Protected Forest Szast

The next day, together with Przemysław, my local guide, we drive into the Szast Protective Forest. I know this landscape! Przemysław unsuccessfully tries to cool my emotions, talking about the terraced arrangement of the forest, the population of the recovering capercaillie. But here it is simply like in the Tuchola Forest. I look at the trees, whole clumps that, bent, with tissues shattered by the wind, have been living for years. “And they even bear fruit” – Przemysław praises them.

All kinds of emotions pass through my body: euphoria, joy, wonder, fear, sadness and compassion. And above all, a sense of rootedness, thanks to which I can contain them all within myself. This feeling of rootedness, which does not belong to a place – I feel it in the Lack of Forest, in Szast, in the Wolf’s Lair, in Warsaw and in Sarajevo, wading with my feet in the Genbei River in Japan or visiting the garden of the First Nations in Montreal.

We take root in a world of global ruins, learn to move across new maps. This world demands from us fragility and exchange. It offers us life emerging from everywhere – it is what flickers before us. This is the path we should choose.