Brain - “Patience”
Macdonald writes, “That’s what I needed. Slowly my brain righted itself into spaces unused for months. For so long I’d been living in libraries and college rooms, frowning at screens, marking essays, chasing down academic references. This was a different kind of hunt. Here I was a different animal…That morning, I felt like the deer. Not that I was sniffing the air, or standing in fear – but like the deer, I was in the grip of very old and emotional ways of moving through a landscape, experiencing forms of attention and deportment beyond conscious control.” The narrator’s resolution to ‘ hunt ‘ a goshawk is refreshing for the brain. Diverting the brain to academic engagements had reduced the narrator’s emotions which are activated when the narrator goes searching of the rarely found goshawk. The hobby absolutely reinvigorates the narrator’s conscious and feelings.
Madness - “Lost”
Macdonald writes, “I knew I wasn’t mad mad because I’d seen people in the grip of psychosis before, and that was madness as obvious as the taste of blood in the mouth. The kind of madness I had was different. It was quiet, and very, very dangerous. It was a madness designed to keep me sane. My mind struggled to build across the gap, make a new and inhabitable world.” Madness alludes the mental struggles which the narrator weathers after being bereaved her father. Her mental health is impacted adversely because she struggles to proceed with her life after the interment. Evidently, extreme grief could elicit mental illnesses if not mitigated in time.
