As an African, I sometimes struggle to explain what it means to “take a walk in the woods” simply to admire nature.
Where I come from, disappearing into the bushes alone is not always interpreted as a peaceful attempt to clear one’s mind. If I had spoken too freely about wandering into the woods for quietness, someone might have wondered whether I had lost my mind, fallen into some strange spiritual practice, or needed to be taken behind an ambulance for a mental-health evaluation.
Perhaps the Western world simply developed different ways of resting, unwinding, and making room for oneself. In my culture, however, family is often the refuge after a difficult day. There are few grand rituals of solitude. Life is busy, laughter is shared, sleep is precious, and rest can sometimes feel like a luxury.
Yet, strangely enough, even as a child growing up in Africa, I found myself running to the bushes.
My family would search everywhere for me. When they finally found me and asked where I had been, I would simply say, “I went to the woods.”
They thought I had probably inherited the idea from the novels I read or the Western films I watched. Perhaps they were right. Books had opened doors in my imagination that geography could not close. The Chronicles of Narnia, The Sound of Music, games like Scrabble and Chinese checkers, and stories of distant places introduced me to worlds beyond my immediate surroundings.
My family sometimes wondered whether I secretly wished I were not African, whether I dreamed of living overseas, or whether I longed to belong somewhere beyond our shores.
But they were only partly right.
I did not want to escape Africa. I simply discovered, very early, that the human imagination has no borders.
In those quiet places, I would watch birds move through the branches and listen to them hum their little songs. I watched leaves fall, change colour, and cling to the branches before finally surrendering to the wind. I did not necessarily admire trees and leaves for their own sake. What fascinated me was what they seemed to say about people.
I love flowers more than forests—the flowers in a vase at home, the flowers growing stubbornly along pavements, and those appearing unexpectedly beside roads and shores. I look at lilies, daffodils, roses, sunflowers, and even the strange beauty of plants and creatures like porcupines, and somehow I see people in them.
Some are delicate. Some are thorny. Some bloom loudly. Others survive quietly in places where no one expects them to grow.
Perhaps that is what I have been doing all my life: finding people in nature and nature in people.
There is a famous line by William Henry Davies: “What is this life if, full of care, / We have no time to stand and stare?” Perhaps he was reminding us that a life consumed entirely by urgency can leave us too busy to notice that we are alive.
I understand that now.
I may have been geographically misplaced, but perhaps I was never spiritually misplaced. I was simply a child with a boundless heart, reading beyond my borders, imagining beyond my surroundings, and finding quiet wherever the world allowed me to breathe.
The books, games, films, and travels shaped me. They gave me windows into diverse worlds without taking away the world from which I came.
And I have no regrets.
I still retreat into quietness. I still watch birds. I still notice flowers growing where nobody planted them. I still gather ideas from falling leaves and changing seasons.
And somewhere between Africa and all the worlds I discovered through stories, I found my own place—not necessarily in a country, but in the vast human imagination, beneath the mighty hand that holds this universe together.
By Joan A.Roberts
