Shaman John's Arc

Chapter 2 of 6

The road took John far from the village. He set up a camp near a stand of trees and waited for the butterfly to return. Days passed. It did not come. His two dogs, the light brown one and his smaller brown sister, curled against his legs each night. But John lay awake. The old doubt crept back. He was alone now, with no strangers to help, no work to prove his worth. He wondered if he had thrown his whole life away. Each morning he tried to sit still. He closed his eyes and reached inward, the way the voice had asked. His mind would not quiet. It filled with lists, worries, the faces of people who still needed him. A migraine pressed behind his eyes. The butterfly had promised answers inside him. But he could not find the door, and without stillness he could not hear anything at all. On the fourth day, the dogs would not let him brood. The smaller one dropped a stick on his chest. The larger one barked and ran toward the trees, then looked back, waiting. John groaned and stood. "Fine," he said. "Show me." He followed them into the woods. The dogs ran ahead, noses down, tails high. John watched them. They did not worry about tomorrow. They did not measure themselves. They simply moved through the world, breathing it in. The smaller one rolled in a patch of grass, legs kicking at the sky. John laughed. He had not laughed in days. He knelt in the grass beside her. He put his hand on her warm ribs and felt them rise and fall. He matched his breath to hers. Slow in. Slow out. The lists in his head grew quiet. The pain behind his eyes softened. He was not trying to reach some far place inside himself anymore. He was just here, in the grass, with the sun and the dogs and his own breath. And in that quiet, something opened. Not a voice this time. A feeling. He felt the grass, the dogs, and his own body as one thing, not many. The line between himself and the world went thin. He understood, for one clear moment, that he had never been alone. The stillness he chased had been under his feet the whole time. John opened his eyes. The dogs sat watching him, ears up. He knew now that he did not need to force the journey inward. He needed only to stop fighting and be present. But the feeling had already begun to fade, and he knew he could not hold it alone for long. He would need a way to return to that stillness, again and again, or he would lose it. That would be the next thing he had to learn.