at an altitude of about one hundred feet for what must have been about a minute. Then the hawk disappeared. I continued along the trail (a trail I had blazed the year before). Approximately one hundred yards further on down the trail, sitting on top of a dirt mound where the trail rose, was a perfect red-tailed hawk feather. A tail feather. Mostly brown on top (meaning a young hawk) and white below.

Michael John Schofield at 00:15 on 28 May

My mother had many friends who had Cherokee blood. Many of them turned in my mother's new age circles, cashing in on their native history by conducting workshops for suburban whites seeking enlightenment. Still, not bad guys (or girls). My mother's spiritual adviser (or cult leader) was part Choctaw and wrapped the feather in leather, telling me that this was an obvious sign that the red-tailed hawk was my animal spirit guide. I still have this feather and my possession of it is technically a violation of the Eagle Feather Law as I am not at least 1/4 Native American. I am Australian for God's sake.

Of course, once this idea was in my head it would be easy to say that the power of suggestion made me see all the hawks. But actually I did not see another for years, not until I moved to LA. You see, the hawk only shows herself when I need to see her. And since my arrival in LA, the appearance of the hawk as foretold every major change of direction in my life. That is what the red-tailed signifies. It signifies a need to change direction. There are some Native Americans who will turn their car around if they see a red-tailed flying in the opposite direction. They take it as a serious warning. And unfortunately the appearance of the red-tailed has not signified any New Age bullshit for me. Every time I see one I know the shit is about to hit the fan. The Red-Tailed Hawk is the Red Skies at Night (sailor's delight) and Red Skies at Morning (sailors take warning).

Every time I see the Hawk I know that something good is about to happen, or something not so good. Either way, a change is gonna come. Hawk is the messenger, the Native equivalent of Mercury. Every time I see Hawk, I know I am about to be challenged.

I saw a Red-Tailed yesterday. I just looked up, above the dog park, and there it was, circling over me.

Ah, shit.

I'm sorry, Susan. I can't help looking at the sky.

But remember the Red-Tailed means a challenge, not defeat. So what I do think this Red-Tailed signified: red skies at night or red skies at morning?

I think both.

I think there is red skies at night, meaning that the storm is mostly behind us. There will be squalls ahead, but our boat will not be swamped.

I also think there is red skies at morning, meaning that there is a chance of storms in front of us. But I trust in the spirit guide who has brought me this far, brought my family this far. The hawk may mean challenges, but she has never led me down a path I cannot survive.