by Xavier Clot
PureTravel Writing Competition 2025
The tree was just a tree when I first sat beneath it. Wide-trunked, unlabelled, not listed on any map or guided walk. I had wandered off the designated trail at the edge of the Knysna Forest in South Africa, ignoring the gentle warnings of the lodge manager who’d told me not to veer too far without a guide. But I was angry that morning. Angry in the quiet, simmering way that leaves you restless, unable to sit still, unable to sleep, unable to understand exactly what it is that’s broken but knowing something is. So I walked. Past the ferns. Past the chatter of the baboons echoing in the canopy. Past the place where the path gave up and the forest began.
I don’t remember choosing to stop, I just did. Something about the way the roots rose like ribs from the earth. Something about the hush, the cathedral-like silence beneath the branches. I sat down cross-legged with my backpack behind me and my elbows on my knees. I breathed in, not yet knowing I was waiting. I had been traveling for four months by then, trying to find peace or purpose or maybe just distraction. I had said I was taking a sabbatical from work, but the truth was I had walked away from a life that no longer fit, left a job that felt hollow and a relationship that had faded like old ink. I had been hoping that if I strung enough miles together, I would find something to fill the ache that woke me every morning before the sun.
But there, under the tree, something different happened. For the first time in months, I let myself do nothing. No journal. No camera. No planning the next stop. I just sat. The leaves above shifted in slow circles. A beetle the size of my thumb dragged a stick twice its length across the forest floor. I watched it for a full twenty minutes. And somewhere in the stillness, a question came to me that I hadn’t dared ask: What if I stopped running?
The thought was quiet, but it clanged through me like a bell. I felt my heart knock against my ribs in reply. What if I stopped searching for meaning out there and just let myself feel lost for a while? The forest did not answer, but the silence wrapped around me like something kind. I closed my eyes and let the moment hold me. No epiphany. No great revelation. Just a deep, unexpected sense of enough.
I sat there until the light shifted and the shadows lengthened, until I remembered I was still part of a world that needed my return. But when I stood, something in me had softened. Not fixed. Not solved. Just softened. And in that softness, I felt a shift, not in the forest, not in the air, but in me. A turning point that came not from movement, but from stillness.
The tree was still just a tree when I walked away. But I was no longer just a woman passing through. I was someone who had finally stopped long enough to listen.
Photo by Lukasz Szmigiel on Unsplash
