The Way as Truth
As a pioneer of the Walk of Wisdom , I try not to put myself in the foreground. The route is not about me, I want to be of service to the route.
Yet something pinches in me.
We’ve been around 16 months since the opening and I often feel like a rule-breaker. A lot has to happen before you have a new tradition of contemplation! From organizing departure ceremonies for pilgrims or sponsored walks for nature to the website, administration, getting starter packages ready, maintaining contacts with stops and markers, or the development of ideas, such as the second edition of our pilgrim book of hours. I haven’t even mentioned Facebook, reports from pilgrims and news – or press releases.
Fortunately, we are getting more and more help and I am proud of the 1000th pilgrim who is coming. But is this my life, this service?
In all the arrangements, I miss a place to be. A place where I don’t look back or forward, but stand still, experience what is going on inside me. In the last six months, that place has increasingly become my diary. Here I keep track of what I feel, how I am doing and to what extent I experience love in what I do.
It doesn’t hurt to share some of that experience. In fact, as a pioneer of the Walk of Walk of Wisdom , I even think it is good to do so, because it is precisely the reflection on the experience and sharing that can make a walking route grow into a pilgrimage tradition.
So I’m happy to just write this piece now and show myself with it. Not as marketing – for the sake of effect – but from within. I write to rise above the rules, to be present in the midst of the trouble with my soul. In this way, the route becomes for me not only a metaphor to which I am subservient, but also an invitation to live up to the meaning of that metaphor in the practice of my life .
My own ‘walk of wisdom’ is a movement inwards, towards the truth of my inner world. A truth with which I cannot or do not have to convince anyone, but with which I can give the contact with the other person real meaning. Then my arranging becomes not just a shuffling in the outside world, but a movement from within. This movement from within is the only way in which I can sustainably commit myself to this route.
Photo: Bart Kouwenberg, dike Beuningen
Who helps the Walk of Wisdom: an overview.
Other experiences: René: ‘peel off your grimace‘.
