My Country of Birth is Reclaiming Me

I have been somewhat absent from this blog in the past 2 years. Not completely, but I was far less active than in previous years.

One of the reasons is the fact that circumstances largely beyond our control have forced my wife and I to relocate back to the country we were born in, The Netherlands, and leave our country of choice, Australia, behind.

That process, happening in the midst of the COVID pandemic, was messy, hectic and rather painful at times. But the transition is behind us now and we are settling into our new home, in a beautiful forest in the north of the country.

One interesting thing I am noticing is how the country seems to be reclaiming me. After living in Australia for more than 20 years, I felt (and still feel at times) more Australian than Dutch. I came back to this country feeling a stranger in a strange land; a visitor to a country that didn’t look much like the country I left behind in the previous century.

But in the past few months, that feeling has been changing. Gradually, I beginning to feel my old roots – the ones I thought I had severed and discarded when I migrated to Australia – come to life again and take hold in the soil of the forest around me. I am beginning to recognise the feel of the sand under my feet, the sounds of the birds and insects, the smell of the grass and the surrounding trees. And I am beginning to feel Home again.

What makes this process interesting to me is that it is not the nation or its people that is reclaiming me, but its Nature, its soil, its COUNTRY, as the Australian Aboriginals would call it. It is a feeling that had slowly grown on me in Australia, but – because I wasn’t born there – would never completely take hold: that of belonging to country. Here in The Netherlands, I feel I am welcomed back and told I do belong here; that I never stopped belonging here, no matter how far away I was.

For me, this is an important reminder of how deeply intertwined we really are with Nature, with the land on which we are born, live and die. We are not separate from Country, we are its offspring, and tied to it through many, many invisible roots and connections. We may have created this illusion of man vs. nature, or man over nature, or even man completely separate from it, but we are, in our core, just another form of Nature. Nothing more, nothing less. Only when we acknowledge that and let our country fully claim us as its own can we be truly happy and in harmony with ourselves and the world.

Here is to coming Home and being reclaimed. Here is to Country.

Happy New Future.