The green, green grass of home…

The weather on the west coast of Norway is… wet. Always.
Rain here is a daily reality; it doesn’t care about seasons, forecasts, or anything…
(Just for comparison, the annual rainfall in my small town on the northern Black Sea coast in Bulgaria pours down here in less than a month.) Wherever you go for a walk, there is water – on one side is the sea, and on the other, you pass through bogs dating back to the creation of the world, mud that is particularly determined to steal your shoes, and the rain, which falls from so many sides and constantly tries to penetrate your clothes through every possible spot.
There were moments when this water everywhere would sometimes terrify me. I remember the period when my anxiety was in a severe phase, and the cure – as some of you might know – for everything here is “ut på tur” or going out for a walk. And because my husband firmly believes in this recommendation, when he would somehow manage to get me to go out for a walk and I stepped on one of those tufts of grass, or something that looks like grass but has absorbed moisture like a sponge, and when you step on this thing, you sink to your ankles, my heart would jump into my throat. I reacted with panic – that awful feeling of having no footing, that the ground is disappearing and I’m going to sink at any moment. I would freeze and fight for a breath of air, gripped by terror, only saying, “I’m sinking, I can’t move”… and before my eyes, memories from those cowboy novels of my childhood would flash, and the quicksand where some of the characters would get trapped, and this terrified me even more.
Anxiety loves such scenarios and does exactly that: it makes you feel unstable in your own life, as if you are truly wading through quicksand and that’s where you will end up. It took me some time to understand that nothing actually wants to swallow me, but that this land is simply alive, breathing, and is as raw and natural as it was during the time of the dinosaurs.

Thus, through the relentless rain, the storms, and the grayness, time crawled along, and at the end of May and the beginning of June, it seems to change the stage. The mud and the bogs give birth to something that is hard to describe.

The landscape explodes into a deep, lush, almost glowing green that seems to have its own pulse. The moss becomes thick and soft, and the air smells like life. When you stand in front of this view, you feel the fog and grayness in your head blow away; the anxiety seems to lose a huge part of its power and sinks into the greenery. It is not by chance, perhaps, that the human eye is built to recognize the most nuances in the color green—we have evolved to see most clearly the color that tells our nervous system: “It is safe here. There is abundance. You can breathe easily.”

The other thing this June green teaches me is patience. All this abundance now it didn’t happen overnight. Until recently, the months were only darkness, stagnation, and that endless waterlogging. Nature in these latitudes has a very clear and harsh rhythm and it doesn’t hurry. When it’s winter, it simply stops and waits. When it rains, it drinks the water. It doesn’t try to skip the gray and gloomy months, nor does it worry about exactly when the sun will come. It just follows its own course – one that I am still getting used to and which is definitely not perfect from a human standpoint. But I also realize that anxiety always has the power to make us rush – to want answers right away, to be sure of tomorrow, to fast-forward through the difficult periods.
Looking, however, at how after the long, dark winter the bogs and mud have given birth to this soft, green carpet, you understand what slow life actually means.
I learned that it isn’t laziness or inaction, but it is trust in the process. It is the knowledge that every season has its role and that if you allow yourself to move at the speed of nature, things always fall into place. There is no force, there is no “must”, there is no overthinking. As the saying goes, “everything happens when it’s time for it to happen” – wise, but hard to learn.

This is exactly what slow life means to me. Not sugar-coated and perfectly shot frames from social media, but the conscious decision to step onto the ground that gives way, not to sink, and to look into the green. To feel the elements and let them pass by you. Anxiety loves to live in tomorrow, in the fear of the next storm.
But this June green is here and now. It reminds us that true peace requires a time of waterlogging and mud. But in the end, it’s always worth it.

Yesterday we were traveling by car, and my husband, looking out the window at the hills, said simply: “Look how green it is, how peaceful. Nothing can annoy me.” And he was absolutely right. Right at that moment, it didn’t matter that it was raining, that the clouds had come down so low that if you reached out your hand you could touch them, nor how much mud we had waded through all these months up to now and how many times the ground had given way under our feet. The rain had done its job. The green was here—quiet, mystical, and healing. And for us, all that remains is to look at it and breathe.