In unlikely places
palm green on ice
What Amsterdam's parakeets taught me about migration
It’s quite mesmerizing, and almost unbelievable, seeing a bright green parakeet perched on a branch coated in snow. For a moment, your mind rejects the image. Tropical birds belong somewhere humid, somewhere loud with insects and palm leaves. Not in the stillness of a Dutch winter.
And yet they do.
Thousands of ring-necked parakeets have made Amsterdam home. They roost in city parks, gather noisily at dusk, and return to the same trees every year as though they have always belonged here. Perhaps belonging is not always about where you begin, but instead where you learn to endure without losing sight of your core.
It requires a certain kind of courage to build a life in a place that was never imagined with you in mind. Migration asks more than crossing borders. It asks you to remake your routines, your language, your sense of direction. It asks you to learn seasons your body doesn’t recognise, skies that grow dark before dinner, customs no one remembers to explain. Long after the journey is over, the work continues.
Jan 5, 2026
The week the Netherlands saw its heaviest snow in a decade. Roads closed, schools shut, the country at a standstill and this photo appeared in my messages.
The parakeets are found in the season furthest from everything their feathers seem designed for. Snow settles around them. Bare branches frame them. The landscape withdraws into greys and whites. Yet they become even more luminous. Their green doesn’t disappear against the cold. It becomes impossible to ignore.
Belonging without becoming lessI kept thinking about how often difference is spoken about as something that should eventually soften or disappear once you enter a new place. As though belonging and assimilation depend on becoming less visible. A more acceptable you. The parakeets suggest something else entirely. They did not earn their place by dimming their colour. They simply found a way to survive while staying whole.
Palm Green on Ice
Series: Between the Margins
This is what thriving in the margins looks like. Not assimilation. Not erasure. Just presence. The refusal to become less visible simply because the backdrop changed.
This painting is for everyone who has ever arrived somewhere unfamiliar and slowly built a home there. For everyone who has carried another language, another climate, another memory inside them while learning to love a new landscape. Sometimes belonging doesn’t arrive because the world changes for you. Sometimes it begins the moment you decide to bloom where no one expected you to.
Palm Green on Ice, 2026
Acrylic on canvas,
90 × 80 cm
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Art@karlaking.com
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