Free Fall

I was doing research for a poem some time ago, reading a few articles on birds of prey, when I was reminded of the hawk's incredible mating behaviour. First it's interesting to know that male and female hawks tend to be monogamous, staying with the same partner their whole life. Then they'll build their nest before the mating season begins, occasionally improving it later on during the season. Once this is done, they will engage in the mating proper.

They will circle around one another, rise up in the air at the same time, higher and higher up until the male eventually flies much higher up and lunges at the female. Both will then fly back up to that same height, and then resume their courtship with the same pattern. They will repeat this circular dance until the male finally dives and latches onto the female to mate, free-falling down to the ground. It lasts just a handful of seconds.

Hawks like the red-tailed can dive after a prey to speeds of up to 120 miles per hour (193km/h), so even though they won't reach speeds like these when mating, and even though they will be so very high up that it's not a danger, they will nonetheless free-fall, quite fast at that. It's not too hard for us to imagine what it feels like to trust someone enough to let everything go. We will all profess that we have done this at least once in our lives. And oh, of course, hawks do not endanger themselves free-falling, so like us it's a measured danger we take every time we make love with our partner.

If only we were only talking about measured danger. It's very tempting to draw parallels between hawks and us: they tend to be monogamous and to have only one lifelong partner, to build their nest before having offspring, and making improvements to it during the course of raising their chicks. Somehow, somewhat like us in that idealised, old world version of our world.

Both hawks surrender their natural instinct to fly in order to mate. They cannot reproduce if they are not in free fall. What natural capacity do we surrender when we make love? It's not a question of spatiality for us, as we do not abandon our capacity to walk or move. It's more to do with being naked and defenceless. It's about closing our eyes, lying on or near that special someone. About sleeping soundly with them. It's about surrendering our faculty to think straight, to rationalise. That's our free fall.

Our measured danger, once we have chosen a partner with whom we've built a nest, is to put our trust in them by handing a part, or parts, of our judgement so we both appreciate the distance between the apex of the spiralling up and ground zero. We trust our guts in that free fall towards the unknown, latched onto someone who like us is hurtling down – who lets themselves hurtle down with us – with only the safe knowledge that we're in this together.

And perhaps, occasionally, that poetic feeling, when hugging someone this close to our heart of hearts, of a hauntingly real, timeless free fall.