Returning to the Land, Returning to Myself

I never would have imagined that the town I hated so much as a teenager would one day become my most longed-for refuge.

It began, almost imperceptibly, around the time of the pandemic. I started returning to the Spanish land where I had spent my childhood summers with my parents—land that had always been mine, even when I tried to forget it. And every time I went back, I felt well. Better. As if something in me were slowly coming back into place.

After many years of living abroad, of building an adult life far from where I had grown up, I began to feel a call: a need to reconnect with the land that had shaped me long before I understood it. I had lived in Madrid, and afterwards in Utrecht, The Netherlands, long enough to become used to movement, to cities, to a life shaped by trains, schedules, and distance. I had become a very urban woman.

And yet it was here that something insisted. So we bought a small house in that village in Ávila, near Madrid—a house with a generous plot, full of olive trees. The same land that once bored me now seemed to be waiting, quietly and patiently, for my return.

Is there a place that returns you to yourself, without you having to do anything?

Rituals among olive trees

In this place, I have performed many rituals for the healing of my soul. I have hung some feathers from the olive branches, burned beliefs that no longer belonged to me in a little cave, buried letters I no longer needed to keep. And now, I cannot tell whether I am the one caring for this land, or whether it is the land that has been caring for me all along.

I know every inch of it, every corner, despite its vastness. I feel an almost vigilant need to care for each tree, each small sign: the caterpillars in the pines, the moment the olives are ready to be picked. A way of living utterly different from the life I had known until then.

A land of stars… and fire

This land has given me moments of deep presence and connection: long nights under the stars, hours of silent contemplation, hands in the soil. And yet, it is also a land of fire.

That same summer we arrived, flames devoured a large part of the landscape I had already begun to love. What I felt then was devastating, and difficult to name. After that loss, there was little I could do other than articulate my feelings in poetry.

Fires

The shadows of the olive trees
have turned green.
Merciless golden light.
Merciless, devouring light.
And the air, thick and dusty.
Why no calm?

Like that of the night before..
The vibration of the universe pulsing
in my womb as I gaze at so many stars.
The warm rocks beneath my back.
The air, thinner and sweeter,
the cicadas.

Then, yes.
Then,
to die was no more than to live,
no better, no worse.
But now,
these green shadows do not comfort—no,
they threaten everything.

And so I live,
between fires and stars,
between threat and promise,
the greening shadows,
and the luminous constellations.

Knowing that everything, absolutely everything,

will burn someday.

What sustains you when your world is shaking?

Returning to work with my hands

On the coldest days of this winter, I have been stitching. Not as my mother did, nor as I was taught—lessons I once resisted, when I wanted to be a free woman, far from what I believed were limiting traditions. Today, I sew for another reason: because it brings me back to my hands, to the earth. I sew without striving for perfection, without a destination. Threads of color cross the fabric as memories do—stories, years, lives interwoven.

One night, while sewing a new piece my hands remembered a stitch my mother had taught me more than fifty years ago. And I understood something essential: I am not who I was—and yet, I am.

As I sew, I understand that memory lives not only in the mind, but in the body. In hands that remember a gesture learned long ago. In soil that recognizes a footstep. In trees that survive fire and continue to bear fruit.

Perhaps this is what coming back home means. Not going back to who I was, but allowing what has always been there to pass through me again—changed, but alive. Like the land after the flames and the fabric mended with visible stitches. Like a life held together by a single, patient thread.

---

Other posts