The mountain doesn't ask if you're okay
Or: yes, I'm fine, but thank you for worrying
People ask me this all the time.
Isn’t it lonely up there? Isn’t it scary? All that silence — doesn’t it get to you? And the forest, Mirjam, the forest — you just walk into it? Of the beaten track? Alone? With only a dog who, let’s be honest, would sooner befriend a wild boar than fight one?
There’s a particular kind of concern that people reserve for women who choose solitude. It arrives wrapped in genuine care, which makes it both touching and faintly absurd. As if the mountain is waiting for me to let my guard down. As if the trees are up to something.
Here’s what I’ve found, though: the silence isn’t empty. It’s full — of birdsong and wind and the specific creak of an old forest settling into itself. The loneliness people worry about is, from the inside, mostly just space. Room to think. Room to not think. Room to stand still in the middle of nowhere and feel, quietly and without drama, like exactly the right person in exactly the right place.
Is it responsible? Probably debatable. Is the dog a reliable defense against a sanglier with attitude? Absolutely not. Do I go anyway?
Every single day.
And now I’d like to take you with me.
This week: the Morvan in seven days, in pictures and thoughts.
Sunday
There is an hour, just before the light gives up entirely, when the forest stops pretending to be ordinary.
I know this hour well. I go looking for it on purpose.
The lake holds the trees in its arms like a memory — the real ones standing dark and quiet at the edge, their reflections warmer somehow, golden where the trunks are grey, as if the water knows something the forest doesn’t. Or perhaps it’s the other way around. The last light comes in sideways, threading itself between the pines, landing on the moss in small patches of impossible green. The kind of green that makes you stop walking.
I stopped walking.
This is what I didn’t tell you, when you asked if it gets lonely out here. That sometimes I stand at the edge of a lake in the last ten minutes of afternoon light and feel the very particular feeling of being a person inside a story — not watching it, not passing through, but in it, bone-deep, boots damp, coffee going cold in the thermos.
There’s a story I’m writing and photographing. I won’t say too much about it yet. But I will say that I come here for it — into the deep Morvan forests, dog trotting ahead, pack on my back — and I wait for the light to do this, exactly this, and then I understand another piece of it.
The forest gives things up slowly.
You have to be willing to wait.
Monday
The roots come for you in the dark.
Not aggressively — the forest has more dignity than that. But they’re there, spreading from the base of the old tree like sentences that refuse to end, like arguments made in slow motion over centuries. Grey and deliberate in the last of the light. Patient in a way that makes you feel, by comparison, very small and very temporary.
I know I shouldn’t trip here. I know this with the specific clarity that comes from being alone, deep in the forest, out of signal range, with a dog whose emergency response strategy is essentially sit close to me and look happy. So I watch my feet. I watch the roots. I move the way you move when the forest asks you to pay attention — which is slowly, and with respect, and with the full knowledge that out here, there is no one to call. No signal.
And then something shifts.
The birds change their language. The sounds rearrange themselves into something else, less familiar. A crack somewhere to the left — what was that — and suddenly every nerve is awake, every sense leaning forward into the dark. The adrenaline arrives clean and certain, the way it does when your body remembers, before your mind catches up, that you are an animal in a forest.
People ask if this is responsible.
I think about the A2 on a Monday evening. Headlights and tail-lights as far as you can see, everyone hungry, everyone desperate to get home, two tonnes of metal at 130 kilometres an hour, bumper to bumper, driven by — well, at least some of them — people running on empty in every sense of the word.
Tell me again, dear worried ones, where exactly the danger is.
Tuesday
The basin in front of the house holds the evening like a secret.
Trees that are perfectly ordinary in daylight become something else entirely when the sky turns and the water catches it — dark lines fracturing across turquoise, branches dissolving into veins, the whole familiar world rearranged into something that looks more like the inside of a dream than a Tuesday evening in Burgundy.
I didn’t go far today. Sometimes you don’t have to.
Sometimes the forest comes to you.
Wednesday
March cannot make up its mind. Or rather — it has made up its mind entirely, in two directions at once.
Look down: winter is still here, heavy and unhurried, the ferns burnt copper and collapsed against the dark soil, the old fence post holding its ground with the patience of something that has seen many seasons come and go and is in no particular rush about this one.
Look up: spring has already arrived and is not waiting for anyone’s permission. Blossom after blossom, soft and extravagant and faintly outrageous against the bare branches, pink against grey against gold — as if someone turned up the colour in just the top half of the world and forgot about the rest.
Two seasons in one frame. One breath of winter, one of something warmer.
That’s the Morvan for you. Never quite what you expect. Always, somehow, exactly right.
Thursday
There are days on the mountain that are just work.
Pruning until your shoulders ache. Mowing in long uneven strips. Gathering wood for an outdoor fire with the specific grim satisfaction of a person who knows exactly how cold the nights still get. Sowing a flower border and silently promising to water it this time. By late afternoon I was dust and sweat and garden, hair escaping in all directions, socks with opinions of their own.
I sat down in the sun to recover.
And found I wasn’t alone.
He was already there, this neighbour of mine, perfectly still on the warm stone beside the water. Scales in a green that shouldn’t exist outside of a jeweller’s window — electric, iridescent, shifting between emerald and gold depending on how the light chose to fall. Compact and streamlined and unhurried in the way of creatures who know they are faster than anything that might come for them.
We regarded each other with equal curiosity.
He was, objectively, the better-looking of the two of us. I chose not to dwell on this.
We sat together for a while in the easy silence of two beings who had both had a full day and were simply glad of the sun. Then he spotted a small spider and dealt with it efficiently, and I decided that was my cue for a hot shower.
Some meetings don’t need to be longer than they are.
Friday
While I slept.
Two badgers, just after midnight, making their unhurried way down the driveway as if they owned it. The trail camera watched them in silence, green-tinged and patient, recording what the dark gets up to when no one is looking.
Uninvited, technically. Unannounced, certainly.
There’s something quietly wonderful about knowing that the moment I close my eyes, this place keeps living — that the darkness here is full and busy and entirely unbothered by me. That the mountain doesn’t stop just because I’ve gone to bed.
They felt safe here. Moving through the night without fear, without hurry, hopefully without a single thought of danger.
I know the feeling.
It’s exactly why I stay.
Saturday
The last thing you do before bed, when you live on a mountain, is take the dog out for a final late-night wee.
No streetlights here. No hum of traffic. Just the Morvan night, which is — and I mean this in the most official sense possible — one of the darkest skies in Europe. An International Dark Sky Reserve, if you want the certificate to prove it. The stars out here are not decorative. They are serious. Unreasonably, almost aggressively beautiful, spread across the black in a way that makes you feel both very small and inexplicably glad to be alive.
The dog sniffed around. I stood still and looked up to the stars.
And then.
A sound from somewhere in the darkness. Close — I think. Possibly very close. A deep, resonant call, unhurried, rolling out across the valley like something ancient checking in.
The Eurasian Eagle-Owl. Bubo bubo. One of the largest owls in the world, roughly twice the size of a long-eared owl, with eyes the colour of burning amber. Others have actually spotted one here. I never have. But I know that sound, and I stood there in the cold starlight, completely still, while he called his name into the night.
He could see me, almost certainly. Those eyes are built for exactly this — for the dark, for the distance, for spotting the little peeing creature, and the larger creature standing on the driveway and trying not to breathe too hard…
I went to bed with the window wide open.
His call came in with the cold air for a long time. Somewhere between a lullaby and a reminder that this place belongs to more than just me.
In the morning it was the woodpecker who took over — hammering the world awake with the subtlety of a small construction crew. Then a second one joined in. Of course.
So. To all my dear, sweet, wonderfully concerned friends who ask, with furrowed brows and kind intentions, whether I’m really alright up there — all alone on my French mountain, no neighbours, no signal, just a dog of questionable defensive capability and a head full of stories —
I want you to know that last night I stood under ten thousand stars and listened to an eagle-owl call from the dark.
I am devastated by how lonely it is.
Make it worser for your followers. We have wolves in the Morvan. I have spotted footprints not far from us in center Morvan. A specialist recocnized the footprints after we took a picture of itIts so dangerous in the forest that it remains calm and perfect to walk there in a silence eccept of birdsongs and once in a while a meeting with deers, foxed and other animals.