What did we think of June? It was a loaded month for us and despite a lot of personal time and attention being due we managed to wrap 3 big projects, find some direction on our professional branding and set our sights on a corporate contract soon this autumn. We additionally agreed a venue for our very first public workshops in real life, the Teahouse Theatre in Vauxhall. It’s pretty. It’s kitsch. It’s dainty and serves giant cakes. And is run by a cat.
I missed uploading your month’s newsletter in time, sorry gang. But I hope the few days since the 29th didn’t leave you missing us too much. We’re taking life a little slower to manage the pacing of a few projects, writing our books and being present for loved ones and our rest as summer begins. Hope you enjoy this piece, about how therapeutic mud is, how mud allows us to give our emotions a canvass to come up, big or small, sad or glad. We enjoyed the metaphors and imagery we could blend between the visceral components of mud. Extracting these into wordplay and exploration into our senses was wonderful to engage on the upward and lowland bound motions. Emotions can feel like heavy mud, but the smell of the earth is always one we will nourish our senses in. Thanks for letting us explore themes and topics with you, we love being in your inbox - and truly appreciate the continuity of your support.
LOVE S [SHIMI]
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Converse shoes sink in and I feel the tug upward to move on from the heartbreak I left behind only a few months ago. The hotness in the dry sand i would once feel on my feet, feel everywhere - gets in my bra, gets in my hair, slowly piercing my skin to discomfort - but be grateful for it - you’re abroad and isn’t that so lucky. The converse I wish I had as a teenager but never wore, thinking they were too common instead of the reason that they were simply too much to afford. Waste my money on clothes instead, outfits from highstreet european importers of cheap cheap cloth, looked okay for Daniela’s 15th birthday. The air curls around my ears, swirling into past memories of things I once felt, things now resurfacing from this trigger: mud.
Being stuck in the mud feels akin to being buried alive. That fear of suffocation and no way out, no light at the end of the tunnel.
Now is not the time for progress in the literal sense, although my skin cells are still regenerating (slower), my invoices are still being sent out, the sun goes up and then it goes down, the earth spins around it so it’s the Earth that does the up and down, or is it my eyes? Imagine I’m in a field of cows gently mooing with nary an engine to be heard, the grass soft beneath my feet, kinda wet from the morning dew. The sun has set long ago and the stars are swept across the black sky, like a piece of cardboard pin pricked to let in tiny spots of light that can barely reach me. The moon's orbit shines ever white, tries its best to stretch out and reach the edge of my periphery. Stillness. I wouldn’t mind being still, and inviting the world to sit down for a cuppa with me.
Being stuck in the mud feels akin to being buried alive. That fear of suffocation and no way out, no light at the end of the tunnel.
Mud pulled me down into a tunnel, the secret entry to the rabbit hole Goldlilocks was too impatient to find. She wanted a nap instead. She knew the priorities. Alice though, she had nowhere to go, hot stepping into the glue the earth cements minerals combined with dense clay all at a suitable rest as the water stays wet. Mud pulled me into a quick bang snap of recollection and I had no choice. To aimlessly wander is forbidden with the innocent consent you agree to when you step outside for a new day. You resign yourself to whatever you’ll step in. The privilege of having feet.
Would you be so cold if I were to touch you? I ask permission, I ask the field soaked in the river overflow if it would mind if I cross it. It welcomes me, not caring, reminding me it’s my own issue whatever happens to me at the cost of its state - wet. I remind myself to enjoy whatever the earth gives me, I try to stay connected but oh you make it so hard. I look at my skin as it heals, the open wound pressing outwardly puss and blood to clot over the careless holes I’ve broken into my skin - I didn’t mean it Mum, I just fell over. I Didn’t mean it. I think about how my body only cares to close the hole, and I think about how the Earth only cares to close its broken pieces too.
Let me ask you something: does being stuck in the mud feels akin to being buried alive yet? That fear of suffocation and no way out, no light at the end of the tunnel.
I look at mud across the fields. I look back through the horizons down at the foot of the steps, away from the river, the horizons I’ve walked many times now. The earth only wanted to push up and outward, towards the places it had come from, toward the comfort it preferred. Backward is a place we all long for when broken apart. It wants to heal too. Coagulation is visible, I see it: on my elbow and across the fields where my every step re-breaks her soft being. I’m so sorry. I see you are just trying to heal. I see you are trying to just get back there. I see that no one is helping you and everyone is taking. Mud engulfs your plains to scab over the pain you’re coping with, the torture you’re living with.
Been sinking into quicksand lately, playing stuck in the mud with no friends around to tag me and get me moving again. Slowly sinking and watching the world go by, fixed earth energy can feel like a swamp when meshed with my cold neptunian sensibilities, or my hot headed Martian instincts. Stuck, stuck in an urban jungle with all the energy bottled into a fragile mason jar and nowhere to put it. Energy I’d love to sprinkle onto the grass and help it grow, energy I usually sizzle into the onions on a frying pan, now just clutched close to my chest. The mud becomes a mirror and makes me question why this energy is something I want to expel, rather than handle for a while. I’d make a really shit mum, but I’d build an empress-ive network of babysitters to handle it for me. Not now though, I have a dumb baby to look after. I am that dumb baby, it’s me.
Birdsong and the fresh scent of dung is what the doctor’s calling for. My self-doctor. Clarifying mud all over my body and on my face, drawing out the toxins of self isolation and doubt to clear some space for a solution. A place to go, a thing to do, a word to speak. Something. Give me something to do, or tell me to do nothing and close my eyes. Tell me to stop fighting and rest my legs, my ankles that have been beaten and worn from all the running. Tell me there’s absolutely nothing for me to do or think right now. Help me put up these wooden pellets around me to protect me from those who are also feeling the restlessness and try to reach me with their own insecurities and doubt with the hopes that I’ll magick them away, somehow, because that’s what I usually do.
Ask your lover if being stuck in the mud feels like being buried alive, ask them what takes them there. Ask them how the earth smells as the panic swallows their safety of tomorrow.
Being stuck in the mud feels akin to being buried alive. That fear of suffocation and no way out, no light at the end of the tunnel. Imagine the King of Cups, sitting on his throne, floating on the treacherous waters of the ocean. There are ships sinking in the distant backdrop. His face is impassive. His core is engaged, and he won’t be falling off his rightful throne. Now the Queen of Pentacles, in her garden. Surrounded by her flowers. Gold is falling from the sky and onto the dirty ground by her feet. She moves past the wretches falling over outside the church scavenging for money and is at peace with the air hung around her, no breeze to feel. Just her own kingdom. I wonder what it would be to build a cocoon and rest, not hide, for 28 days. Like those embryonic sacks manufactured by Tyrell Corp. When I’m ready, slice the sack with a knife and let me fall out onto the floor, naked and covered in some artificial gelling agent. I’ll learn to walk again.