10/07/2026
As I went on my walk today with my dog, a gentle drizzle making its steady descent from the grey sky I was thinking how the weather was matching my mood. When I walked the familiar path I walk almost every day I noticed how the landscape had changed after a storm coming through. After another sleepless night wondering if we would be safe or not and our son leaving to go back south to his flat with his friends I noticed how nature often reflects our lives.
The river with its muddy waters and debris carried downstream from the mountains covering what is usually land, trees and branches, broken in the wind, paths under water, tree roots submerged in water, a little stream flowing where I sometimes walk. In a few days time the water will have receded, branches will have been cleared away to the side where they will rot and support new growth and provide shelter to insects and rodents, tree roots will be recovering in the sunshine from the damp, maybe seeds or bulbs that have been uplifted from upstream will settle and grow downstream, like the daffodils and jonquils I now forage in amongst the trees, who might have come down in a flood a few years back and made themselves a new home in the wild.
I was reflecting on how what happens in nature often mirrors what happens in our lives. We all have storms coming through on a regular basis. They will have varying severity and some of us are more resilient than others in a storm. Sometimes it might just be a strong wind, threatening to break some of our branches off, sometimes it might be a heavy rain that carries parts of us away downstream, sometimes it might be such a severe storm that we don’t know if we will ever be able to thrive again.
Then the sun comes out tentatively and properly and our landscape starts to recover. First slowly, tidying away the debris bit by bit, some of it supporting new growth on the sidelines, some of it overgrowing and composting eventually. The parts of us that have been taken away, might start thriving elsewhere and in their place something else might grow. Our roots will eventuall.....
You can head to my substack to read the end. https://myheartspace.substack.com/p/muddy-waters-and-changing-landscapes
