Love going back and forth: Life in the Kahlenberg Hills

I love the hustle and bustle and the city’s smoothly worn cobblestones. I experience the vibrant pulse, instinctively picking up the rhythm of the boulevards, and I feel how the city breathes us people in and sighs us out. But here, in our new home, on this strange borderland where the center of Vienna is as far away as the chirping lights flickering through the forest canopy, it feels as if we are living between two worlds. And lately, waking up to the rustling of the trees, I feel that this strange land has embraced me, that it speaks to me and calls me home. And this home is somehow no longer the city, but the sunlit forest clearings, the fresh mountain air you can bite into, the morning song of wild birds. It’s as if a person here transforms a little, quiets down, and returns to something that has lived inside them since time immemorial, and now can merge into where they belong: a green playground of nature, where the city filters through the trees, but the arms of the trees embrace me here, and even if I long for the cobblestones clicking beneath my shoes, I know that I will return to these embracing branches. And somehow, this awareness fills me with calm, gives me peace and a kind of feeling of arrival. As if we have always belonged here.