There is a quiet magic that lies in the embrace of the Vliegenbos on a serene Sunday morning. As I step into this pocket of wilderness—small in size but vast in spirit—I am enveloped by an unlikely beauty. The air here carries a symphony of birdsong, a cacophony that feels like a warm embrace from the trees and plants surrounding me. There are few people, and the absence of human noise allows the forest’s voice to emerge, tender and clear.
In this stillness, I sense a shift within myself. The dappled light filters through the branches, touching the earth in patches of warmth, and in these moments, I breathe differently. It’s as though the forest pulls me into a restorative bath, where the waters are laced with magnesium, soothing every fiber of my being. I feel life returning to my bones, my heart, my spirit. It is a sensation I recognize as essential, a daily necessity that I too often forget in the chaos of living. This daily immersion in nature is a vital ritual, one that restores me to my natural state of being.
In moments of deep weariness, when the demands of life threaten to overwhelm, I have found solace in this ritual. When my youngest child struggled to sleep, and I felt lost, I would retreat to the forest. Here, in the solitude of nature, where no one could reach me, I found the strength to keep going. It is in these spaces—where I am alone, surrounded only by trees—that I can rebuild myself. The forest offers a quiet companionship, a reminder that I am part of something greater, something ancient and wise.
Richard Powers captures this connection in The Overstory, where he writes of trees as sentient beings with their own stories, their own ways of communicating. The trees in the Vliegenbos, too, have stories to tell—of endurance, of patience, of a life lived in harmony with the world around them. They remind me that in times of change, when I have had to let go of parts of my life, it is to the forest that I have always turned. Like Raynor and Moth on the Salt Path, I have sought distance, a space where I can breathe, reflect, and heal.
And so, when I can’t wander far, when life’s responsibilities keep me close, I find a tree, sit by it, and listen. The forest, in all its wild, untamed beauty, belongs to me in those moments. It is a place of refuge, of reconnection. In the words of Marjolijn Heemstra from In lichtjaren heeft niemand haast, it is a place where time slows down, where the rush of the outside world fades, and I can truly feel what it means to be alive.
We all need reminders of this. We need to remember the importance of stepping away, of finding our own quiet corners in the world, where we can reconnect with ourselves and the earth. The Vliegenbos, small as it may be, offers just that—a place to belong, to heal, to simply be.
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