It’s March, and colour is blooming. Light and warmth are mingling with cool, fresh air and drops of soft rain to grace our days again. I’ve got sweet pea shoots springing up everywhere, because I carefully cultivated some, while others self-seeded from last year. Daisies have popped up in with the winter jasmine, and I have shoved a load of primrose plants in pots and little corners of the bank and down at the forest school. Life is happening, as it always is.

I guess you can tell from the title that this might be a wordy post, so bear with me.

Lately, pretty much everything is making me think about freedom, restraint, conformity and wildness. I am in a time of life when I can’t make peace with some of the norms and expectations around which I previously perched precariously on the fence. In fact, I am increasingly uncomfortable with the presence of fences at all. This applies to almost everything: parenting, faith, church, teaching, gender, politics… My wonderings (wanderings?) are far-ranging and often emotional.

I have been reading voraciously, perhaps even more than usual. It has always been both my way of escape and my route to connection, and this is particularly true right now, in a time when I am many things and the world is many things. We all seem to find ourselves careering and hurtling around a crazy web of feelings and circumstances. We are busy; we are fulfilled; we are dissatisfied; we are curious; we veer between baffled and irate. We are joyful; frustrated; sorrowful; scared; tired; energised; amused; bored; overwhelmed and empowered. We are so much and sometimes we are also, painfully, not enough. All this to say, books help me to figure things out, and I need that in my life right now.

So, books. I read The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Anne Bronte. What a fascinating book! It is clear that its author had done a lot of figuring things out herself, a lot of wondering and wandering through the complexity of social and moral expectation, of faith, of despair and hope, of human failings and human warmth. The beauty and freedom of wild places and gardens provide a backdrop for this novel. It is essentially about a woman, Helen, who walks a “narrow path” to forge a life of goodness, love, and freedom for her son and herself. This is a sweeping, almost relentless novel that challenges class structures, gender stereotypes, patriarchy and hedonism. Our heroine is constrained by her moral and religious obligations, yet they also give her a sense of freedom, even joy. In some ways, she transcends and overcomes the pressures and abuses of the world around her through the faith and integrity that compel her.

Another somewhat controversial female figure is Meghan Sussex, whose Netflix show, Megan, with Love, I recently binge-watched. There is far too much media coverage of Meghan, in which, as many women have found, it is never possible for her to please and placate everybody. To those watching and weighing in, she will always be too much of one thing or too little of something else; facing a plethora of contradictory expectations, demands and criticisms. One of the things that shines through the show is her love of gardening and growing things, and how much joy she gets from sharing this. One of her friends comments on her freedom to be herself when out hiking; similarly there is a glow about her when she works with flowers. It seems to me that it is a great gift to find what we love and remain true to those things amid all the voices of the world around us.

A third woman helping me to find my way is Sarah Bessey, with her book, Field Notes for the Wilderness. In it, she explores the disillusionment and confusion many of us are experiencing around Church, describing the process of rethinking our faith and religious structures as like time in the “wilderness”. She writes, “There are a lot of reasons why folks like us find ourselves in the wilderness. And right now, it’s even feeling a bit crowded. We are in the midst of a shift in the Church that has resulted in many of us here, outside the city gates, exhausted and scared, sad and angry, and yet just a little relieved.” Bessey explores how being on the outside can feel lonely but also how it is a wide-open space, big enough for our questions, our anger, and all the rest.

Both in wild places and in the intentional cultivation of gardens, freedom is to be found. This is literally true, and a powerful metaphor for life. I am hugely thankful that I am relatively free to explore and to cultivate and I am becoming increasingly committed to considering what that looks like for others, too. There is still so much work to be done on tearing down fences and creating space for everyone in this world.