If I were a gambling
woman, I’d bet my right leg that at one time or another you’ve lost yourself in
an emotional or spiritual jungle, where your mental understory is tangled, and your
inner landscape, dank. It’s a dim, internal swamp shaped by illness or accident,
lies or misunderstandings. By selfishness, fear, grief, or death. It’s a
wilderness we’ll all experience, if we live long enough. Wilderness through
which we must choose our paths. Characters in my contemporary novels grapple
with conflict like this in nature’s “thin places,” where the seen and the unseen
worlds overlap. Like us, those characters must choose how they’ll navigate
personal darkness. If they’re listening, nature can be a wise guide through that
wilderness of heart.
Three examples from my
novels for you:
In Sugar Birds, young Aggie accidentally lights a tragic fire and
flees into a northern forest, where guilt and shame so skew her worldview that
she evades everyone, and the treacherous woods reinforce her self-condemnation.
But when nature’s protection and healing at last reach her psyche, love and
forgiveness bring her home. In this scene, Aggie realizes that creatures she’d
considered vile may actually have saved her.
The itching subsided. Weak with shock
and hunger, she crumpled onto the forest floor and inspected her injury in the
growing light. A few white wigglers still squirmed inside the cut. From fly eggs, she remembered.
Grimacing, she extracted the creatures one-by-one and flicked them to the
ground.
Maggots
eat dead things.
Maybe death had been closer than she
thought . . .
She forced herself to study the wound.
The angry swelling along the sides of the cut had shrunk and paled. Red streaks
shooting out from the gash had retreated, and a clear serum now wept from the
wound, instead of that nasty green pus.
Wait
a minute . . .
The maggots had eaten away her
infection. Without them . . . she shuddered, as the ground she counted on
shifted, and her thinking took a turn.
In Leaning on Air, ornithologist
Celia—bereft over the loss of her premature child—leaves her autistic
husband Burnaby and holes up near a remote, wild prairie. As the prairie and a
red-tailed hawk recover from wildfire, Celia realizes that she and her marriage
can heal, too. Here she explains the insight to Burnaby.
She snapped her fingers. “Quick as
that, the fire was about more than the land. It was an embodiment of all the
destruction in my whole life—a flashback reel of the trauma with Mother, the
losses of people I loved, the hopes that never materialized. A grand finale of
carbon fibers, up in fumes. Though I was in no physical danger, I felt like my
days were over, right then and there, and I was as close to giving up on living
as I ever have been.”
She continued before he could shape a
reply . . .
“That little redtail started hopping
down the creekbank in my direction, off-balance from a tail of kebab sticks in
her pincushion rump. Her entire world, and her ability to navigate it, had just
been destroyed, but she was still trying to fly with everything in her. She
didn’t seem frightened at all. Just . . . determined.”
Celia’s hands went to her head, her
fingers a skullcap. “Right then I felt a
surge in me of something from beyond myself—nothing I had manufactured or
talked myself into. I was confused for a minute. I couldn’t understand why I
felt happy while this ruined, stub-tailed little buzzard was stumbling around
in a charcoal dust bath. Then I realized it wasn’t happiness I was feeling. It
was hope . . .”
What
the River Keeps tells parallel stories about the
demolition of generational strongholds. Reclusive biologist Hildy Nybo,
mentally imprisoned and confused by a wilderness of lies, takes a job near her
childhood home, where she joins a team of scientists working the Elwha River as
two century-old dams fall. The ecosystem’s healing releases her from a haunted
past and into a new place of love, forgiveness, and remembered hope—shown here
in one of her few anchor memories:
On her tenth birthday, Hildy Nybo was
casting a spinner under the Elwha River bridge when a steak of silver broke the
surface. She whistled softly and pointed as the fish flicked its tail and
disappeared into the pool’s shaded depths.
Upstream, her father glanced, then
threaded a night crawler onto a hook’s shank. “I saw him.” He raised his brow,
aimed the hook toward the river like a dare.
The fingertips working Hildy’s reel
stalled, and she eyed the water, rapt. “They hush me, Daddy. Every fish I see.”
“I noticed,” he said. “Why, you think?”
She gazed into the water, considering.
“It’s like . . . like if I’m talking, I’ll miss their music. It’s like they’re
all little banjos, and somebody’s strumming happiness on ‘em.”
She didn’t notice her dad approach
until he palmed her blonde head. Then he lifted his chin toward the forested
foothills rimming their family’s fishing resort, where the river entered
sapphire Lake Aldwell. “Could be you’re hearing his riffs.”
“Whose
riffs?”
“Your Banjo-Strummer. The Fish-Maker.
Same, same.” Dad shrugged, then thrust the tip of his rod toward his work-shop
like a band conductor’s baton. “The music’s in heartwood and burls for me, but
maybe you’ll hear him best through fish.”
Hildy bobbed her line to her dad’s
words, sending concentric circles from the thin filament into the current.
Would she? She’d love nothing more.
In all three books,
nature offers a path through wilderness— to love and forgiveness, restoration
and healing. To hope. It can do the same for
us.
