Fawn Island Finding my own Listening Point

-by Douglas Wood, the best-selling author of Old Turtle, Grandad's Prayers of the Earth, and Paddle Whispers. His newest book, Fawn Island, will be published in the spring of 2001 by the University of Minnesota Press.

Late evening, and I paddle among the islands, gliding between Mallard and Crow, back home towards the Fawn. The western sky hoards its last gold like a miser. White-throats and veeries call, leaving the tracks of their songs across the hush of evening. A loon wails from north of the Fawn, another answers from the south, and they begin an antiphonal chorus, the rock shores reverberating wildly with their echoes. The canoe pushes its breast against stained waters, and I fly into the reflections of the sunset.

Gradually the colors fade. Sky and water darken to a deep indigo. A crescent moon crowns the scene, earthshine of the old moon cradled in the new moon's arms. Following the sun, it too slides away, and as the night deepens the wilderness of the stars is revealed, the brightest ones—Vega, Deneb, Altair—dancing on the water.

Fawn is now only a dark and looming shape against the stars. The air is chill and I shiver, pulling the collar of my wool jacket just a little higher. Still I remain, unwilling to let the evening go. If ever there was a time for exploring the shadow shores of awareness, for probing the soundless depths of thought, this is surely it.

But no thoughts come. They seem to have slipped away as irretrievably as the sun and the moon, and as the loons suddenly desist, there is only the silence of the stars. That, and a profound sense of harmony—what the Navajo call "hozhro", the feeling of being in tune and at peace with yourself and all that is. This, of course, is enough. In fact, it is everything.

I dip the paddle and slide past the bulrushes, past Jackpine Point and toward the old dock, toward the soft yellow glow in the window of the cabin, and the warmth of the woodstove.

***

The island is not wilderness. But it is close to the wild, near enough that the forces of nature are always close at hand. Even the cabin itself, old and weathered, seems more a part of the elements that a shield from them. On the island one is never far from sun and star and wind, the aspiring growth of green things. The flutter of moth's wing. The fall of raindrop. Here there are few diversions. Each aspect of nature, authentic and important, fills the moment in which it is encountered. Once truly noticed, a trailing stem of goldthread or twinflower winds not only through a green and shady sanctuary of the forest, but a green and shady sanctuary of the mind as well. Like the goldthread, I notice my thoughts becoming increasingly embedded in nature, in its forms and processes. And gradually, surrounded by the embodied forces of nature, I come to the realization that I am an embodied force of nature as well.

The full realization comes as something of a shock. To be "an embodied force of nature" as I understand it, as rightfully entitled as tree and stars and bears and boulders, is no small thing. It causes one to look at things in a profoundly changed sort of way. And it entails some very fundamental freedoms and responsibilities.

To be impelled and animated and illuminated by the same Power that spins the planets and burns the stars and blows the wind and sings the birds and grows the pines is to be left essentially without excuses.

Forces of nature are always completely themselves and nothing else.

They do not give up. In this regard the Zen maxim applies perfectly—there is no "Try," there is only "Do."

And perhaps most importantly, and most differently from "normal" human behavio forces of nature—authentic flowerings of creation—do not get in their own way. Most of us human beings—including this one—get in our own way constantly. We stop ourselves through fear or doubt or procrastination or insecurity or indolence or, especially and encompassing all of the above—ego. We allow our small self, the ego, with all its wounds and bruises, greeds and desires, to get in the way of the big Self, the Self that draws as surely as the sun on all the powers of the universe, the Self that wants nothing but to Grow and Do and Be if only its nemesis would get out of its way. The Self that is, like the indomitable chickadee above my shoulder or the trees in which he sings or the star toward which it grows, a force of nature.