By the Book

By Sandy Long

Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination

Perhaps, for Barbara Hurd, it was being a twin — sharing that fluid space nearly absent of light, of shifting form and formlessness, where cells divide into sisters — that a lifelong devotion to the exploration of edges, boundaries and margins began. To grasp the profound implications of these zones of transition, these places where boundaries blur, Hurd headed into those environments that are neither land nor water, while being both. The result is her new book, “Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination,” a collection of deeply insightful essays.

Climbing through the brambles and brush of a bog’s perimeter, slupping through the muck of a swamp’s guts, Hurd finds such environments to be the ultimate vehicle for exploring issues of self versus other (particularly powerful for a twin), life and death, presence and absence, vision and yearning. Throughout, Hurd’s understanding of Zen principles and Tibetan Buddhism comes into focus as she searches for the she-bear gathering its final pre-hibernation sustenance, helps tag endangered bog turtles, studies an albino turtle confined to a life of captivity intended to protect it.

She writes, “In Tibetan Buddhism, the word ‘shul’ means the impression left when something has passed through. A cave carved out by water. A footprint in the mud. The enormous white space that opens when you stop clinging to what you think will protect you, whether it’s love or success. The unguarded void that remains when you realize you’re mortal, the clearing into which insight can move and some other voice can be heard. We need, it seems, some absence in order to feel the presence of something larger.”

“Stirring the Mud” is the tangible evidence of a mind devoted to deep understanding. Reading it, one is left to wring meaning from metaphor. Hurd invites us to look inward, probing the origination and motivations of our boggy selves. “Much of human history could be told as the history of our clearings, our impulse to clear forests for farms, swamps for cities. We seem to associate the cleared with the civilized.... We’re tidy and clean. But inside, we’re a mess, a yammering conglomeration of instinct and reason, reverie and logic. Maybe the impulse to clear brush, drain swamps, manicure our forests signals our discomfort with our own cluttered interiors.”

If you like to think, you’ll love this book. If you read Annie Dillard, Mary Oliver and Scott Russell Sanders to appease some deep hunger through the wisdom of the natural world, this book will feed that fire. If you love elegant language and eloquently expressed thought, you will find “Stirring the Mud” deeply satisfying. It follows then, that this is not a book for swift or light consumption. Not a snack, but a slowly consumed literary delicacy over which one should linger, essay by essay with patience and an absence of pressure on outcomes.

As Hurd suggests, “It is, perhaps, the single thread running through mysticism ­that you must wait patiently, that to go hunting what is mysterious and life-changing... armed with intent and a sense of your own deserving goodness is futile. Biologists say that wild animals often interpret a head-on stare as an act of aggression. The moment you decide to stare down the periphery, it is no longer periphery. What might have been there either will overwhelm you, or more likely, will sink out of sight, melt back into the trees, retreat to the inaccessible reaches of memory.”

Hurd, a finalist for the Annie Dillard Award for Nonfiction, appears in Best American Essays 1999. She teaches at Frostburg Unversity in Maryland. “Stirring the Mud” is published by Beacon Press, 25 Beacon Street, Boston, Massachusetts, 02108. Or visit www.beacon.org.