Last Christmas holidays were spend in Belgium with my parents. We decided to have a walking holidays in Voeren, a hidden gem between the Netherlands, Flanders and Walloon. This region is steeped in history and […]
Category: Belgian stories
From Celtic source cult and tree devotion to worship of local female saints in Flanders
From Celtic Source Cult and Tree Devotion to Worship of Local Female Saints in Flanders Introduction:The woven tapestry of Flanders’ history is a rich blend of myths, legends, and tales that often go unnoticed. My […]
Amelberga, the river and the sturgeon’s lifecycle
In May 2021, my father found a good book from the 1980s: Roeck and Marquet (1980). “Belgian sagas and legends”. Illustrations by Henri Lievens. In the chapter “the virgins,” Dymphna came back, who has inspired […]
A Flemish ghost in the throat: Imagining who Cathelyne van den Bulcke was
One week earlier, I walked with S., a friend, in the Flemish town Lier, once a rich city with Game of Thrones intrigues. The city has installed a walking tour, with different stops and QR […]
Dimpna, a story about an uprooted Irish princess rerooting in Flanders, and a 6 centuries old method of care for the mental ill
On a July day, in 2021, I was in Geel, with a fellow offspring of a witch that did not get burned in the 17th century, to “dig up some bones”. That’s what we call […]
A Linden Tree in Tongerlo (and educational philosophy for the future)
One of my new short stories got published as part of a book of speculative social fiction that present different possible futures of education. About the book: Educational Fabulations *Teaching and Learning for a World […]
Feeding my imagination with nature
“Knowledge feeds fictions, and fictions set the powers free”The life of Elves, Muriel Barbery I arrived in Brussels in 2019. I was surrounded by high buildings, busy streets and a roundabout full of cars. But […]
That special tree/plant in our lives is often rooted in a landscape of the past
One of the invitations that I give to my participants at the beginning of my nature based practices is to share a memory about a special tree in their life. I pair them up and […]
Ecofeminism anno 2022: writing wild
This winter, one of the mentors of the writers academy in Antwerp, recommended me this book. I bought it. I do not get only inspiration for my current fiction book, but I also start dreaming […]
a musing: evergreens in Christmas songs, midwinter poems and cultural heritage
Traditionally, the spruce is the Christmas tree in the North-West of Europe, but this is not always the evergreen with is the subject of christmas carols. In Flanders, we have a famous christmas song about […]