To bring you my love
After October 7th, the forest became my refuge. When it burned, I returned — not to save it, but to sit with it, and offer what little I had: light, and love. I didn't go back to save the forest. I went back because I needed it to know I was there.
After the massacre of October 7th, I began building protected spaces from olive branches and sunlight refracted through crystal prisms.
The helplessness I was facing translated into the creation of alternative structures of protection: instead of concrete and bunkers, instead of grenades, guns, and bullets, I built delicate forms — bird nests, beams of sunlight, and glimmers that open a doorway to another world. A sense of safety and shelter, following the massacre and the trauma we have endured, and are still enduring, here.
On Memorial Day, April 29th, 2025, I was on my way to my beloved Canada Park to gather resins and visit the forest, to draw strength from it. From a distance, even before reaching Sha'ar HaGai, we saw the smoke clouds rising — and once again, the end of the world approaching us, for the who-knows-how-many time. My heart broke again, for what feels like the countless time in the past two years.
It was the largest wildfire in the region's history — hundreds of acres of woodland and forest consumed within hours.
Ever since, and especially since October 7th, my closeness to nature, to the forest, to the small animals and its unseen beings, has been what strengthens me and gives me hope that the natural order will return. Just as spring follows winter, the war, too, will eventually end.
I felt that now it was my turn to give love back to the forest. To encourage it, to bring it joy, just as it has done for me for so many years. I wanted to scatter glimmers of light within it, to offer beauty and comfort, to let it feel the energy of my love.
Each time I came to the forest to hang my mobiles and bring it joy, I left feeling strengthened. From the cracked, scorched earth, tender raspberry and mallow leaves rise. Inside the hollow spaces left by the charred pine trunks, seeds of cypress and pine are gathering, waiting for rain. Green prickly pear pads gleam between the blackened ones. The forest is alive and pulsing beneath the ash.
Nature, the forest, the earth — they are stronger and wiser than me. They will heal with or without me. But for me, this act of healing holds a two-way meaning.
In the shamanic path I have been studying for several years, there is a saying: "To heal you is to heal me." And it is true. Even here — this post-traumatic growth reverberates through me, pierces into me — the knowing that we, like the forest, will rise again from the brokenness and the ashes. And maybe, just maybe, we already are.