The harvest has only just begun in Tramin. Walking around I find it humbling to think of how time has marked itself on my body. Last year I’d worked part-time for another farmer, helping him when he was short of hands. It was gruelling work that required my limbs to be in constant alignment with those of the machine that was transporting us through each row. I’ll never forget the cellular ache I would experience after six or seven hours, when I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to walk home from the parking lot. It’s tempting to think of it as exaggeratedly dramatic in retrospect, but not when I think about how far my body has come along since then, the ease with which I can now manage uphills, and the grace with which my breath can accommodate the altitudinal shifts. It’s hard to think there was ever a moment when I thought we’d move between India and Südtirol. I realise now that this feeling I’ve acquired of being ‘at home’ has emerged, inextricably, from the emotional investments I have been making ever since I landed here last June. Had I the opportunity to move easily back and forth between the homes from which I come in India and this one I have been trying to build, it would have taken a lot longer for me to arrive at this realisation—that becoming indigenous involves placing both feet on the ground.

It sounds simple enough, almost facile. It’s not possible to walk without placing both feet firmly on land. But I think there’s a lot of profundity tucked beneath the surface of this sentence. It might have something to do with gravity; the idea of not just locating one’s feet on the ground but also allowing them to hold the body’s weight and to fluidly venture forward. For someone like me, who has trouble orienting herself in relation to the sun, frequently unable to distinguish North from South in the absence of daylight, staying in place, being here for as long as I have in the early stages of my ‘settling’ here has been transformative. Bearing witness to the landscape as it sheds, stands naked, sprouts, flowers, and fruits, all the while changing hues feels like a privilege. It must be the only way I currently know of positioning oneself within existing relational systems. One of the reasons I’ve been so preoccupied by the intellectual discourses around indigeneity as a mode of embodiment is because I feel surrounded by the consciousness of land as an entity to which humans are bound.