Growing Roots, Becoming Land

a repost of my debut Substack essay, one year later

My Mum came by last week, and as I came out to meet her she greeted me with, “You look like you grew here!” She was referring to my being scruffily layered in swamp green with my fleece hanging open on a broken zip and my unbrushed hair a bird’s nest mess, trailing bale string and straw, splattered in mud, bog water and other suspicious stains, unwashed, probably smelling like a billy goat, pants tucked in and welly booted in classic, hill farmer style, looking something like the ragged, winter heather I’d just crawled out of, but I’ll take it.

Swamp Woman. Lady Shrek? This was taken a year ago. Imagine: same setting, same clothes, twelve months later, with mud and moss and twigs in my hair…

A theme has been appearing in my reading lately, resonating with my own sense of—or lack of—and search for rootedness. Uprootedness? Of landlessness, rootlessness, by default or design, and a deep longing to belong, for the stability and permanence of place, of earth to ground and root into. And on …