A reset

Many years ago a traveller I met in southern Chile said to me: in life, you decide where to live, who to live with, and how to make a living. The three align. And all these years later – there come also the children who grow up, parents who get older and so do we, and then to care about our health. Time is running out. But time for what?

The search begins anew. If Estonia is an answer, what are the questions? Driving past old farmhouses, endless rows of trees and fields of grain; camping in forests and by the stone-strewn sea and lakes; a sauna with family, dinners with friends, singing old and newer songs around a bonfire, enjoying traditional song and dance events; working for my clients in cafés; tramping through Tallinn’s old town and by the river through Tartu – all of this offers room for thought.

Family and / or friends and connections go without saying, or ways to make them. The language is essential, a long road to take and rewards along the way, a connection with the people who speak it, and with the natural world that inspired its creation.

A third is: does the land draw you to it, answer to a sense of wellbeing, to things we like to do. It may be camping in summer and skiing in winter, chopping wood for the sauna, picking berries and mushrooms when in season, tending a garden and orchards, building and creating, planting trees, going for a walk in the forest, a swim in the sea, or boating in a lake.

Here, I find myself thinking back to the storybooks of my childhood: storks and ravens, squirrels and foxes, bears and wolves, ruined castles, old people living deep in the forest.

On this day of writing I walk a 10-kilometre circuit through berry-carpeted pines down one side of the clear-flowing Elva river, and then back up the other. Only I get distracted by a sign pointing to a haldjarada, a fairy trail, and I follow it. Along the way, I learn about the guardians of the trees, the stones, the water and the air, and the spirit of the forest.

This is an ancient view of ecology, of how all of nature in northern Europe is connected. When the British brought the flora and fauna they loved with them to New Zealand, these species devoured and smothered the sacred forests of Māori, and we see the newcomers as such, as pests and weeds to be eradicated or controlled, as time, energy and money allow.

Back in the homeland, everything is in its place. Only I get lost among the trees, unsure of the way, and momentarily out of cellphone range. I check for the sun, shining faintly in the treetops above high cloud, and remember that at this time of year it describes a long arc from the south at 1-2pm, and then by 4.30pm it is already nearing west. Chaffinches and sparrows busy themselves in the forest litter, and song-thrushes call from the trees. Sense returns to the forest trails; the way points to the car park, and all is well again.

Why am I travelling in Estonia, I ask myself, holed up at a pine-forest campsite in the rain at night, drunken revellers on one side, and noisy students on the other. But the longer I stay in this country of a language and culture that has grown with the trees, the boglands, the lakes and the rivers over the millennia, the more I feel Estonia travelling in me.

Whether in the dark of a smoke sauna sensing the presence of the ancestors, or hearing in song an echo of family exile to foreign lands, or lighting a fire at a lakeside campsite among the trees as did the first peoples who followed the melting ice sheets 10,000 years ago – a deeper connection between inner and outer worlds awakens.