(Taken from my journal February 2024—exercise for travel writing course, Deer Park Institute, Bir Billing, India)

My very first adventure travel experiences took place at an age somewhere between diapers and being told to behave—beaten into behaving—in a manner more appropriate for a suburban showpiece primed to eventually marry someone who would take me off my mother’s hands. I was, however, an intolerable feral creature trapped in the lacuna between this world and that; not quite wild yet definitely not tame. That came later. But before I was cornered, I was free. I discovered a universe far and away from appropriately dressed knife and fork meals where every morsel must be consumed—swallowed like my words—from the exact same seat at the family table.

I travelled as often as I could … although then it was more escape than travel; more Houdini than Happy Camper. My destination was the giant roots beneath the sky-high canopy of the tibouchina tree stationed approximately 100m from the French doors to the patio. I travelled there with my black furball who followed willingly, enticed by the picnic kibble I packed for her to endure the journey. My own snackbox contained anything both edible—and some things not so—that I could reach in the kitchen. I ran the gauntlet of visibility across the immaculate lawn devoid of diversity, like my family, and ducked beneath the foliage of finger-like fern tendrils that seemed to hold and guide me through the final portal into the damp peaty undergrowth of my belonging.

I can’t remember if I left the house with clothes or if I discarded my perfect outfit in the flourishing mud of the fairy garden. I can distincltly remember that my destination was not fond of the shackles of such trappings. I had to be stark naked; this is how the fairies could identify me.

So close yet so far from the constricting home environment, I was able to exist in this lacuna between worlds. No planes, trains or buses were needed to transport me to this authentic dimension of my inner dynamic beingness, where the roots of this tree assimilated me and hid me from that other world where I somehow couldn’t exist; a place not of flourishing. The only world I knew for the hours—that were days and seeming eternities—was the one of magic that forged me into the being connected to all the trees I would later climb, visit and revere: the Banyan in Auroville that stretches its arms outward, sending aerial roots to probe the earth for support; the upright Fir in Diana’s garden that I would ascend like a spiral staircase to collect pine cones to start the fire; the Milkwoods on my plot where I am custodian; the Cherry Trees in London that for several weeks of each year pop pink candyfloss flowers and then lay them like carpets over the sidewalks in the road where I lived, and the Willows that have wept so much now that they are ready to sit down. They are my teachers, my paradise, my freedom.

I have feet, not roots, so I can can move. But I am forever connected to the underground network that somehow connects all these trees and acts as a transmitter of my forever … even when I find that portal elusive.