Travel Light

‘Travel Light’ by Naomi Mitchison was the perfect companion on my trip to De Hoge Veluwe National Park. It’s a story about a girl raised by bears and dragons, who strongly dislikes heroes. “Travel light my child, as the Wanderer travels light, and his love will be with you,” she is told as she embarks on a journey after losing everything she knew and loved. 

Nature has been calling me lately, and it was the first time I spent three days alone in a cabin in the woods. Slow mornings, long hikes, and many stops along the way to appreciate the flowers and the birds. But underneath Her beauty and enchantment, Nature is fearsome and ruthless in equal measure. At a certain point down a dark trail, I found myself turning back when an inexplicable fear took over, making the hair on the back of my neck stand on end as if shocked by some kind of instinctual warning sign. There are wolves and wild boars in the park, I later discovered. But I also met a friendly cat and saw hares playing - twice. 

Maybe this is what calls us back to the wild - a desire to watch wildlife and be watched by wildlife in return. A reminder that we, too, are wild and alive. We must be as strange and feral, in their eyes, as they seem to us. We share the space, exchanging nothing but an acknowledgment of each other’s presence. And while my human existence limits my ability to understand what it is they have to gain from this exchange, I am certain of the value it holds for me: a way back. A way out from underneath the layers of social domestication and a mending of the sharp incision that cut us off from the wilderness within. It comes in the shape of a winding trail, sometimes shadowed, sometimes light - but always unpaved. And to walk it, we must go like Halla, the girl raised by bears and dragons: we must unlearn and then reclaim our origin, keep an open heart, and travel light.