Swamped

Cypress swamp

To love a swamp, however, is to love what is muted and marginal, what exists in the shadows, what shoulders its way out of mud and scurries along the damp edges and what is most commonly praised.  And sometimes its invisibility is a blessing.  Swamps and bogs are places of transition and wild growth, breeding grounds, experimental labs where organisms and ideas have the luxury of being out of the spotlight, where the imagination can mutate and mate, send tendrils into and out of the water.

~ Barbara Hurd, Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination

Reflections in the swamp

I do love swamps and bogs.  I suppose I have to given how we almost always end up living near swamps and bogs.

Looking down into the water of a swamp at just the right time of day can make you almost dizzy, and unsure if you’re looking up or down.  Sometimes I imagine that while I’m looking down, I am falling up.

Falling in

In a swamp, as in meditation, you begin to glimpse how elusive, how inherently insubstantial, how fleeting our thoughts are, our identities.  There is magic in this moist world, in how the mind lets go, slips into sleepy water, circles and nuzzles the banks of palmetto and wild iris, how it seeps across dreams, smears them into the upright world, rots the wood of treasure chests, welcomes the body home.

~ Barbara Hurd, Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination

Of earth and water

To me, exploring a swamp or a bog is a little like stepping back in time, into the primordial soup from which, it has been theorized, life originated.

Liquid reflections

That’s about all I have time for today.  We are swamped with kitchen work here at the Wabi-Sabi Ranch.  It’s exciting, but exhausting.  We have a saying here:  “Nothing is ever easy.”  We cleaned the bay window in the kitchen only to question why it continued to fog up which brought about the discovery that the wood under the frame was wet, moldy, and rotting.  Changing a faucet resulted in broken pipes and almost a full day with no water.  To borrow from Kurt Vonnegut, so it goes.

Primal

Thank you for visiting.  Be careful on your way out.  Things are starting to get a little spooky around here.  It must be the season for it.

It’s easy to get lost.

Be good, be kind, be loving.  Just Be.  🙂

Ghosts in the woods