“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I also think that in her unique private and public ways Jane explored time as well, as evocatively, as anyone ever has. An immodest statement, I submit, but I’m proud to have shared in her creativity, and I offer The Personal Sessions series as a testament to what she sought to accomplish in all of her writings—and did indeed accomplish, in my opinion.

Obviously, this introduction will be incomplete. It will also be rather unorthodox—more like a series of conscious and unconscious reminiscences and free associations, moving back and forth in time as I approach sets of ideas from various angles while seeking to learn more about my wife even now, 18 years after her death. Jane’s death may have been physical, yet she still lives, still offers insights, still makes me reach to understand and grow as I mourn her passing. She died at the age of 55. What more could she have accomplished in our camouflage reality had she chosen to live physically for, say, even another decade? Wonderfully penetrating things, I’m sure—and I believe that she is indeed doing so, “where she is now.”

No, I think that seemingly innocuous little happening is one more sign of how this reality we’re all creating together works in its often mysterious, and often ignored, fashion.

Some will disagree with my felt premise and this is their right, of course. But after working with Jane and the many complicated and interwoven facets of the Seth material that she produced for more than 20 years, I no longer believe in “chance” or “coincidence.” I humbly submit that somehow, somewhere, there are connections, intuitions, whispers and shouts and facts that proclaim our greater reality’s depth and being, its independence of our ordinary conscious ideas of space and time. More and more, but especially since Jane’s death on September 5, 1984, I have tried to be open to those fascinating and unending interrelationships we create individually and en masse and so live with.

My goal, then, has come to be the publishing of all of Jane’s work, or at least as much of it as I can, including not only the Seth material but her poetry and fiction and notes and journals—to finally be able to offer it as a great whole for study in what we call the “future.” For if all of a person’s lifework isn’t known, how can its true worth in all of its human complexity ultimately be known? Sometimes I think I’m a slow learner: It took me a while to realize, for example, that the responses to the Seth material by mail and in person—and now electronically—are actually myriad extensions of that work, showing in all of their varieties the questions and answers it’s raised and the beneficial effects it’s had on the many who have communicated since Jane held her first real session on December 2, 1963—and on those who still do. The mail in any form is great! Seldom does a day go by that I don’t answer letters. I’m glad to do it, even when I fall far behind.

But first: One day in late November 1963, Jane sat at her writing table in the living room while I left to paint in my studio at the back of the apartment. We often followed this routine when we didn’t have to be out of the house. My wife liked to tune into a radio station that featured classical music while she worked; she kept its volume low enough so that it didn’t bother me. After some time on that particular day I realized that all was quiet—too quiet—out there in the living room. When I went out to see what Jane was up to I was greeted with her breakthrough accomplishment—one that, to put it mildly, was to lead to very unexpected challenges and growths in our lives: Jane held up a sheaf of typewriter paper upon which she had scribbled in large handwriting an essay that had come to her as fast as she could write it down: The Physical Universe as Idea Construction. She didn’t know where the work had come from, how she had produced it. She’d felt as though she was out of her body some of the time, out on the first floor’s porch roof looking in at herself. “What does it mean?” she asked as we discussed it. She was exhilarated, intrigued, cautious, wondering about its ideas—that basically each one of us creates our own reality in the most intimate terms, for example.

She was of course very familiar with the spontaneous role her creative self enacted when she was writing, especially in her poetry. But this? We were to learn that the conscious yet intuitive pace of her realizations was carefully meted out by her psyche: just so much at a time. For the first few days after I finally got it through my head what Jane was really saying in her essay I couldn’t accept the idea that each one of us literally, really, creates our own reality. Conventional thinking simply couldn’t, wouldn’t accept that, I said, although I didn’t regard myself as a conventional thinker. But her breakthrough had set the agenda for our lifetimes-to-come: idea construction, all right!

Jane had read about the Ouija board and expressed casual interest in it, but hadn’t tried to obtain one; nor was there a local supplier. What conscious and unconscious communications, we were to wonder, had led her to mention the board to Jimmy? What kind of a “coincidence” was that, anyhow? Out of all of the apartments for rent in Elmira, why had Jane chosen that one? She had found the apartment. She came to Elmira with me after I’d begun working for the greeting-card company, Artistic, to look for a place for us so we could move from Sayre and save the time and expense of commuting 30 miles a day, five days a week. She found the empty apartment 5 at 458 on her first day of looking. When I picked her up after leaving work she directed me to the apartment, and that was that. Jimmy had lost interest in psychic phenomena long ago.

Would Seth have cooperated in such a venture? It didn’t occur to Jane and me to even ask. We moved beyond Frank Watts’s “Timidity has roots of rage.” Seth announced his presence in the next, fourth, session: “I prefer not to be called Frank Watts. That personality was rather collarless (as spelled out on the board).” Also: “I was Frank Watts to learn humility.” So with our obvious consent and the great variety of his very intelligent and fluent discourses, Seth became the discarnate entity who spoke through Jane for the next 20 years and eight months. That “energy personality essence” did his best, always honestly, I’m sure, to help my wife, both as far as he was able to but also, as I came to believe, as far as he was allowed to. Not only because of Jane’s intense early fears in this lifetime, I felt, but also because of past lives, as Frank Watts had indicated. How unusual, I thought as I recorded the sessions in my homemade shorthand, that the conflicts displayed between the two main portions of her immensely creative personality were so open, even while she had the potential to help so many others. And did. Jane was living her challenges just like each one of us does, and her efforts were inextricably bound up with the world even as, I was sure, we were creating our human versions of the earth and its own reality. This taught us that even with Jane’s talents there was more, always more, to create and to learn from. How exciting and frustrating at the same time! In all modesty, there seemed to be much that we could do, feel, want, offer to others. Our mail alone began to speak written volumes, almost always approvingly, that we had never anticipated. How could we have known that would happen? As with other details of our experiences to come, many were still unknown to us on conscious levels—we’d have been incredibly wise to have known it all in advance! Like each one of us, Jane as a physical creature still had to travel her literal paths to experience and knowledge.

During her journey (and mine) I helped her publish 19 volumes of the Seth material, fiction, and poetry, and since her death in 1984 I’ve added 12 more so far, including this first volume of The Personal Sessions. I’m sure that Jane knows what I’m doing, and identifies with the poignancy I feel as I begin this latest publishing venture. That very poignancy enriches the value of this long-range endeavor for me as, I trust, it will for others.

I’ve noted that many of the sessions in this personal series will not be complete, but deleted excerpts from published sessions. Often over the years Jane and I tried to balance the subject matter of the sessions as Seth sought to help us in whatever way. This approach included what I thought Jane allowed him to say.

Often, I could hear a powerful Seth through two closed doors. And so, we learned more than once in warm weather, could neighbors and passersby on West Water Street when our windows were open. But those occasions were relatively minor: consider the situation inside the house! Long ago, the three floors of the old house, a typical turn-of-the-last-century “mansion” on the main street three blocks west of Elmira’s business district, had been converted into eight apartments. All were continuously occupied during the 15 years Jane and I (and Seth for the last 11 of those years) lived there. Turnover was low, and we knew most of the other tenants, although no more than one or two of them at any time had an inkling of what we were up to with first the sessions and then the addition of the ESP classes. Even now I still correspond with two of those “ex-tenants”—loyal friends indeed!

Reading these private sessions, one can legitimately ask: “Well, if Jane Roberts was so smart and Seth was so great with all of that personal stuff, why did she come down with the symptoms to begin with? Why couldn’t he cure her, or at least help her?” My answer right here is that those questions were and still are answered to the best of the abilities of Jane, Seth, and myself in these private sessions, even while I keep in mind Frank Watts’s references to Jane’s “Timidity has roots of rage.” from “Previous hates unresolved.” These sessions will detail in many ways and times why my beloved wife, even with all of her creative dedication to her chosen path, ended up with what finally came to be her intractable physical impairments. Part of the answer, as I’ve already noted, is that because of her strong fears from early childhood on, Jane did not allow Seth to tell us all he could have. Not that she was consciously aware of why she refused, and not that the elimination of that barrier alone would have magically wiped away the challenges the two of us were creating. But again and again I felt, I knew, that reincarnational factors were involved, concerning not only Jane, Seth, and me, but a number of other “past” personalities and influences from any of the three of us, and in various camouflage time frames. And what about that influence from the “future,” since Seth maintained that all is now? I didn’t berate Jane to open up more psychically. I saw her struggles (and had plenty of my own). I sensed walls, barriers, and complications there. Some of them arose from the very uniqueness of her position. After all, here she was, speaking in trance for a personality who told us he’d last lived on Earth in Denmark 300 years ago—even if there is no such thing as time!

Yet Jane and I began to truly understand that the challenges, potentials, and probabilities in our lives could easily outstrip our ordinary daily capacities to grasp them. We began to feel that the probable realities alone that we could create and explore, for example, were “probably” endless in ordinary terms. Now, all of these years later, I’m sure of it.

A strong saving grace in all of the personal and household turmoil she lived in, Jane told me often, was her relationship with her maternal grandfather, Joseph Burdo, her “Little Daddy,” as she called him because of his diminutive size. Even as a youngster she had been well aware that she felt psychically connected to him. Joseph Burdo had become estranged from his wife, Minnie Finn, long ago. He was a man of few words, yet he nurtured in his granddaughter a love of nature that she was to cherish for the rest of her life. In Appendix 1, Volume 1 of The “Unknown” Reality, published in 1977, I partially quote Seth as saying that Joseph Burdo was “Part of a very strong entity. However, extremely inarticulate in his last life, due to an inability to synthesize gains in past lives… That is, in his feeling of unity with All That Is, he excluded other human beings....” He lived alone in rented rooms and worked at various jobs in town; he was a doorman, a watchman. He drank and gambled at the local casinos and played the horses at Saratoga Springs’ famous racetrack. He took Jane on walks in the nearby woods. “When he spoke of the wind,” Seth remarked, “she felt like the wind, as any child will unselfconsciously identify with the elements.” He died in 1949 at 68, when Jane was 20 years old.

A note about how the “past, present and future” evolved and combined in an unexpected way within Seth’s concept of simultaneous time. Jane divorced Walter Zeh in 1954, and published Seth Speaks in 1972 and Personal Reality in 1974. She died in 1984. During all of that time we had no communication with Walt, as might be expected, although we often talked about him and wished him well. Yet a year or so after Jane’s death Walt wrote to me, and we began a most interesting correspondence although we were never to meet. Walt gave me background information about Jane’s history, and his own, and the welcome news that he had married again and fathered several children. For many years he worked for the New York State government in Albany. His passion was railroading, and after his retirement he and his wife traveled extensively by rail.

Well, the pay wouldn’t be as good as I could earn in New York City, I explained to my parents, but my living expenses would be much lower. Besides, I’d be close enough to visit them often, so what could I lose? I could always go to the city. What I didn’t understand until later was that Ed’s seemingly innocent call had set into motion a series of events that one by one would magically fall into place and create a much larger, much longer and more penetrating overall experience. I wasn’t used to consciously thinking in such terms.

Nor again, in presenting these private sessions and Jane’s and my travails, am I looking for sympathy. Instead, I’m passionately interested in presenting our work with Seth so as to contribute in whatever ways possible to our understanding of this reality we’re all creating together. And, dear readers, the participation of each one of you in those efforts help make that possible. I thank you, one and all.

I had kept my very strong feelings for Jane to myself, or so I’d thought, and despaired at the idea of never seeing her again. I was the complete amateur at dealing with the personal interactions of others. I visited Walt and Jane at their apartment in Saratoga Springs and told them I’d be leaving the area. Jane discussed the decision she and Walt had made. Then, directly to me: “I’m leaving town, with or without you. So which is it going to be?” I was quite unprepared, yet knew at once what my answer would be. Even though I’d had no thought of interfering with, or taking advantage of, any complications between them. I can see Walt now, sitting by the window of their second-story apartment’s small living room, nodding at Jane’s words, his eyes wet. There was never a harsh word between us. Jane’s dog, Mischa, slept at her feet. It was only after Jane had begun the Seth material a number of years later that we realized that she and Walt, both coming from dysfunctional families, had chosen to come together at just the right time for their own mutually creative learning purposes—and that with those purposes fulfilled, each of them was ready to move on by the time I met them. At the time, however, I wasn’t ready to consciously understand such interlocking emotional relationships even though I was playing a part in one of them.

I drew Jane a few weeks before our marriage on December 27, 1954. We had always been dedicated to our arts, but little did we realize what great changes were to take place in our lives and how we were to help ourselves and others with Jane’s gift of the Seth material.

Professional writing was simply outside of their experience. They did understand that we had a creative relationship with the arts, and that we obviously loved each other. For whatever psychological and psychic reasons, the lack of communication on that score between the two “sides” suited both. I don’t remember Jane and me showing my parents any of the Seth material, for example, and trying to explain what we were searching for within it. For all of the six years that we held the early sessions, we never mentioned them to my parents as we sought to go our own way. Nor did we discuss with them the information Seth occasionally gave us about them. For that to be possible, my parents would have had to understand what the Seth material was all about. There was no animosity about the situation, let alone conscious curiosity about what to do, on either side, although now I think there must have been at least an unconscious telepathic understanding and acceptance among the four of us.

And guess what: I finally understood as Jane’s symptoms began to slowly grow that her choices were her right, and stopped my innuendos that it was perfectly all right for her to be open to outside help—so why wasn’t she? Seth was way ahead of me. I don’t recall that worthy ever suggesting to my wife outright that she seek medical help, let alone insisting that she do so. Was this because Jane wouldn’t allow him to say that, even if he wanted to? As noted, at times I’d felt that that was the case. It’s easy to proclaim that we human beings live short of our potentials in those terms—for if such potentials didn’t exist, how could we sense or aspire to them? But I’m hardly being original when I insist that each life is so intensely real that it seems most difficult to truly believe that we can have it any other way—let alone have more than one! Our challenges in this physical/nonphysical existence reign supreme, regardless of other possible long-term influences like reincarnation or time travel, for example. Or—yes—even religion: a subject I would like to explore in depth if ever I can create the several years of camouflage time necessary to do so. So even if Seth did help, still Jane chose to live her own life within the face and force of her own very creative present personality. Seth did offer insights, excellent ones of certain very creative depths that we more than welcomed, while all the time being quite aware, I think, that the beautiful young woman through whom he spoke—who let him speak—had her own agenda at the same time. And even though we agreed with Seth’s reincarnational material involving the three of us, and our families, still it was also intensely personal for my wife in this life that she go her own way.

Jane was still productive during much of that last stay, however. With Seth she dictated, if slowly, The Way Toward Health. For herself she dictated poetry. I read to her the fan mail I brought each day, and between the two of us we kept up with answering it. She had periods of modest motion improvement, but they didn’t last. Various medications helped a little (with side effects at times), but the medical establishment had no cure to offer. Jane obtained her greatest relief from the daily baths that were given her so lovingly by staff members. We became friends with a number of them; they helped us celebrate birthdays and holidays in 330. At no time did we tell anyone what we were writing about, or its sometimes nonphysical source, so to speak. Staff knew only that Jane dictated to me often, that we got a lot of mail, and that I kept copious notes. We had a few visits from local friends, but it didn’t take us long to learn that many people avoided hospitals as much as possible. We could hardly object to that: after all, for whatever strong personal reasons Jane had done her best to stay out of the hospital, and I had acquiesced to her decisions. People out there in the world had their own challenges.

I do want to record that while we took great comfort in receiving the mail, we also came to receive through it an additional and totally unexpected gift—one that literally we would never have asked for even if we had thought of it. Maude Cardwell, an older Seth reader in Austin, Texas, had for several years been publishing a modest monthly journal on the Seth material that she called Reality Change. When I wrote her about Jane’s latest hospitalization Maude, without mentioning her idea to me, suggested to her readers that donations would help Jane and me cope with our hospital bills. I would have never had the nerve to make such a statement. St. Joe’s, as we called the hospital, had never dunned us for money in the past, and wasn’t doing so now. Our considerable daily charges were mounting, but we had emotionally pushed their import into the background. I was able to make modest payments out of royalty income I had been saving, but this was difficult to keep up because most of that money was paid to us but twice a year. Imagine, then, our great surprise when the readers of Reality Change began to contribute: small checks; medium checks; the occasional larger check. I have every one of those letters and my heartfelt answers in a separate file that I plan to add as a unit to the collection of Jane’s and my work in the archives of Yale University Library.

If they chose to do so together, how did Jane and Seth explore the new reality they were committed to? Could I have briefly joined that reality, and perhaps recorded a few aspects of it in my own dream reality, aside from the afterdeath paintings of Jane that I was to produce over the next several years? What, I could ask, did Seth really think of the portrait I’d painted of him way back in June 1968? I had envisioned him as portly, middle-aged, and bald.

A month later, in Session l68 on July 7, he did tell me that the work was an excellent likeness; Jane had liked it from the day I began working on it. And why hadn’t I ever painted the two of them together? I could even insert myself into the art, since I’m the third member of the triumvirate. In short, I believe there’s no end to our abilities in whatever reality we choose to create and explore.

For whatever reasons, she had resolved along the way to do her own thing in her own way—with two exceptions. She went to Andy Colucci, a dentist (and friend) who had his office around the corner from where we lived on West Water Street for routine cleaning (she had perfect teeth); and on rare occasions one or both of us visited Sam Levine, a doctor who had his office on the ground floor of his building next-door to 458. We’d see him for an inoculation, say, or treatment for a cold. Did Doctor Sam ever hear Seth’s booming voice in the summertime, when windows were open, or the uproarious racket made by the members of Jane’s ESP class on Tuesday nights? Yes he did, he told Jane, but he didn’t understand what was going on—only that there were many extra cars parked in the neighborhood on Tuesday nights. And Jane wasn’t about to explain: “Hi, Sam. Hey, I’m speaking in a trance state for this nonphysical entity called Seth—a guy I knew in Denmark three hundred years ago. I wonder if you can help me deal with some of my symptoms, as I call them. They might be connected with my psychic work…” Not a chance! Doctor Sam was a very kind but reserved Jewish doctor who helped many people on a daily basis. Yet I do think that even if he hadn’t accepted Jane’s mediumship per se, still he would have recognized it as being a portion of her psyche.

Jane and I were very surprised at the initial reception of The Seth Material, then Seth Speaks and Personal Reality (our shortened terminology for those first two Seth-dictated books.) Since we had no experience with “fan mail,” for example, we had no expectations, but as the Seth titles and Jane’s own books were published she came to spend many a weekend answering that most welcome mail. I helped out when I could after typing sessions, often doing commercial art at least part-time, and trying to paint. The mail rapidly became a quite humbling education in itself. The writers of those letters opened up in specific terms worlds that we’d have never known about otherwise, and, eventually, they did so not only from this country but also from abroad. Seventeen language translations as I write this. How interesting to see that each one of us was indeed creating our personal reality within the overall reality of the universe that all of us were also creating, uniting all—everything—in complicated fashions far beyond our ordinarily accepted understanding. Time travels for sure; travels not only through the psyche but through time—even if Seth did call that quality we were so used to “camouflage time!”

Of the two of us I was supposed to be the artist in the conventional sense, yet I’d always felt that I couldn’t rival Jane’s amazingly simple but brilliantly colored art that was so true to her innate psychic knowledge—while seemingly ignoring it! But she didn’t ignore it at all, I learned along the way, for she created and explored a spontaneous and innocent reality that freed her from all other concerns. Her art contained our origins, I felt, by strongly calling attention to her obviously creative and intuitive knowledge. She painted a tree rising out of the earth with brilliantly colored apples, for example. It was, after all, an epitome of what our reality has led us to create and enjoy. What could be better? She wasn’t bound by the mundane rules of perspective, with its everyday limits that most of us never surmount or subsume: she created her deceptively childish world each time she painted. I could go on and on. Jane’s work is not large-scale by any means. One of my goals is to see her art, all of it, reproduced in color in 81/2” x 11” portfolio style at a modest price. Susan Ray of Moment Point Press used three of Jane’s paintings as cover art for her books; God of Jane, Adventures in Consciousness, and Psychic Politics.

I showed our guests the portrait of Seth that I had painted from my vision in 1968, as well as my paintings of Jane both before and after her death. Some of the latter were from visions, some simply from my memory of her and what she was trying to tell me or from what I was trying to understand. I also showed our visitors several of my portraits from my own past lives, both male and female, that Seth had mentioned long ago, or that I’d tuned into through dreams. The points I stressed to the group mainly concerned my basically unconventional interests. I do some abstract art. Beyond an occasional foray, however, I no longer have an abiding interest in simple literal portraits or still-life or landscape images per se. But then, I asked, what more literal odyssey would there be than to investigate one’s own past lives, male and female? It took me a while to start thinking that way after Jane began speaking for Seth. The subject matter is endless, free of time and age and style in unique ways. And here again, I envision publishing a portfolio of my art, with the necessary text. I see Jane’s and my art as reinforcing the Seth material in quite original ways.

Of course, it could be much trickier for the artist to paint a past-life portrait of the client who poses with that result in mind. Questions abound. Can the artist relax enough to let a pertinent image of the sitter come to him or her? What if the client doesn’t like the results? The looks? The time frame? The race, the sex, the implied behavior? Well, to start the sitter could always tell the artist about his or her own dreams and hunches, and help the poor guy out that way. That is, while taking it for granted that the artist believed in reincarnational possibilities....

Back to conventional reality.

I pushed open the back fire door and the six of us clumped down the open stairs that Jane and I had used so many times. I worried about being an intruder into the domain of the people who lived in those dingy apartments now. Indeed, as we left the stairs two dogs in a back apartment set up a furious barking as they scratched at what I knew were kitchen windows. A friend of ours had lived in that apartment (and I still correspond with him). I was embarrassed: the dogs’ racket must have bothered everyone in the house. We saw no one, however, and the barking magically ceased as we moved around to the east side of 458 and surveyed it from a small paved parking lot. Once in that spot there had been flagstones and benches beneath an extended roof supported by four sets of wooden pillars. The tin-covered roof had born layers of old vines that had climbed up the pillars from our living-room windows on the second floor. Jane had liked to throw seed and bread crusts into the vines for the squirrels and birds to root out. The pigeons, cardinals, sparrows, blue jays and others had flown over from the Chemung River a quarter of a block away.

While we were surveying the house I saw a young black man step off the front porch and stroll out to the sidewalk. He didn’t turn to walk up or down the street, however, as one might expect, but casually stood there and turned to look at our group a few times as we talked and took pictures. Evidently we’d bothered at least one tenant after all, to the point of sending a sibling, say, to try to see what we might be up to, if anything. Perhaps deciding that we were no threat, our observer sauntered back into the house. I never did see anyone peeking out at us, though.

Actually, outside of our own small group of friends, including ESP class members, plus the well-received articles Peg Gallagher had written for the Elmira Star-Gazette, Jane and I hadn’t stirred ourselves to become known in Elmira, even after the Seth books had begun to sell. In our own creative ways we had been loners, (as I still am) basically; our passions had been to focus on what we could learn both for ourselves and others in the long term, and especially through publishing to reach a larger audience. This became even more so for us as Jane gradually became more restricted physically because of her symptoms.

Then a strange little challenge began to develop. There were two cars lined up in the driveway. Without intending to, Laurel and Debbie became separated from the rest of us as they stood in back of the car nearest the road, while Winter, Jim, Theresa and I were clustered near the front of the other car as it was pointed toward the house. The four of us were so busy talking that we actually missed the little drama that followed: Laurel briefly mentioned it to me right after it took place—telling me that a very large bird, a hawk or an eagle, had flown from low over the house seemingly right toward her and Debbie before zooming back up to perch high in a tree in the backyard of the house across the road. Amid the other conversations going on I didn’t really appreciate what the two women had experienced until Laurel went into detail about it the next day. By then we were back in Sayre by ourselves as we sought to understand the meaning or message that was involved.

That night in Sayre, and the next day, Laurel mentioned her near encounter with the hawk or eagle several times before we finally got down to really discussing what had happened at 1730. I drew a crude map of the house and its grounds as seen from above. The front of the house, facing Pinnacle Road, cannot be seen from where all of us were standing in the driveway to the side and in back of it. On the map Laurel showed me how the bird had suddenly zoomed into view low over the house from Pinnacle Road, and then flown even lower toward the two women near the back of the second car in the driveway. Laurel exclaimed now about the bird’s enormous wingspan as it had seemed to fly right at her. It had made no sound except for the rush of air through its wings. Obviously my wife hadn’t been prepared for its seemingly friendly behavior.

What had puzzled us both from the time of the episode was that Jim, Winter, Theresa and I, standing only two car lengths away from the two women, hadn’t become aware of the episode even if we hadn’t been staring in its general direction.

Now here is Laurel’s own account of our guests’ visit, and what was to her—and to me—a most unusual event.

As Rob and I looked up hawks and eagles in our bird books I am unable to say for sure what the bird was. It appeared larger than the hawks who appear in our area and are often seen flying overhead. It seemed smaller than the golden brown eagles that soar around the mountains nearby. Perhaps it was a young eagle, or a large hawk with slightly more brown or golden feathers than our bird books show. Flying wingspan approximately straight on was about 3 and one half feet.