Winter in my French cottage / forest walk / cozy days at home, painting & cooking / slow living

Nature has welcomed us into the new year with its cold winter coat, and as the lingering drowsy embrace holds us tightly, I find myself needing to lose myself in it again. Nature is particularly silent at this time of year. Apart from a few crows and the barking of a dog in the distance, nothing comes to disturb the calm. So I started filming this yesterday but it was so cold the camera just didn't want to work. It stopped working. It was freezing. It's a little bit less cold today so I thought why not give it another try. So I am back in the forest and I wanted to talk to you about something that happened to me just a few days before Christmas. It was a very strange thing. I often come here in this forest and I often sit here on this very trunk when I want to be alone, when I want to read a book. So the other day I just took my book and my thermos of tea and I sat here as I usually do and something strange happened. It's still very vivid in my head and yet it's been a few days now. I was reading and all of a sudden I heard a strange noise behind me like footsteps, several pairs of footsteps coming closer to me. So I stopped reading and I started getting a little bit anxious and all of a sudden I saw them coming from the right. White boars, a big group of maybe 10 adult white boars. This was the strangest encounter ever. They were just standing there looking around. They looked terrified. It's like they were thinking about their next move, you know, what their next move was going to be and I understood that they were being hunted. It's hunting season at the moment here so you hear a lot of gunshots and you see a lot of wild animals running around trying to survive and so those boars were there. The look in their eyes, I will never forget it. They looked terrified. They knew they were being hunted and so they stayed there for a few seconds. They didn't see me. I don't think they saw me. They were so taken in the moment, so terrified that they didn't even pay attention. They didn't jump into the stream, down the forest. They ran everywhere. They were really all over the place. They didn't know what they were doing, I think. It was a big mess and then I thought I didn't feel very comfortable anymore so I took my things and I just left and like two or three minutes later I heard gunshots so I can only assume that at least a few of them were killed that day. It's not the first time I hear gunshots here in the forest. I know this is hunting season but it still freaks me out a bit every time it happens and I'd never seen boars this close to me like maybe 10 boars. I didn't count them but there were many and the funny thing is boars rarely go out in daylight. They leave during the night, you know, so if you see a boar in the day it means that the boar is being hunted. The funny thing is I'm not a vegetarian. I have even eaten boar meat in the past. It was never a problem for me but that day just seeing the fear in their eyes and in their behavior, for a moment there I felt sorry for them, deeply sorry for them. It made me feel really uncomfortable not because I was scared but because I could feel their fear. Their presence made me think about the fragility of life, how precious it is and yet how hard it is for some to protect it. For the animals that don't hibernate, winter is a very challenging time and how lucky humans are to not have to think about it. In nature in winter there's no safety, no warm blanket, no fire to cozy up to with a hot chocolate. It's all about survival. I wish you all a beautiful new year and a calm winter. Stay cozy and safe.