The wind came earlier today than expected. I’d counted on a calm trip out, but by the halfway point to the bay it had already picked up, tugging at my jacket, making the canoe rock slightly, as if it were pushing back against something I couldn’t see.
I kept going anyway. There are days when resistance doesn’t disturb — it clarifies. The wind forces you to paddle more precisely, to set each stroke more deliberately, not out of strength but out of precision.
Once I reach the island, I look for shelter behind a large granite boulder, gray and scarred from a hundred years of weather. In its lee, everything suddenly goes quiet, as if the stone had drawn its own zone around itself where nothing else can reach it.
I lean the bow against the rock. Today I won’t shoot into the wind — that wouldn’t be an honest target, only a fight against something I can’t control. Instead I sit down beside the bow, my back against the warm stone, and listen to the wind moving through the pines up on the hill. A sound like a thousand voices whispering at once, none of them individually understandable.
The granite beneath me has stored the day’s sun. I feel the warmth through my jacket while the wind sweeps over me without really reaching me. Two forces that have nothing to do with each other, and I sit exactly between them.
I think about how often I’ve tried to control things that can’t be controlled. The wind doesn’t ask anyone’s permission. The granite doesn’t argue with it — it simply holds, patient, the way it has for centuries. Maybe that’s the real lesson of this afternoon: not every resistance demands a response. Sometimes it’s enough to simply stay.
When I paddle back later, the wind has eased a little, but it stays with me the whole way, pressing against one side of the canoe, forcing a slight detour. I let it. The direct path isn’t the right one today.
Between wind and granite.
Between resistance and stillness.
Between control and trust.
