I’d never been here before. Yet I was on my way home.

I was curious, of course. But that feeling I’d perhaps subconsciously been expecting didn’t materialise.

I didn’t yet know that it was waiting for me elsewhere.

To get to Estonia, I then boarded a small propeller plane that was to cross the Baltic Sea.

I remember that moment with astonishing clarity.

The sea stretched out beneath the aeroplane. Then, little by little, the Estonian landscape came into view.

And then, something happened.

For no apparent reason, and beyond my control, tears began to flow.

They weren’t tears of sadness.

It was an immense, spontaneous emotion, almost impossible to put into words.

And a phrase came to me with disconcerting clarity:

‘I’m coming home.’

Yet I had never set foot in Estonia.

How could I feel as though I were returning to a place I had never been to before?

I had no answer.

I simply knew what I was feeling.

The forest and the Baltic

Then I discovered Estonia.

Its pine and birch forests. Its peaceful landscapes. Its very distinctive light. Its expanses of moss, its silent trees, this natural world that seems to preserve something profoundly ancient.

And then there was Narva-Jõesuu.

There, the forest almost meets the Baltic Sea.

You can walk amongst the pines, breathe in the scent of the undergrowth, then reach the sand and gaze out at the horizon.

I’ve always found the Baltic incredibly gentle.

To me, it possesses a subtle, almost intimate beauty. A presence that doesn’t need to impose itself to be deeply felt.

In these landscapes, I didn’t feel like a tourist there to discover a new country.

I felt at home.

As if something inside me could finally settle.

As if I no longer needed to search for my place.

Can one recognise a place one doesn’t know?

Over time, I’ve often reflected on this experience.

Why Estonia?

Why that immediate emotion, even before I’d landed?

Why such a powerful sense of belonging?

In my whole life, I’d only ever felt something comparable once before, in Rome.

Yet these are two such different places.

Rome, with its ancient stones, its history, its Mediterranean light.

Estonia, with its northern forests, the Baltic Sea, its silence and its horizons.

Perhaps certain places simply resonate with who we are at our core.

In environmental psychology, we talk about ‘place attachment’ to describe the emotional bonds we develop with certain spaces.

These bonds can be nourished by our memories, our experiences, our values or our identity.

But sometimes, the emotion seems to come before the memories.

I don’t claim to have a scientific or spiritual explanation for what I experienced.

I only know that this feeling was real.

And that it has never left me.

The day I had to leave, I cried.

This time, my tears were truly tears of sadness.

I watched Estonia recede into the distance and felt that peculiar pang one feels when leaving a place to which one is deeply attached.

When nostalgia becomes a path

Nowadays, I sometimes watch the videos of Jonna Jinton, the Swedish artist who films the beauty of Nordic landscapes with such sensitivity.

The light on the trees, the snow-covered forests, the changing seasons, the silence, the wind…

These images bring me deep peace.

But sometimes, they also make me cry.

Because they reawaken that longing for Estonia.

The longing to return to the forests, to walk beneath the pine trees once more, to see the Baltic Sea again, to breathe that air which I associate with a sense of inner freedom.

There are days when this longing is particularly intense.

I sometimes imagine the moment when I’ll be able to return to walk in the Estonian forests, no longer with the prospect of an imminent departure, but with the possibility of building my daily life there.

I know that living somewhere is different from travelling there. No country is without its difficulties, and I do not idealise the idea of starting all over again elsewhere.

But what I felt there remains an important part of my story.

Where the heart feels at home

I believe that the word ‘home’ does not always refer to four walls or the place where we were born.

Sometimes, home is a feeling.

Light filtering through the trees.

The scent of a forest after the rain.

The sound of the wind in the pine trees.

A peaceful sea behind the dunes.

A place where you can finally breathe and feel at home.

I’d never been to Estonia before I caught sight of its coastline through the aeroplane’s window.

Yet my first tears were already expressing something I hadn’t yet been able to put into words.

I was coming home.

And when I return, I hope to be able to look out at the forests and the Baltic Sea with this simple thought:

Ma olen lõpuks kodus.

I’m finally home.

Lümi – Inner Forest
Amidst northern forests, emotions and inner journeys. 🌲💙