The Floating Island
Disclaimer: This is a derivative work discussing Hârn or Hârn World, originally created by N. Robin Crossby. No assertion of copyright to Hârn or Hârn World is made by producer or the publisher of this work.
A piece of allegoric prose, a vision reflecting the undercurrents present in the Hârniac community.
Hârn is like a floating island. It travels in mental currents that take it to other floating islands, called fantasy worlds, and sometimes to firm ground, called real world. Like the other floating islands and the firm ground, the island of Hârn has a history of its own that both shows on the contours, shoreline, vegetation and settlements, but in the same time is hidden under the thick layer of recent constructions and waste.
Some claim that this island was created as an island, while others say the island was split off from either some continent or from some of the other floating islands. Still some think the island is a random collection of pieces from all possible islands and continents. Some say these parts were brought in by certain people. Others say the people were just travelling on these parts when they happened to come together.
On this island there live people with mixed origins. They have widely differing reasons for choosing just Hârn for their dwelling place. Some like the shorelines, the surf and the sunshine; some like the lush vegetation; some like the ground and claim Hârn is much firmer than the other floating islands; some like the harsh conditions and the adventurous mood one finds in the deeper forests; some roam the island in splendid freedom; some just like to climb the lighthouse and watch the whole island from above; some like the people gathering on the island. Many are tourists, just visiting and soon moving on, either too busy or too bored to stay longer. But many also stay, some even for life, and there is an older, almost aboriginal part of the population.
Even when many of the locals and the visitors mostly stay quiet and just enjoy their stay on Hârn, there is a lively debate going on on a wide variety of issues concerning both the island and the world around it. Common for many debates is the question of where the island comes from and where it is heading, and if it should be heading anywhere at all. Sometimes the discussions are so hot that they lead into bushfires, making some areas of the island uninhabitable for a time (but in the same time creating clearings that eventually are filled with new, rapidly spreading plants and species). A couple of the bushfires have flamed so high that the earth is left burned and barren for years and decades. Some living on the island even like those barren grounds, and many short-time visitors believe the barren grounds have always been there.
Now there are those who want to anchor the island right on the spot where it was created. Their problem is that nobody is sure anymore where that spot is, and if there ever was such a spot at all. The oceans Hârn is traversing have changed over time. Thus all anchor-minded people want to anchor Hârn on different spots, some closer to a certain continent, some closer to a certain other floating island, and some on the open sea, where there are no other floating islands around and no continents on the horizon.
Then there are those who would like to anchor Hârn anywhere it happens to be for just to enjoy a certain sunset, a certain wind, a certain temperature. Their problem is that they prefer different places, and there are always more of those who would like to lift the anchor and get moving towards the place they think they would like the most.
Then there are those who are building motors for the island, trying to get it to travel on certain oceans, in certain currents. They want to be captains of the ship, and their problem is that Hârn is not a ship but an island. You cannot power whole islands, especially when everybody is building the motors on all sides of the island, and wants to be captains themselves.
In the middle there are those who are afraid that the whole island may split because of the momentums heading for different directions, or that the whole island may sink because the anchor doesn’t let it to follow the changing altitudes of the ocean. But most of the people, especially those visiting the island just for short periods or just for once, don’t care about the origins or the fate of the island. Some of them never know they have visited an island, and for some of them the name Hârn means nothing at all.
While people discuss the origins and the fate of the island, the island itself is steadily moving on the currents, bouncing off from some islands and continents, and spending time on the side of other islands and continents, changing exotic seeds. Maybe one day the island finds itself firmly settled on the side of a continent, or grounds and just stops moving, becoming a continent itself, or sinks in a storm.
Nobody knows what will happen.
* * *
I like the pictures I have taken when visiting this floating island called Hârn. It’s because of those pictures that I keep returning to Hârn. But those pictures are part of me, not part of the island. Sometimes when comparing the pictures with some friend of mine we find out we like the same parts of the island in the same way. Sometimes we see that we have not visited the same parts of the island at all. And then there are those moments when we have to admit that we have taken pictures from the same spot and in the same direction, but they don’t resemble each one the least.
This is strange. It makes me want to visit those other coasts and forests of Hârn, to see them with my own eyes, to try to measure how big this little island actually is. And I’m beginning to get the feeling that while Hârn looks small from a distance, it is too big to get to know or to understand in one lifetime, or at all. Sometimes I get the feeling that Hârn may only have a life in pictures taken by us, the visitors on Hârn.
How mysterious these floating islands tend to be.