Yma o Hyd
(“Still Here”)
I went for
a stroll on the Boardwalk at Cors Fochno the other day. It was a sunny Sunday
afternoon in April; surprisingly warm once you got a bit of shelter from the
breeze. It was actually so much more
than a stroll. First of all, it was my first venture out onto the boardwalk for
over 15 years, since my MS started getting disabling, and second, it wasn’t a
stroll - it was my first time out there on my new and game changing off-road
electric wheelchair. So it was very much more than a “stroll”, it was like
visiting an old friend that I had lost touch with for 15 years! I sat for a while basking in the fresh spring
sunshine, drinking in the sights and sounds, the delicate bobbing cotton grass,
the glistening sphagnum, the surrounding woods with an orchestra of jostling avian priorities. And the smell! - gorse flowers, bursting into
the breeze with their sweet coconut scent, the hint of salty air on the breeze.
It’s only a little loop of the bog that
is accessible, the rest being set aside for wildlife and regeneration. Finally we have learned to cherish this wild
space, and realize that, for it to recover, we have to allow it to flourish without mechanical interference.
The irony isn’t lost on me that this place
suffered under technology’s footprint, while I am benefiting from another
machine, albeit one that, to me, represents liberation and reconnection with life
and nature.
I feel a
bond, a kinship with this beautiful faltering land, the once great bog of Cors
Fochno. Referred to by ancient maps as “The Great Bog”; a vast wild expanse now whittled down to a kernel, by men and machine forging and
forcing their way through the most intimate unspoiled havens. That tapestry of
delicately interwoven food chains - pockets of dazzling flowers amid the gentle
yielding carpet of green, so vital and dynamic - ripped, scraped away, drained and enclosed. Soft
sphagnum stripped down to bedrock. Rivers mutated and broken. The straight
lines of steel and stone have left their mark on the land like an old wound.
I too, a kernel
of a once boisterous and untamable ball of energy, future shimmered brightly before me, bursting with potential, pockets of
dazzling flowers amid the gentle yielding carpet of good health. But I, like this beloved bog
have a disease that has changed my very essence. My disease is stripping my
nerves down to bare wires; scars I will
never see, but I feel them in my faltering gait, my foggy days and sleepless
nights. that boisterous girl is now long dead, and in the decay this thoughtful
woman was eventually born. This slow transformation from carefree girl to a
quieter, more sober and considered version of myself is due to the effects of
nature’s unpredictable movements; forces that will never be tamed, while the bog’s malaise was caused by modern progress, the taming
of nature that should never have been tamed.
We’ve both borne our battering, but vital tendrils of connection have been severed
forever. The march of disease is as inevitable as the march of modernity, and
just as catastrophic. Recovery is unlikely, but survival is key; we both fiercely
cherish the life we hold. Tiny lives bustling about their every eternal day,
and my tiny life of quiet observation. Entwined in the incessant hum and throb
of one day at a time; birth, death, decay, rebirth - the constant chant of the ages. We both have
clung on defiantly, and so been transformed, not always through choice, but
sometimes necessity.
Pockets of
disconnect baffle the land, things out of place and out of time, but still they
cling to every chance of another day in the sun, like the reeds that still grow
in the drainage ditches, reduced to
remnants without function, they stand as reminders of what once was, and is still,
in its own defiant way. And I take strength from these ancient sentinels, adapted
to life condensed to a roadside ditch,
still strong, thriving in their tiny niche, and very much still here!
The wild
and beautiful Great Bog is no more, now an enclosed and monitored vestigial
treasure, an echo, with a hope, against the odds, of rebirth. But even now,
beaten down and ravaged, the old place
still whispers to those who are listening: “yma o hyd”. Despite the indifferent, busy world moving
ever onwards, like the old anachronistic bog, I too am still here. And so we will both stand
in our quiet defiance and silently shout “Yma o hyd”.
