“Russians could say: If you tie yourself to the tree, they will simply cut you down together with the tree.

In this struggle, all means are good enough: if you cannot love your homeland as a human being, if the enemy pushes you out, love it like a plant – stay, resist; or love it like a beast – run, attack, or escape, but don’t leave them your homeland; just pack it in your heart and take it with you wherever you go.”
— Oxana Timofeeva

The book reflects on the difficulty of reducing one’s sense of homeland to a single country and explores the philosophical relationship between movement and rootedness. Drawing on memories from Timofeeva’s childhood across different parts of the USSR, the text intertwines autobiographical fragments with reflections on ideas of homeland in literature and philosophy, including references to Brecht, Deleuze, and Guattari. It considers the ways in which human, plant, and animal forms of belonging shape how we imagine and reinvent our homelands.