‘I walk and I love’ (2) (Dineke de Velde Harsenhorst, pilgrim 933)

A beautiful story by Dineke de Velde Harsenhorst

 

I’m going to walk for two days. With an overnight stay with Gabriëla and Ferdie in Kranenburg. 

I pick up the tour where I left off last time. Although the tour didn’t stop when I wasn’t walking, the Walk of Wisdom has already gotten under my skin quite a bit. 

So did the cold this time. Especially the first day, it drizzled and drizzled on and on.

 

I get lost immediately. Already on the route to Beek, a route I know so well. How is that possible? Suddenly I’m back up in Berg en Dal instead of down in Beek. I walk down the normal motorway and decide to pick up the route again at hotel Spijker. With my hands around a hot cup of cappuccino, I feel like I’ve already had a day. I’m on the road for a good hour…. 

Tapping of rain on a thinning canopy. Birches are shattered in a feast of yellow leaves. I think of what Jos wrote on Facebook: Because the leaves fall in autumn, it becomes not only darker but also lighter. 

 

The advantage of such a drizzly day is that you hardly meet anyone in the forest. There’s something very lonely about it. Just me, the booklet with the directions and the signposts with the Pilgrim. 

On the Duivelsberg, what I feared comes true: the restaurant will be closed on Mondays from 1 November. Today is Monday 7… I sit down under a covered terrace and eat my boiled carrots, sniffing and soaking. Standing patio heaters watch me idly.

Then I get lost drastically. I walk back to find the missed turn, but through a thick carpet of leaves I can no longer see what ‘paths’ are and what ‘forest’ is. I’m just among the trees. I surrender, wander around but don’t feel lost. Instead of the route via the Groesbeek farmlands, I end up walking the busy road from Nijmegen to Kranenburg. Because I will get to Kranenburg!! I know that a warm welcome, a delicious meal and a wood-burning stove await me there. What a blessing to have friends.

 

Endless walking

Day two is a very different one. It starts with sun and mist, so that diffuse rays of light hang like veils between the trees. The splendour of colours is divine and the silence in the Reichswald deafening. You can walk endlessly, what a lovely forest. And I thought it was boring with all those straight paths… 

Exactly at 12:00 I walk out of the forest, the sun is right in front of me. Pasture, cows, view, warmth. Wow, or better in this context: WoW. 

It goes further. Over the Diepen, Jansberg, Kiekenberg, Mookerheide….all areas where I have walked, separately from each other, but this Pilgrimage connects them with each other and therefore everything comes into a different perspective. I understand connections, in-between spaces, how the areas are in relation to each other and how they relate to each other. It becomes a whole.

That process is also taking place in me. Naturally, I make connections and ‘separate somethings’ become one whole in me. I can’t put into words what exactly is happening, but I am sure that something is happening. As within, so without.

I am grateful that I am allowed and able to see, hear, feel and experience all this. That I can walk this path, that I have legs that carry me and that I live in a country and have a neighboring country where I can walk in and out freely. 

I walk, learn to bow deeply and bowing turns out to be loving.

‘fairytale Reichswald.’

“The Reichswald will let me go again.”

‘The Jansberg, rising from the Diepen.’

“The Pilgrim. Faithfully showing me the way.”