Dear Passenger,
On the first day of the Retreat, I walked through the campsite with Toni and the other volunteers and I immediately fell in love with all the twisting paths and hidden spaces that were nestled in between the trees and the nearby river. Looking at all the gaps of space within green canopies and shadows that swim under sunlight, I knew that this space would be transformed once the campers arrived at the retreat.
"While stargazing with the other volunteers outside our tent, a nostalgic imprint of my younger self gazing at constellations with my Amis best friend by the Hualian coast smiles back at me."
There is something so powerful about creating a feeling of “home” in a land that has felt hostile towards you. I moved from my home country of Taiwan to the UK in the cold winter of 2016 and the warmest article of clothing I owned was a thin cotton hoodie. The small English village with its endless fields that we had moved into made me homesick for the lush green mountains and beautiful coasts of my homeland. The flatness of the terrain accompanied with its pastoral history had a certain idyllic charm, but how would someone who looked like me fit into this tradition? In fact:
What does it mean to find home in nature when you are dislocated from a land that others you?
"Whenever I am homesick for nature back home, I find myself looking for traces of overlapping sights, sounds, and memories."
Whenever I am in nature with my community I re-write the sensation of unfamiliar land under my feet. Sun baked mud trails hidden in long grass take me down to an opening by the river where queer joy bubbles up with laughter. The silently testing steepness of the Malvern hills becomes a pathway to showing that with enough encouragement, we can all ascend to the viewpoint of a peak.
Whenever I am homesick for nature back home, I find myself looking for traces of overlapping sights, sounds, and memories. The faint rustling of leaves from trees high above could almost be waves from the ocean, and the dancing shadows that fleetingly imprint themselves on trees are shapes of past and future campfires. While stargazing with the other volunteers outside our tent, a nostalgic imprint of my younger self gazing at constellations with my Amis best friend by the Hualian coast smiles back at me in response.
For this reason I am hopeful for the future of what “home” will mean to me in nature. There are still conversations and play to be had in future landscapes, and they will become a continuation of the nature that has nurtured me in my childhood.
Dreaming of the next adventure already,
Tori
We're proud to have been able to support Touch Grass' Reverie Retreat earlier this summer, a joyful weekender of laughing and meaningful time spent outdoors. Look out for our final Camp Letter next week.
Touch Grass is a London-based outdoor community for queer women and non-binary people of colour, born from “a need for community, at a time when people felt lonely and isolated”. They bring people together through thoughtfully curated gatherings and retreats—acts of unity, creativity, and intention.
