Mountain Pine on Mainland Islet

A bog is a wetland formed by stagnant, nutrient-poor rain and meltwater. It consists of peat layers formed over a long period of time. For some time I have been familiarizing myself with two bogs of different characters. One is Store Mossen in Hillerstorp, which is a vast, open and desolate place, where the bog pine grows crooked and twisted. Åstarpe mosse is the other. It spreads out high up on Hallandsåsen and hides in a varied marsh landscape of swamp forest and mainland islets.

The boundary between firm ground and wetland is difficult to discern. It’s only when you take a few steps in between the trees that you realize the ground is giving way. I listen to the breathing of the bog, to the progress of the peat as if it were an ultra-minimalist piece of music.

But the moss also breathes something else. It is a space. A memory. A link between worlds. Life and death, presence and absence. A place to disappear into – literally and symbolically.

In Seamus Heaney’s poem The Tollund Man, Tollund Man is described as a bridegroom ritually sacrificed to the bog, a sacred being, a goddess transforms him in dark fluids and preserves and embalms him like a saint.

The periodic deformations of the tidal earth are a slow interchange between the atmosphere and the earth. Elasticity in slow, low-key sounds. The earth and wetlands become breathing beings. Everything that moves just below the threshold of our perception is registered in the barely audible. A rhythmic stillness, a non-human intelligent ability to remember.