Rooted

Day 25. Phase 4 — Balance — Spleen / Pancreas — Turquoise — Sun Tzu.
Biodynamic: Root day.

Wake-up feel: 6. Wind through the night.

Up at 5:15. Exercises done. Reached the pond before the walk began — standing at the edge in the early light, about to head out. A snake came swimming toward me across the surface. We looked at each other. It changed course and went on its way. The snake was already gone by the time I thought to name what it was.

A snake in the pond at the water's edge. The Rani — the West Slavic people whose sacred centre stood at Cape Arkona on Rügen, directly to the northeast — held the snake as a messenger of Veles, the god of rivers, underground water, and the soil beneath. What lives below the threshold. A snake coming toward you from the water meant the land was sending something across. It did not require interpretation. It required presence.

I walked north/northeast into a strong wind. The northeast wind on this coast in April comes across open Baltic water still running at 5 or 6 degrees. It is the wind that delays spring — the cold's argument that it has not finished. Root day. The body low, the ground present underfoot.

At Gut Nisdorf the Monday morning fire gathers what the week will need. Each person speaks their gratitude into the landscape — not into the room, into the land itself.

The morning held one word underneath all of it: Beziehung. Relationship — to the land, to the place and its long memory, to the season pressing in from the northeast, to the people at the fire. To the people we love. To the family we carry. To the ancestors who stood at edges like this one before us.

The snake was Rani territory. The wind was Baltic. The fire was Gemeinschaft. Three different forms of the same question: how do you stand in relation to what is larger than you?

Heute komme ich mit Präsenz, nicht mit Lösung.

© 2025–2026 Michel Garand | A Pilgrim's Fitness Plan — Gut Nisdorf 2026
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