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Barbara's Reviews > Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination
Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination
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The universe dropped this book into my lap the day after we visited and I became enchanted with Okefenokee Swamp in Georgia. We were shopping at a flea market and I happened to find an old National Geographic magazine from 2007 I had been looking for. The vendor told me I could pick out two more magazines or books for the 25 cents I was paying him for it. The first book my eyes saw as I glanced over the pile was Stirring the Mud and I thought, how wonderful, a book about swamps!
This book is amazing, exploring with such lyrical prose the physical and spiritual beauty and mystery of swamps. I had a powerful feeling of transcendence in Okefenokee, with no words to convey the experience I was having there. Barbara Hurd seems to know how to express thoughts and feelings about swamps that resonated with me deeply.
This book is amazing, exploring with such lyrical prose the physical and spiritual beauty and mystery of swamps. I had a powerful feeling of transcendence in Okefenokee, with no words to convey the experience I was having there. Barbara Hurd seems to know how to express thoughts and feelings about swamps that resonated with me deeply.
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Quotes Barbara Liked
“In a swamp, as in meditation, you begin to glimpse how elusive, how inherently insubstantial, how fleeting our thoughts are, our identities. There is magic in this moist world, in how the mind lets go, slips into sleepy water, circles and nuzzles the banks of palmetto and wild iris, how it seeps across dreams, smears them into the upright world, rots the wood of treasure chests, welcomes the body home.”
― Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination
― Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination
“To love a swamp, however, is to love what is muted and marginal, what exists in the shadows, what shoulders its way out of mud and scurries along the damp edges of what is most commonly praised. And sometimes its invisibility is a blessing. Swamps and bogs are places of transition and wild growth, breeding grounds, experimental labs where organisms and ideas have the luxury of being out of the spotlight, where the imagination can mutate and mate, send tendrils into and out of the water.”
― Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination
― Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination
