Getting bogged down below the bog

A series of Em-BOG-iments, Spring flavours, beautiful chaos

Dear pals.

I hope the sun is shining on you as sweetly as she is right now, trickling in the half cracked window pane along with the other things I need to mend, replace or repair.

It’s felt like a hot moment since I wrote on this newsletter and about time, too. Life has rolled (but not without some minor turbulence, buckle up) onto a very new chapter indeed: one of returning and re-rooting in my native Clare. Perhaps home can exist after all! But not without being a bit bogged down. . .

‘A simple life in nature’ was all I ever wanted since I was very little. I’d write pages and pages about the little house made of sticks and the welly boots and the ducks. But it turns out that in our modern age, a ‘simple life in nature’ may not be quite so smooth as once thought. We are no longer cave people, after all, at least not all of us. And there will often be holes, as it were, in our dreams. Parts where the heart wrenches out and darkens. Parts where the heart lights up and we feel all fuzzy inside.

I don’t know about you but I always felt Spring such a strange and beautiful time, my favourite season indeed. But as much as I love the brightening of days and tiny buds on every tingly tree, I always feel a funny sense of restlessness paired with the relief. It’s important then to stay a little bogged down. And though I’m currently living on a springy in a house without running water or electricity, I feel more together in one place than I have in months, perhaps even years. The quietness of life post building-site destruction and the peace of having no power (that is until it becomes a nuisance, emails overloading and life’s trickling demands settle in). Still there is something beautiful in what remains unfinished. And also in collecting water from the well and fumbling around in candlelight. The tapping of the trees on the tin roof and the stream flowing by. The donkeys running loose through the oak trees to the left. All of it basking in a mysterious sort of hope.

Now that I’m back on the big bad bog I’m seeing more and more, in the ‘flesh’ as it were, how the body of that big, juicy landscape is what makes this place feel so dark and threatening and also protected and held at the same time. Perhaps we are stilll figuring out what it means to descend. To fall into the unknown and watch the process to its finish, knowing that there won’t be one, ever, and we’ll live out the rest of our days in search of a something that exists all the while, in moments.

Perhaps chaos isn’t so bad really. All just part of the dance….

Em-BOG-iment is perhaps what you feel on the inside when you have nowhere else to go. Like when the sediments of sand settle to the bottom of the container that is your life.

When life has overwhelmed you so, you fall into it instead.

I’d love to hear your thoughts about these strange emotions. These pulls upwards and dragging downs. Of feeling bogged down and being held.

Your relationship to landscape, to feeling embodied in the everyday-always. It’s a journey, but each one so unique. Cheers for reading, I look forward to hearing your thoughts and stories.

And if you want to subscribe I would also love to have you.