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.
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.
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