Field Notes: Why the bogs are calling

There’s a pull happening, and you may have felt it. A quiet move back toward wild places. Not the tidy, postcard version of nature, but the mud, the moss, the overgrown and the untended; the bog. It’s easy to read this as a passing look but it’s more than that. 

What people are reaching for isn’t just the visual landscape. It’s what the landscape doesn’t do. Because everything else has started to ask something of us. Our sleep is measured. Our days are counted. Somewhere along the way, rest turned into another thing to get right, and most of life became something to keep on top of. The pressure to be a little better, a little tidier, is always on.

A wild place asks none of that. Nothing out there is trying to improve. It grows in every direction, keeps no schedule, and answers to no one. And after a week of being measured, that turns out to be the thing we’re short of - somewhere that lets us off. 

There’s an older comfort in it too. Being near green, unhurried places is known to settle us. The body slows, the mind loosens, without being told to. It happens on its own, which is rather the point.

Maybe that’s why the bogs are calling. Not because we’ve fallen for nature again, but because we’re tired of everything that keeps score. Out there, nothing is being optimised, nothing is being tracked, and for a while, neither are we.

Have you felt the pull? 

Image credits:
1. Inez Lightfoot
2. Unknown
3. Gerlanda di Francia
4. Unknown
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