The scent of oil paints

He needed to regenerate. He needed to get away from that chaotic and stressful life.

He decided for a walk in the woods. From the very first steps he understood that it had been the right choice. The noises of traffic had given way to the soft sighs of the woods. The rustle of the leaves, high up in the branches, and the creaks caused by his footsteps, which trampled on the ground what the trees had left behind when dying, but which by fertilizing the soil would help to create new life. The air, fresher and cleaner, a few faint rays of sunlight filtering through the branches.

The happiness of simplicity.

The gesture came spontaneously. He approached the trunk of a beech tree and put his arms around it, as if to thank him for that newfound serenity. She closed her eyes to better appreciate the sensation and it seemed to her to become one with the tree, it seemed to her that the sap began to flow instead of the blood in her veins. Still with his eyes closed, he saw his skin, stripped of his clothes, covered with bark, in patches, where it came into contact with the trunk.

The breath of the forest became his breath; including the lightness of the leaf, the fervor of the branches, the strength of the trunk and the vitality of the roots. The generosity of the soil became evident to her, which nourishes everything and makes it grow.

She knew that she would remain forever contaminated by that contact: she could no longer deny her belonging to Earth.