“My mate, my walking stick, stepped naked and expectantly with me into his new life” (Paul De Marez, pilgrim 1420)

Walk of Wisdom, from the perspective of a distant Fleming

As a pilgrim 1420 I left the monumental Stevens Church in the middle of summer for my Walk of Wisdom. That Monday afternoon I had arrived in the oldest city in the Netherlands after a long train journey from my hometown of Kortrijk, close to the French-Belgian border.

Soon I was walking along the Waal beaches. The space, the silence, the water, the flowers and the sheep immediately immersed me in an atmosphere that opens the mind and energizes the feet. I walked over cattle grids, through folding gates, along hedges and pollard willows. Puffing, I was able to pull myself across the water of Het Meer with a ferry. Fortunately, I still found shelter in the simple hospitable ‘Sous Eglises’.

It was a wonderful start to what was supposed to be a short five-day pilgrimage, but I was still missing a sturdy walking stick.

For relaxing trips through mountains and forests, I have a pair of sturdy telescopic sticks. They have all the qualities but they are cool. On my pilgrimages, I want a hiking buddy with a soul. I want a support and anchor with a story, who is also willing to listen to my story, my questions, my great happiness and my small sorrow. I want a companion who is strong and courageous enough to carry me over muddy paths and keep the dogs off me. And for every pilgrimage I want a new friend to store the story of the road deep between its buds and growth rings and to remind me of it in my old age.

Sturdy stick

The next morning I quickly walked past a border post up the Duivelsberg, looking for a new hiking friend. And there, in a tangle of broken branches, he lay ogling me: a stout straight stick of the right size, grown in the earth on which my feet searched for the old stories. Sitting on a bench, peering over the Valley of the Philosophers, I took my pocket knife, gave my new mate a firm point, and lovingly peeled off his old weathered bark. So he stepped into his new life with me naked and full of anticipation.

It was also the definitive start of a short but wonderful pilgrimage for me.

I remember the fascinating stay with the Capuchins in Velp where I also met pilgrim Angelina. The next morning we didn’t say goodbye. After all, soulmates do not say goodbye to each other on the pilgrimage, so the mental connection remains, even if you no longer see each other again. Yet in the afternoon we were already together again on a terrace in romantic Ravenstein. At a window I read a clever poem by Simon Dermijn:

Stray light

Once upon a time, words could travel undisturbed in space,

Dressed in colors, accompanied by sounds, surrounded by scents.

Born of old souls, nourished by ancient love

they laid down and laid out.

Heard unheard, they could burst into a thousand sharp fragments,

whereupon the sunlight broke its rays again and again.

If words really meet us,

they don’t squeeze in, they don’t break sounds.

When we listen and don’t speak,

meet and don’t seek,

they sometimes coincide with us.

Coincidentally in a pattern of eternity.

Simon Dermijn

And so the road showed me my way. The fens and the undulating heathlands were inspiring, the patch tree at the Sint Walrick Chapel and the impressive Stations of the Cross on the Kapelberg evoked old devotion.

The penultimate day I was able to wander in the footsteps of the cows along the Waal to find a bed in the Alde Coninckshof. In the morning I could have breakfast early in the morning by the rippling water in one of the most beautiful dewy gardens in the Netherlands.

I was ready for the final.

Salty air

In the middle of the bridge ‘De Oversteek’ I took the time to enjoy the water landscape and the salty air under a spider’s web of steel tension cables. Five days was short for a drastic pilgrimage experience, but I had still gained a good dose of vitamins for heart and mind. I stared at the boats that glided silently by on this gray Saturday morning, the bow aimed at the striking Stevens Tower. In the distance I saw the cars speeding by on a large characterless car bridge, closer hurriedly walkers flanked the slowly passing trains over yet another river crossing. A chilly breeze made me leave again and to my surprise I was suddenly able to descend a staircase to the sandy island below De Oversteek. On a field of withered blades of grass, I stood with mixed feelings between dozens of concrete pillars under the Crossing.

White and colossal, the feet firmly planted in the sand or water, they offered man a safe crossing between two shores. The conical shape of the clumsy pillars and the slightly curving perspective gave me a feeling of robust security, as under the protective skirts between the soft legs of a fat grandmother. I found a sandy road to the bridge over the Spiegelwaal. Turning around, I noticed how the unwieldy robustness of The Crossing had acquired a playful flamboyance reminiscent of Gaudi. I walked over the embankment, under the railway bridge and reached an elegant white bridge over which I could reach the island again. No languid toughness here, but a lively lightness, a poem of concrete lines of verse in the rippling Waal water.

Away from life

I felt that this was a moment where the pilgrim on his journey comes to understand the language of his soul. As human beings, we find our way between the many aspects of our being. We are full of questions and skipping between the shores of hope and doubt, of certainty and adventure, of arriving and leaving. But it’s the bridges between them that bring us the answers. Or not, but then it’s okay too. Under the bridge we find security and on top of it we can enjoy the endless views, looking back where we came from, expectant of what is to come. Yin and yang. Harmony.

Along the railway bridge I came back to the Waalkade and suddenly I was standing in front of a large labyrinth. Cobblestone paths meandered in between water channels in and back out. The eternal symbol of the way of life, the pilgrimage way inwards and back to the world. That was the place where I could ritually end my trip. I placed my heavy backpack on the dock, took my cane with me and let my feet explore the cobblestones. Slowly, taking in every step, I let the past journey remind me. For five days I had walked and enjoyed, but this morning I had met the words of my soul. I had arrived.

Slowly I went back to the outside world.

On the way to the station, all that was left was for me to get a stamp in the Stevenskerk and buy a Book of Hours. With that, I could do my Walk many times over.

Thank you, Walk of Wisdom!

Paul De Marez, Kortrijk