The Body Knows

Wake-up feel: 7.

Fire last night. Music. The spring festival ran late. Tired this morning — the good kind.

Root day.

Sun and Moon both in Taurus — fixed earth, both luminaries in the same sign, holding what is not yet ready to surface. In five days the New Moon comes in Gemini — the twins — and what has been consolidating in the dark becomes something that can be named.

Blue sky. Wind from the south. The winding road between the Bodden and the reed fields — reeds greening faster every week now, rapeseed yellow to the right, rising sun behind it.

The Elster was at the threshold. Different rooftop this time.

The wind was quiet. The Bodden was not. It sounded like waterfalls this morning — the water audible, sounding like a waterfall, beneath everything.

The Bodden here is shallow. A south wind doesn't just move the surface — it reaches the bottom. The whole water column stirs. That is what the waterfall sound was.

The people who lived along this coast before the 12th century held water as a threshold. The sound of water moving was not incidental — it was what lay beneath, working.

The south wind: warmth, fertility, the direction of life. Also, in some of these traditions, the one-eyed wind. You can feel it. You cannot quite see through it.

My mind was elsewhere, agitated, could not discern why. Reflecting on the last few days — two video calls, east — to a broken land where I am needed, a letter of interest sent south, across the water, unanswered yet, a conversation five days ago that is still landing. Something still pulling. Not a day for decisions, I told myself. I kept walking.

A few minutes in, I was busy with the camera. Not quite attentive.

The Rehbuck had been watching me. I looked up and it jumped — out from behind the trees, ran silently into the reed fields toward the shore of the Bodden. Then the barking began. Short, sharp calls from somewhere inside the reeds.

I stood still. A duck pair flew past to the left.

I noticed my pace on the way back. My feet were determined — not walking for its own sake, but moving as if they already knew the destination. The mind was still sorting. The feet were not.

Not a day for decisions. I had said it on the way out. I said it again when I got back.

When you have to say it twice, the thing you are not deciding is still working.

Back at Gut Nisdorf, the place was the same as I had left it. That is not nothing. Fifty-two mornings the place has been the same — the garden, the light on the main building, the Baltic air. The mind comes back carrying whatever it has picked up. The place has not moved.

Fifty-two mornings. The mind comes and goes. The feet have been the same for weeks.

The Agate does not shine like the Diamond. It glows. The difference is the source of the light: not reflection, but what the stone itself has become through the long accumulation.

Day 52 — Phase 8 — Warmth — Kidney — Agate — Durga
Gut Nisdorf, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Baltic Coast
© 2025–2026 Michel Garand | A Pilgrim's Fitness Plan | CC BY-SA 4.0
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