When I was grieving for my mum, just one thing helped ease the pain: making a new life in the countryside
Words by Kiran Sidhu
It is not a secret that nature can heal us. Doctors have long known to prescribe fresh air and walks in nature as a remedy to many ills. Nature can soften life’s sharp edges; be a pacifier, a tonic, the thing that we long for most when things feel they’re not going our way.
I’m from the city. I’ve lived there all my life; it has embraced me and seen me through all of my transformations – it is what I know. But in 2014, when my mother passed away from cancer at the age of 62, the city and I no longer spoke the same language. There was a dissonance between myself and it. I felt a sense of ‘other’ to something that I had always called ‘home’. So I moved to the Welsh countryside.
I would never have thought I’d be suited to rural life, but I was no longer myself. I was full of grief and the world already felt unfamiliar, so the transformation from city to countryside didn’t feel so abrasive.
Soon after moving to the countryside, I had an inexplicable urge to walk; to roam the nearby forests, to visit the little streams and to hike up the mountains that seemed to challenge me. So I bought my first walking boots, opened my front door and stepped outside.
My grief made me feel that I had a layer of skin missing: I felt everything. Both joy and sadness were amplified. I noticed things that I hadn’t before: morning dew, a dancing butterfly, the first signs of spring. I’m not sure whether it was this new fine-tuned version of me that allowed me to soak up the countryside more, allowing it to penetrate my very existence. Perhaps it was just the quiet and unassuming power of the countryside itself. I’m not sure, but I don’t think it actually matters. What matters is that the countryside started to make sense to me. My solo walks out in the wilds of Wales became an important part of my day; so important, that I no longer became a fair-weather walker, I became a walker of all seasons. Frogs crossed my path, bluebells adorned the sides of the roads and yellow Welsh poppies grew out of ancient walls.
It’s amazing how seasons are so transformative to the landscape. This seems obvious, that seasons change things – light, flora, the a
