Donate
The American writer Susan Sontag wrote in Illness as Metaphor, “Everyone who is born holds a dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.” Reading My Body is a Meadow, I got the sense that poet and activist Bethany Handley crossed this border when she became a full-time wheelchair user in her twenties. Her latest book reckons with everything this journey has cost her, and everything it has also helped her gain.
As a child, Handley spent much of her time outdoors, playing in the woods near her family home and, at weekends, surfing in the cold sea or scrambling up hills that revealed the natural beauty of the Welsh countryside. After over a year of declining mobility, she woke up one day to find that she had lost all feeling in both of her legs. Sadly, this meant that her access to the outdoors would never be the same again. “I try not to look at photos of my former self standing behind waterfalls or frozen, jumping mid-air, on Cader Idris or Blorenge, outstretched limbs claiming space,” she writes with full vulnerability about those early days.
My Body is a Meadow is a manifesto for making the outdoors more inclusive. When only a few hundred of the 140,000 miles of footpath in England and Wales are accessible to all, and 68% of people with limited mobility struggle to access green spaces, it is clear that a significant portion of the population is locked out of the many benefits that being in Nature can provide. To Handley this is an obvious injustice. After leaving the hospital, she found that being “rudely shut out from the many paths” around her family’s house was a significant mental challenge. Given that one in four people in the UK is disabled, her experience is far from unique.
The author also makes the case that the natural world is not separate from our bodies, but an extension of them. “We cannot exist in a sealed vacuum devoid of Nature,” she writes, explaining how even her wheelchair, which she sees as an extension of her body, is made of raw materials partly mined from the Earth. She proposes that a false separation between the ‘wild’ and the ‘non-wild’ has placed humans above Nature rather than within it. Handley describes this as “one of the biggest barriers that disable both the natural world and people, depriving us of our interdependence”. To be severed from Nature, she suggests, is a diminishment of what it means to be alive.
Handley writes from within the social model of disability, which views disability as something created by societal barriers, such as physical obstacles and negative attitudes, rather than by disabled people’s medical conditions or impairments. She examines how issues of class and race inequality, as well as inadequate infrastructure, compound to keep disabled people out of natural spaces. When writing about the joy she gets from doing laps in her local swimming pool, for example, she notes that 40% of swimming pools in England could close by 2030. Or, when outlining everyone’s right to access Nature, she highlights that residents in the most affluent areas of England and Wales enjoy 80% more local footpaths than those in the most deprived communities, and that the whitest areas have 144% more local footpaths than the most ethnically diverse areas.
There is so much to love about this book, including the author’s brilliant pushback against contemporary ableism and her insights into how profoundly disability is misunderstood by most people today. Yet what makes it special is Handley’s prose. She ingeniously uses the natural world as a lens to understand her own body as it changes, and it is in the mountains and meadows, rivers and lakes that her transformation begins to make sense.
My Body is a Meadow: Finding Freedom in the Outdoors by Bethany Handley. Headline Press, 2026. ISBN: 9781035427505
