Alona worked in film industry for years — casting director, twelve-hour shifts, phone calls at any hour. There was no rhythm, no ground beneath it.
When the war began, everything stopped. And in that stillness, she noticed for the first time how a chestnut tree blooms.
“IF YOUR INNER FOUNDATION IS STRONG — IT BENDS IN THE STORM, BUT ALWAYS RETURNS TO CENTRE. WITHOUT ROOTS, THERE IS NOTHING TO RETURN TO.”
In qigong, there is a posture called the tree. You stand, and from the soles of your feet you imagine roots growing — deep, branching, reaching the core of the earth. The body becomes a trunk. The arms, a crown. The energy moves upward from the ground.
For Alona, this was not a metaphor. It was a practice she returned to throughout the war: grounding herself when everything else had been displaced. Walking barefoot whenever she could find grass. Tending a plant she was keeping for a friend.
She speaks also of another kind of roots — the lineage of ancestors. To reach this generation, she says, at least 1,022 people had to make the decision to bring a child into the world. That chain of decisions carries its own force. Forgetting it means cutting yourself off from a source of support that has always been there.
She chose Madeira consciously — for its laurel forests, its ocean, its sense of depth. Here, she found what she had been practising: a place where the ground holds you, and the roots go all the way down.
“Wherever we go, we carry ourselves. The only question is whether we are rooted — or not.”
Project: Healing Land.Voices Voice: Alona Location: Madeira, Portugal
