Searching for that first word to begin a new piece is like standing knee deep in the river preparing for that first jump. You know its going to be cold and you hesitate…just for a few seconds. When you’re in, the feeling is full of so many sensations. The most notable for me is the freedom. Stretching my whole self out almost beyond my physical limits and becoming one with the water, the moment, the beauty of the valley around me. I replace the fear with calm and allow my body to move naturally and fluidly with the water. I think about the water molecules that surround me. Where they’ve come from and where they’ll go. I wonder if any other human on earth has ever touched them before. They will soon join the vastness of the oceans and perhaps never end up in the same place again. I allow my mind to drift like the river, but then land again in the shallows invigorated and engaged. This is happening within me now as I write, I feel it flowing. I rekindled my love for wild swimming with the help of a dear friend this past summer and it has led me back to a connection I thought I had lost for so many months. I was feeling like a witch who had completely lost her powers. I would go out sometimes desperately hoping to feel something. A tiny spark, a soft whisper, a gentle embrace from the mother, something. It was very unsettling and led me into the tangle of low hanging branches at the river’s edge, so to speak. It was a numbness and an expressionless stare. I am not immune to the effects of what our world is going through right now and that has disrupted me much more than I ever could’ve expected. I have let myself experience the dark but the river has given back what I need as sustenance. I didn’t think that could ever happen to me but it took over. We do not have all the answers and we are not the rulers of this realm. In order to cope when swimming isn’t possible, I often go to a special spot under a particular silver birch on a nearby nature reserve for natural magic in another form. I have birches here but need to see just this one. I’ve only been there with my most intimate fellow people but mostly go alone. I hold onto her fine, flexible gently leaved branches and ask for help. Answers come flowing immediately, like sweet confident words guiding and soothing me. It feels like being embraced by the Mother herself and I feel the connection. I thank her and go with the advice I have gained from an unexplainable source of infinite meaning. I feel the tree from the very tip of the highest reaching leaf all the way down to the end of the longest root deep in the earth below where I stand. I am filled and comforted like a child in that moment. I appreciate this is a slightly bizarre expose on my way of existing, but if it helps anyone else in some small way, I don’t mind. It is the root from which I grow and the thing that all of my writing about nature is based on. I love it and feel it so deeply at times that it must be controlled in order for me to be a functioning member of society! It’s like an enormous liquid sphere I hold in my hand, maintaining its shape so that I don’t let it overwhelm me completely and I accidentally find myself drowning in its inviting power. This is what I think has been happening to me. It has been a gradual process of reintegration back into what a lot of people call “normal life”. For others, but not so much for me. Things have been happening that I haven’t wanted. I didn’t want to have a suspicious substance injected into my arm but felt pressure to have it. I didn’t want the children to go back to school and indirectly enter us back into an exponentially larger group of unknowns. I don’t like seeing and listening to the attitudes of some people I have to be in a room with at my work who just walk in without care for everyone else. I know this is my perception of it and it’s their choice but I don’t have to agree with it. I don’t want these things and have suffered because I’m not in control of it. Knowing this has helped me to relax and come down from extreme ways of thinking. Balance and equal measure in all things is the struggle we all face. I am relearning how to be out among people in the world again and to flow like the river, taking things as they come. Engaging, but also stepping away when I need to breathe. Thinking about wonderful swims, collecting chestnuts, making rosehip syrup and finding comfort in the trees. I am here and always will be.