Pilgrim’s lauds August 5: “When you go outside…”
This morning, a little after sunrise, editor-in-chief and copywriter Lucy Holl read a page from Seasons of Life: a contemporary book of hours and pilgrims in the Stevenskerk.It was the fourth pilgrim’s lauds, a moment of reflection at sunrise, every first Saturday of the month. A report by pioneer Damiaan Messing.
It’s hard for me to get out of bed: it’s 5:30 a.m. on a Saturday morning in the middle of the holidays. I get dressed and start walking. Outside I find deserted streets. The light is already there, but the night is not gone. The city lights are still on and a flicker of twilight lies over stones and trees. A blackbird sings, while a young couple comes cycling excitedly out of the center. Whistle: the lanterns go out.
I see two scattered wagons on an otherwise busy road, otherwise quiet. Everywhere that soft light of the morning that makes everything friendly, makes it look beneficial. Slowly the sky on one side of the sky turns orange. I turn the corner of a shopping street: between the facades, the Stevenkerk rises high above the roofs.
It’s five minutes to six, an hour later already two pilgrims back. Behind the church tower shades of grey. In the few minutes that I walk over the cobblestones to the church, the sun hints at some clouds from behind me.
With about nine people we enter the church and slowly walk through the abandoned church. With a graceful gesture, the Stevenspedel lifts the Book of Hours out of the formwork and flatters it onto a lectern. The reader on duty joins us:
“When you go outside…
“When you go out, you don’t go in.”
When I once read it, I found this polar proposition to be undeniable.
Unless you’re a pilgrim? Because then you go outside in the literal sense, precisely with the intention of going your inner way with attention.
When you walk outside like this, what has not yet calmed down automatically plays up in you. And all around you, nature offers metaphors that touch something in you. Sometimes you see yourself mirrored in a hollowed-out, crooked pollard willow with its straight blades in the air. Other times you think you recognize something in a resting cow that is ruminating wonderfully.
Quite an art to let go of thinking while walking, to let what comes come and to let it go again. Slowly becoming aware of silence and less and less of a tight separation between inside and outside you. Possibly step by step to less divided, to being more one.
Trinette van Schijndel, visual artist (link)
In: Seasons of Life: A Contemporary Book of Hours and Pilgrims. Lake
The next pilgrim lauds will be Saturday, September 1 at 6:48 a.m.
Reader on duty: Lucy Holl: link
