There’s something for you on the route
Damiaan Messing, pioneer of the Walk of Wisdom, also walks the walk himself once a year. In June, during the departure ceremony in the Valkhof Chapel, he told about an experience he had in 2017.
“There’s something for you on the route.”
This was one of the phrases I went out with in 2017. I have a thing for monasteries and had read of clergymen who carried a booklet with them as a spiritual exercise in the 14th century. During the day, they wrote down words and sentences that touched them. By rereading those sentences regularly, those sentences then became part of their inner life.
In the weeks before I left, I decided to do the same, but with excerpts from accounts of pilgrims of the Walk of Wisdom. I read a few reports every day and wrote down the sentences that did something to me. In the week before I left, I read them over a few times every day.
“The universe controls the details,” was one of the sentences I had written down. The phrase annoyed me. I thought she was way too woolly: how does the universe arrange the details? And what about all those wars in the world, the environmental pollution, the Holocaust…!?
Anyway, the sentence hit me. Not without reason: I was going to go out for the first time without a plan. No stages mapped out, no overnight stays arranged, just walk and see what happened. As I had read that others had done the same and hey that’s exactly what I rarely did: don’t plan, just walk. Let’s see what happens. Bring it on then! Take care of it, universe!
Already at the beginning of the route, something remarkable happened. I had planned to tie a string to the fence at hospice Bethlehem in memory of my father. Once at the gate, I forgot the string. I was bummed. What should I do? “The universe controls the details,” sneered through my mind. Take care of it. I decided to search around and looked at the ground, because – and this was also one of the sentences that I had written down and that I now suddenly remembered: “There’s something for you on the route.”
I was alert and looked around. Nowhere to be found, of course. That’s what you have with that woolly nonsense, I wanted to grumble. Not far from me, however, I saw a large bird feather lying near the fence. “I took every bird feather I came across,” I recalled from the reports. I decided to pick up the spring and put it in the flap of my route guide. To my great surprise, something miraculous happened. During a trip, you will of course regularly open the guide. Then you sit on a bench somewhere in the middle of the fields resting and when your footsteps have sunk a bit, you grab the guide to look ahead. And all of a sudden, there’s that spring. My dad felt the whole route close in a way I hadn’t felt in a long time.
At the end of my second day, I arrived in Kranenburg in the evening. It was already late and I had been postponing at every stop to arrange a place to stay. I just didn’t feel like it. Let’s see what the universe has in store for me. But around five o’clock in the afternoon I started to get a bit worried. I had to arrange something now. First dinner, I thought, and I went into a restaurant. The food came and I ordered some more drinks. I pushed the idea of the overnight list away like a heavy headache. You can’t call people that late anymore! Or so I thought. People are eating, it’s rude! It got later and later and it started to get dark outside (I was walking in the fall).
At one point I thought, I’m just going to walk. That’s what I did, I walked through the night. In deserted forests, under clear starry skies, accompanied by the sound of a single beast. I can still hear the calm step of my shoes over the leaves of the deserted path. Here and there I have lain on benches, opened the guide. In the course of the morning I knocked on the door of friends on the route and slept a bit. After a delicious lunch, I continued. I thought it was a wonderful experience.
The universe controls the details.
There is something for you on the route.
Damien (pilgrim 100).
