There’s only forward
Last weekend I participated in a silent walk. The course was partly on the route of the Walk of Wisdom and I thought it would be nice to walk with a group of people in silence on a Sunday morning. We departed from Dukenburg station. An excellent place to leave – unimaginative new construction with a large casino – but also a place that soon led to a meditative route on elongated paths with tall trees and a kilometre-long canal.
Walking together in silence gives a different way of being together than you are used to. Not necessarily deeper, but more instinctively, more instinctively. I can still see the broad paddling arm movements of a man with whom I recently walked a whole night to Kevelaer. It wasn’t a silent walk, but quiet enough for 30 kilometers and the trip with others through the night gave me the same feeling of physicality: faces get a pace and motor skills, in each other’s twists and turns and attunements you feel the course of someone’s personality.
After two hours of walking, we stopped under the bridge. It was the Crossing, a new bridge with beautiful lines that also heralds the finale of the Walk of Wisdom. The place had been chosen for an exchange. A creative exchange: everyone was invited to say, sing or write poetry.
I kept quiet and listened. My feeling of awkwardness soon gave way to wonder and emotion. Two people sang a song, one read a story aloud, and another spontaneously started writing poetry.
I don’t know if it was high Art, but it didn’t matter. It was the courage and the openness, the vulnerability and the guts to show it that counted. Then every contribution is good. And a lot of what I heard, I really liked.
I see the woman in front of me who was standing on the pedestrian stairs under the high bridge singing a short song, the sound coming from her belly. As we lay on the grass, a man read about “God” that you see when you forget the separation between you and the tree , between you and the bridge, the other. I was surprised to hear another man groping for words. “There is only forward” he said, he lived up to it as he wrote about it, afraid of no mistake, saying yes to everything that came. He spoke beyond art and touched on Love, in which light everything that is crooked becomes straight and everything that is wrong can become right again.
There is only forward. That is perhaps the best answer I can give when people ask me why the Walk of Wisdom is a loop and ‘going nowhere’. How far do you want to go, where do you think you have to walk to meet yourself? A ‘walk of wisdom’ doesn’t make you any wiser if you only look forward to what you encounter outside of you: art, churches, nature. Pilgrimage is about what is going on in your own heart and soul. Making time for it and working on it physically, that is the essence of what distinguishes a pilgrimage from an ordinary walk – wherever it goes. It is not the route of the route, but the course of your personality that is at stake.
Below are the lyrics of Anja Strik’s song that touches on this form of walking. Anja organized the silent walk.
One step forward
Just make one step forward
one step forward is enough to reach my goal
’cause my goal is one step ahead
Just make one step forward
one step forward is enough to reach my goal
’cause my goal is one step ahead
Now I feel how close the future lies
I can dance
I can sing life’s wonder
for there’s no yesterday
to mourn about
nor fear for tomorrow
to make me doubt
the things I love to do
and prevent myself
from being true
But when I can’t be in this moment
I don’t exist at all
no wonder I’m frightened
thinking I’ll fall
into life’s emptiness
loneliness, fruitlessness, darkness
between the moments in time
So I call upon life
call upon life
call upon life
to let me be
to let me be
and to let me make
One step forward
one step forward is enough to reach my goal
’cause my goal is one step ahead
Let me make one step forward
one step forward is enough to reach my goal
’cause my goal is one step ahead
Anja Strik
http://www.anjastrik.nl/deherberg/het-stroomt-gebed/pelgrimeren/
