Let This Path Lead Me Home (2024)

I feel like I have been homesick all of my life to a place I do not even know exists. A landscape I have not seen before. People I have not met. It eats at your bones - longing for a place to belong to. You can feel it pulling your limbs, torso, head and heart. It is pulling me home. If only I knew where that is. 

For me, the place that felt most like home, is the forest I grew up in. There was always space for me there. Comfort. Peace. Guidance. Trees gave me a sense of safety whereas within walls, I felt misunderstood. Spending countless hours of my childhood watching drops of sunlight dance on the forest floor, I witnessed nature’s sacredness from a young age. 

However, this forest - like most nature in The Netherlands - was once planted by humans. Even though these trees feel like family members, nature here seems to be missing something. Over the years my homesickness started to long for ancient nature. As if my soul comes from rugged mountain ranges but somehow I was dropped in flat, man-made and controlled ‘nature’. 

Always having felt a strong pull to New Zealand, I started learning about Māori culture. How deeply rooted and connected to their lands they are. With mountains, rivers and forests - that they consider to be their ancestors too. I travelled across the earth hoping they could teach me to belong. 

Learning from their indigenous knowledge felt like recalling distant memories. An inner knowing I was not aware of – that was exactly what had made me feel out of place all this time. My travels through Aotearoa and the lessons learned, were processed in Let This Path Lead Me Home. A photo series which explores these connections between the physical and the non-physical. Sacred landscapes that reveal the thin veil between visible and non-visible dimensions. Embodying what the Māori call mauri: ‘the life essence or spiritual energy that is in everything’. All things are living. There is more than meets the eye. 

A view on the human-nature connection I wish the Western world would understand better. As our own indigenous knowledge vanished, so did our connection to our lands. With that loss, we’ve become lost ourselves. Now, it is time for us to return home.