Affected New Yorker Finds Gratitude in the Enchanted Forest
Lessons from a forest fairy
I was genuinely pissed off.
My wife could see on my face how upset I’d become, though not as visible to others who don’t know me. I’d felt like my sanctuary had been violated.
Let me back up.
We live in a cozy suburban village outside of NYC. Close enough that the commute isn’t completely insane, but far away enough that we enjoy life not too far from the beach and some true outdoor beauty. The crowned jewel of the neighborhood, according to people like us who like green stuff and animals, is the pond and the hiking trail all around it. It’s a pretty nice trail and you can clock about 3 miles going one way across with some great nooks and crannies like streams with trout and bass, big trees full of many variety of birds from sparrows to owls, and then of course the two ponds on either end. The trails are old horse paths so they’re fairly well maintained and great for hiking and biking.
On any given day, you encounter birders, joggers, people just walking their dog, and folks just out for a stroll. Everyone is generally friendly and being there feels like you’re one with the community. As you can imagine, when the pandemic hit, the pond trails were an absolute godsend. Being able to head out in the morning and walk the trails, see other people but with easy distancing, and stay connected with nature no doubt helped a bunch of us not lose our minds.The trails became a sanctuary in the community.
It was in the early days of Covid that I noticed people doing nice things along the trails occasionally. Someone decorated a 6ft pine tree with a star and Christmas balls alongside the trail, then another one popped up about a mile away. Someone was painting flat rocks with lovely and kind sayings and leaving them on park benches as well as along the trail. It was the kind of stuff that helped restore one’s faith in humanity during a truly dark period when we were all wearing masks and using Clorox wipes on our cereal boxes when we got them home. It wasn’t long before I noticed the Forest Fairy.
Along the path I take every time I walk the trail, there’s a tree right off to the side with a big hole in it. We’ve been here for over 15 years and there was never anything in the hole, it was just there. Finally, one morning I noticed an 8 to 10 inch tall figurine of a girl kneeling with flowers in her hair holding a bouquet of flowers of sorts. It certainly could be a statue of someone or something else, but I immediately started referring to her as the “Forest Fairy.”
Not long after first seeing her, I noticed a bundle of feathers intentionally stuck in a tree by the trail on the other side and once I even encountered a harmless enough looking man standing on the side of the trail burning sage, which I know to be associated with warding off bad spirits. After some expert level Google sleuthing, I think the feathers may have been stuck in the tree as some sort of protection as well. It was like there was an area of the forest protected by a Forest Fairy put there by people I’ve never met practicing spirituality I didn’t understand. I thought that was awesome.
Fast forward to 2024, it’s been years since I first saw the Forest Fairy and given we live just a few blocks from the trail and love the pond, I’ve been seeing her nestled in her tree two or three times a week. There would always be subtle changes as people would leave fresh flowers or add more feathers, I had seen little notes written and protected in plastic, even the occasional dollar bill. People were making offerings of sort to the Forest Fairy and even writing notes to her! I never touched any of it, smart enough to know not to disturb things I didn’t understand. It was just beautiful to see.
Every time I would hike the trails, I would make sure to check in as I walked past and there she would be. No matter what kind of day I was having, seeing her would make me smile. There was an energy to the forest and it just felt loved and protected and as a result, I felt protected too somehow. In the years since the first time I’d seen her, I never saw anyone near the tree.
Now back to last week.
My wife and I were walking along the path like usual early last week and as I peeked my head around like I had been doing for years, I gasped and yelled, “She’s GONE!” The statue was gone, a piece of the gold halo someone had put on her head was on the ground next to the tree and the little vase that had usually held flowers or feathers was still inside but tipped over and empty. It had all been cleared out! We kept walking and my wife took my hand as I continued to process what I had just seen. Walking in silence, she knew I was upset though to anyone else it wouldn’t be as obvious.
So many thoughts were circling through my head as we kept walking. Who would do such a thing? This little symbol of beauty and protection remained for years through bad storms, police searches of the park, and who knows what else. Why now? Why do I care so much? How have I wrapped my sense of energy and safety around this unexplained series of idols in the forest to the degree that I feel like someone did this to me?
So we kept walking, I made a joke, we laughed a little, but I could feel her looking at me. She knew I was hurting inside and searching for answers to my own feelings.
The Empty Boat
I tried to stop taking it personally. I started reminding myself that everything I see or do, every interaction with someone or something, is in a place and time and I need to practice gratitude for the experiences I had and how they made me feel. Did I really believe that the figurine would be there forever? I wasn’t calling the shots here, I was along for the ride.
Still, I felt so angry that this happened, just assuming it was done maliciously. I skipped over any totally plausible scenarios in my head like the actual curator decided there was a different part of the forest or a different forest even that needed the Forest Fairy’s protection or that it was always meant to be there for a certain amount of time and the day had come. I went straight to assuming it was someone selfish and misguided wanting to break anything beautiful. I remembered posting a YouTube short featuring the Forest Fairy recently and someone commented with a Bible verse judging my interest in “idols.” Was this a religious act? Was it the person who commented? My mind swirled and my anger grew. “How fucking dare someone disrupt my peace?” was ringing in my head.
Being non-confrontational and playing the “long game” has served me well in life. It does come at a price. I hold back a lot, and I hold in a lot. Couple that with my endless memory and it requires maintenance and management so the dam doesn’t collapse. For that I need tools. I love fables as a tool for this kind of stuff.
My go-to story when it’s time for me to break out the toolkit is the fable about a Buddhist monk who sets out on a boat to meditate in the middle of a lake. He does not want to be disturbed so he picks a lake far away. During the middle of his meditation out in the open lake, he feels the bump of another boat up against his. Trying to maintain his meditative state, he tries to ignore whoever it is who has pulled up alongside his boat until he feels another bump and decides he’s going to open his eyes and unleash his anger on the person rude enough to repeatedly interrupt his meditation. When he opens his eyes, he sees that it’s an empty boat that was bumping into his. He immediately becomes self-aware that there is no malicious intent, there was no antagonist.
The anger was within him, just as it was within me.
There is plenty to be angry about in 2024. Some of it just naturally occurring, some of it manufactured and served up as “news” or “entertainment,” some of it purely malicious to affect a political or other outcome. Yet these are all things presented to us in one way or another. It’s easy to lose sight of the fact that as people of free will, even if significantly disadvantaged in some regards, we have the ability to decide how to process and react to what is presented to us, be it a post on Instagram or a person in the grocery store. And even in those moments when we are absolutely sure that another human is actively trying cause ill will, sometimes it is just an empty boat. If we decide to be in control of our own thoughts and emotions, we are much less susceptible to manipulation, and much less likely to be affected by feelings of anger, fear, anxiety, etc.
That all said, and after some necessary reflection, I’m truly grateful for the time the Forest Fairy blessed our little space. Through her I was able to see the generosity, and beauty of my fellow humans. And even though she is gone, the energy and community of the forest remains strong as ever, and I am again at peace.