Where I Belong

This forest land is my heart, my home. This is where I breathe easy and be free.

The moss covered forest floor, softening big boulders and gently tucking the bare land under its warm green embrace. The little creeks that run from a lake to another, pure and uninterrupted. The dark blue surface of the lake, dotted by little islands.

Places where all I see is beauty, not having to look for it. Not having to actively look for the pretty parts like I have to do in the city. Crop out all the ugly and zoom in on the little nice detail.

I’m only a visitor in the concrete jungle and it will never feel like home.

I’ve lived in an average size Finnish city for almost the past seven years, yet it has never felt like a home. It’s a feeling I can not shake off, a mix of suppression, claustrophobia, distaste and the overwhelming urge to run away from it. There is so much ugliness in the city, forcing you to witness it where ever you look.

I do like visiting new cities, and some are very beautiful, but there is too much people and not enough space. Even when you are ”home” alone, there is another human very close to you, under, over, of to the side, just a wall between.

Living in the city is a sort of an act, pretend play. Hey look at us, going to the coffee shop and running without aim, look at me acting important, look at us playing our parts in the drama. Exit stage left.

A modern terra nullius, no man’s land.

You are always in someone elses territory when you are in the city, no part of it truly belongs to you. I don’t like that feeling. You are on borrowed land, on borrowed time.

I need a place that I know is mine, or at least someone I know, bordered not by a wire and concrete fence, but on a map and treated with respect.

All the forests belongs to someone too, but you can use it if you treat it with respect. There are rules, but no fences barring you from walking in there and enjoying all the beauty nature has to offer. Even when the land in the forest is not mine, it feels like it is. I can walk in it, I can pick berries and mushrooms, I can take pictures of it, I can be uninterrupted. No other human in sight, nobody to tell me I can’t do that, I can’t take a picture of that or I can’t climb in there.

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There is good and bad in both, but the older I get, the more I am convinced that I belong into the wild.