#4: In the Sacred Mud

𑁍 On Blooming Where Planted

Swamp Girl Summer

I’ve been sitting in some great discomfort recently. Met with the tension of life, of seasons, of people, I’ve been wading in the muck for the past month and a half.

When I think of those celebrating the joys of the summer season like midsummer, summer solstice, or Lughnasadh with glee I find myself escaping my present reality and joining them in spirit. Evenings by a fire, days in a chilly river, picking fruit, and eating outdoors.

Occasionally I’ll roll my eyes at these summer rituals and ceremonies. The pagans didn’t live in the swamp tropics!!! But there’s a reason I’m here, rooted in the swamp tropics, seasonless on the surface, but ever-evolving through the birth-death cycles in my own right.

Last month I was sick for the first time in nearly four years. My throat was sore for 16 days. I mean, so sore that I felt like I was swallowing glass. The soreness moved around to different parts of my throat and even my tongue causing crazy painful ulcers. I was tested for mono, strep, covid, and did a general throat culture and everything was negative.

The day after the throat pain vanished, we had an internal disaster happen in our apartment that was horrific and caused us to fear for our health and break our contract.

Coincidentally, up to getting sick, I had been purging over 45,000 images from my hard drive from the last 12 years. Photos I don’t think I ever really looked at after taking. My organized Virgo-moon brain had everything neatly ordered and labeled and yet it was all just sitting in this hard drive… an unseen weight.

I decided to go through and save the images that meant something to me while deleting all the rest. Through this process, a lot of dormant energy got mucked up and sloshed around.

It was like stepping into clear water but upon going deeper, I kicked up the mud and sand and couldn’t see the bottom anymore. Murky and brackish. Old places and faces, screenshots of messages and conversations that shocked me, images of my body 100/120lbs smaller, old lovers, and long-since disconnected friends.

I went into my clearing and grounding practices after this, as it was unexpectedly intense. But the mud always settles.

During the same week as the photo purge, I felt the urge to bring a Datura Metel flower essence into my life. I hadn’t even started using it in or on my body, but rather just welcoming the spirit of the plant into my home and space while attempting to slowly cultivate a relationship with her.

Datura Metel is a highly poisonous and toxic plant that when taken internally can cause severe psychoactive effects and even death. But in certain lineages, it’s used ceremonially and ritually. Of course, I only have the essence of the flower meaning none of the psychoactive compounds are involved — just the plant’s energetic signature.

I was chatting with a lovely gal on IG who noted that even having the intention to work with a specific plant can get a lot of energy moving.

Datura is mysterious to me, yet she stands warmly and firmly. She is reticent because I must be the one to make the move into transmutation… and only when I’m ready.

She is a pure mirror. A noted guide among the birth/death cycles we all face in life, it’s said that Datura helps us through transformation, shining a light onto the darkness of the unconscious — the underworld of the feminine.

Datura’s energtic imprint is strong. Sitting on a clay altar/shelfie I made, she is a feminine force of death and you can’t hide frequency. Funnily enough, her native plant self is also a humid-loving, tropical swamp girl.

She thrives here, where I’m currently planted. Where I sometimes wish my roots would spring up like the mangroves, spindly and hunched, ready to run out of here. She whispers to me,

Mirror, you can bloom here in the swamps, too.

---

Maybe the Internet Raised Us

I was thinking back on how in the early aughts I’d stumble across a youtube video someone would send via AIM or to my AOL address and how that video or piece of content would be relevant for weeks or even months. (Years?) Charlie Bit My Finger. Peter At The Park. Leave Britney Alone! Shoes. Let’s Get Some Shoes.

With social media and the 24-hour news cycle, long-term virality doesn’t exist. It’s rare if the reel I sent to my spouse via DM in the afternoon is talk-worthy by the time he comes home from work. Often it’s not, as we’re inundated with a million other humourous, traumatic, or attention-grabbing pieces of content before then, over and over and over again.

Leslie Stephens writes in her newsletter,

Instagram employs the same strategies slot machines do to keep its users engaged and literally addicted. To keep up with the algorithms, and remain relevant and well-compensated for their work, content creators have to create engaging content on a 24-hour cycle (Brooke Erin Duffy does amazing research in this area). As a result, it is nearly impossible to be genuine on social media—there are no off days, nor room for boring content. 

As an Instagram creator, I realized I was no longer capturing my life on Instagram but living my life in order to capture it on Instagram. As both a creator and consumer, I felt anxious and depressed anytime I interacted with the app. With Substack, I don’t have to work with an algorithm to make sure my work is seen —you either subscribe because you enjoy the content I create, or you don’t. It lends itself to a much stronger community, where I am able to interact with a smaller group of subscribers who resonate with the topics I write about.

“Living my life in order to capture it on Instagram.”

I often think of this when I watch the most ethereal videos of cottage home vloggers and prairie-dwelling homemakers. The angles and tripods used, set amongst ancient forests. The editing of the angles while getting milk or running along the riverbed, stitched together in harmony. The perfectly selected shots of just the right lighting, captured over and over until it’s the best one. Slow living. (We also have an affiliate code for that.)

Life imitates art.

If you have an open G center like me, I’ve found being really careful with what I consume and perceive helps me stay true to my own voice, my own desires, and my own intuition rather than adopting the dreams and identities/opinions of others and proclaiming/mistaking them as my own.

Today I was thinking that it’s surely been a week and a half that I haven’t been on Instagram at all (not even on a desktop, web browser, or through one of my many inactive accounts). I checked my calendar and it’s been six days.

Six days that I haven’t logged on at all and scrolled/consumed. This makes me laugh because I’m fully fathoming how warped our brains have become from the decade-long use of the platform (12 years for me).

I find myself thinking about various influencers I will never meet (did she have her baby yet? Are they back from Paris?), homes and apartments I will never see in person (what was the setup of her living room again? I wonder how much that parcel of land cost them! — insert comparison of my rented apartment), and pop culture news that sucks me in every time (so were Ariana and Lizzo prophetic in their demise??? 1989 stans, rise).

A practice that presented itself to me in the last six months is turning off all of the noise on the internet when I’m walking into my own initiations.

This means not listening to podcasts, watching youtube/Tiktok, or consuming social media content that has anything to do with what I’m going through.

Not intaking all the voices, thought forms, and noise around food, diet/weight loss, money, business, children/parenthood, trauma/health/wellness, plants/holistic healing, and on and on. I avoid any and all content like it’s my job and intake only what makes me laugh and feel connected to others and Earth (Good News Movement, Geometry in Nature, Taylor Swift tour updates).

I’ve taken it a step further during this murky time by not consuming really any content at all. I watch TV for a laugh in the evening. I read. I connect with a special teacher tree. I stare at the wall, watch the light of day move across it. I make music with my hands.

Turning off all the noise with intentional energetic sovereignty is a deep practice, one I suspect I will be clearing, grounding, and practicing for a long time. So don’t be fooled — the simpler concepts are in theory, the more skilled we must become.

---

Winter’s Mud

Summers have been notably “winterish” for me for the last several years. Because I live in a climate where summer is the most uncomfortable season, with the added loom of natural disaster, it’s a time for deep inner grounding.

Years ago I just didn’t understand why I would get depressed and have a reverse sort of Seasonal Affect Disorder, but now I understand it as a time of “wintering” — an internal time of rest, retreat, finding comfort, and solitude.

It’s not easy by any stretch. I despise humidity, I physically feel terrible, and my outside time in nature is drastically cut down. I often feel like an outlier and like I don’t belong where I am and that the rest of the country probably thinks I’m weird or doesn’t understand, because who doesn’t love the beach and sun?

Katherine May writes in her book Wintering that winter is not just a season but,

the fallow period in life when you're cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of the outsider. Perhaps it results from an illness or a life event such as a bereavement or the birth of a child; perhaps it comes from humiliation or failure. Perhaps you’re in a period of transition and have temporarily fallen between two worlds.

So this summer I’ve been flowing with the season (inner and outer) and allowing myself to move with it. To see what I can learn from this season of being in the swamp of life.

Creepy-crawly, slimy, a little scary, yet all-encompassing and warmly familiar, like a cacoon or womb. And in time, brimming with life. Birds, butterflies, flowers. A cool wind rushes through.

No mud, no lotus, right?

In the sacred mud with you,

Tracy