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Returning without going back

The little girl is lying on her back in the middle of a shallow stream. The stream is just wide enough for her to spread her arms wide to the sides without touching the banks. Her clothes are soaked, a second skin only barely keeping her warm. Her shoes and socks sit haphazardly on the bank, waiting for her to carry them home. On the road nearby, cars drive by noisily but she doesn’t take any notice, they don’t even exist to her. Her feet are upstream and her water-darkened hair flows away from her head like algae, moving freely in the current. Her eyes gently close so that all she can see is the dance of shadows behind her lids as the leaves stain the sunshine various shades of green. Her ears are just below the surface of the water, she listens to the music of the water flowing along the pebbled streambed and the dim echo of songbirds in the world above. She hardly even feels the bottom of the stream beneath her back, there’s just enough mud under the rocks to allow them to sink ...
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Learning to love the rain again

Waiting for the Storm to Pass... I’m fairly certain almost everyone reading this essay has heard this quote at least once: "Life isn't about waiting for the storm to pass, it's about learning to dance in the rain." -Vivan Greene You’ll often find it printed on farmhouse-style canvases in big-box craft stores, right up there with “Live, Laugh, Love.” For a long time, this quote grated on my nerves. It reeked of toxic positivity. It felt like a judgment of those who have no choice but to take shelter and wait for the hardest periods in their lives to pass. It reminded me of an ex who once screamed at me, as I was packing to leave, “Why can’t you just CHOOSE to be happy?!” But in recent years—and with a transformation in how I live—I’ve come to see that quote differently. On one level, I took it quite literally and decided to rethink my relationship with actual rain. I hated going out in it. I hated feeling cold, wet, and miserable. Everything looked gre...
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Location: Huy, Belgium
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Breadcrumb Review: The Evolved Nest

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Breadcrumb Review: The Evolved Nest This isn’t just a book review—it’s a reflection on parenting, healing, and remembering what we’ve forgotten about raising children close to nature. For my birthday, our daughter made her father help her choose a few items from my Amazon wishlist and of course, our little bibliophile insisted on including a book (because the cover looked “super like something Maman would love!”). She was completely right on that account. For days after my birthday, she kept asking for updates on my to-be-read pile, pressuring me to start her book. I'm so very glad I picked it up. How fitting that she would gift me a book about how we, as a society, can raise our children in peace and harmony with the natural world. The main concept is this: throughout their evolution, each species has developed an optimal way to raise its young—methods that promote ecological balance with their environment and coexisting species. One of the book’s most powerful points...
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Location: Huy, Belgium
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Showing Up (For Everyone but Me)

 Today I went for my first nature walk in well over two months. While I’m grateful to have a job that sends me outdoors on a regular basis, it’s usually very structured—and I’m in an animator role rather than simply being able to… just be . One of the strangest lingering symptoms of my burnout came to the forefront during a conversation with one of my closest friends in the group. It’s a contradictory behavior that shows up often, and I haven’t figured out how to untangle it. On the one hand, if it hadn’t been for another friend using my daughter to gently pressure me into going this weekend, I probably would have stayed home for a lazy Saturday morning. But she’d told Lily that she was expecting me to be there—and so I went. I needed someone to tell me that my presence mattered, that they’d be disappointed if I didn’t show up. This irritates me, because I don’t go on these walks for other people ! I go for me . I know how fulfilling and refreshing it is to be out in the for...
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