Writing

I’m starting to understand my pattern.  I seem to have written a book once every 6 years and this year as seen Farmotherlands birthed.  Writing feels like exhaling: lots of previous learning and experiencing and remembering; sending it out into the world.  Now the book is born, I’m inhaling again, reading and listening to podcasts, bringing new thinking and knowledge in; a bit like I did in 2020 when I could feel a new phase starting, but wasn’t sure what.

I am so grateful for this blog space and to you for reading it, because it is my thinking out loud space, as it comes, testing out ideas which sometimes for into other works, a safe space to experiment and flow.

River

So I’m inhaling about river health.  I’m very lucky to have a river at the bottom of the garden that is big enough to swim in so having been inspired by my younger friend Kate who jumped into a river near her work, during her lunch hour, I got in much earlier in the year that I usually would.  In March it was literally seconds before the knives of water turned me red and sent me back up the garden and into the shower. Now 20 minutes is OK.

Normally I would be seeing 2 inch long tiddlers nibbling at my legs, but this year I haven’t.  Now it could be that I’ve never been in the river this early on in the year, or of course, my fear is, there are fewer fish in the river.  But there are definitely more feathered visitors.  I’ve swum with mallards and swans (at a respectful distance). The river seems much busier in that way than usual.

So I searched for a river testing kit. When I bought the house years ago, I had the water quality tested and back then it was good, so I was trying to find a test. There are very few so the one that is coming in the post will test for bacteria.  For sure there is shit in the river. There are bullocks in the field opposite so I see their deposits and never ever put my head under.

So, this is part of my inhale, winding my way to thinking about ways of protecting the health of the river that buoys me up and cools me down on a sunny day.

Fascia

Then, as a yoga teacher I’m aware of fascia which is a connective tissue which connects all our organs, muscles, bones, nerves and blood vessels.  It is that white stringy stuff you see when you are cutting a raw chicken breast.  Massage practitioners work with it to relieve tightness and improve function.

Interstitium

Then, I was listening to a podcast where the mentioned the interstitium which I had never heard of before.  It was only recently discovered and is a new organ, but not one is a specific place, instead it is, as far as I currently understand it, a fluid filled space that looks like a golden honeycomb, built largely of collagen, that scientists think might how cancer cells migrate and why acupuncture works.

I know so little about rivers, fascia and the interstitium currently (still reading) but what they all have in common is fluid and flow.

Fluid, clean, flowing

When I did my Permaculture Design Course I learned that eutrophication is where too much slurry ends up in water courses and the additional phosphorus and nitrogen de-oxygenate the water and lead to algal bloom, killing the river.  George Monbiot made a great documentary on how we are killing our rivers and what we can do to change that. It is worth a watch.

Like the rivers, fascia needs clean hydration and so does the interstitium. When the fascia is not hydrated it knots, dries out, sticks to itself and we get stiff and ill.  When the interstitium is depleted of fluid, it can’t move between organs delivering immune support and removing waste in the way that it should.

Which made me smile because it is another example of how what is inside us is deeply connected with our environment. The river needs to be able to flow cleanly and fluidly and so do our internal water sources, whether through our kidneys as urine or through the interstitium or fascia.

Just another example of how connected we and our bodies are to the world in which we live.

Farmotherlands is my award winning collection of poems about nature, farming, community and family. You can buy a copy here.

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Thanks for being here.
Julie

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