The Ordinary Tuesday
Wake-up feel: 5.
Woke at 04:10. The birds had already been going for a while. The Moon had entered Gemini at 04:00 — six minutes before my eyes opened. Last Root day finished in the dark. First Flower day already underway.
The question from Sunday's political brunch was still there: what is peace?
I took it onto the winding road. Bodden and reeds to the left, rapeseed to the right, the sky grey-blue and not yet decided. The walk between them was familiar. The body moved. Something underneath did not settle.
The smells came and went — rapeseed full and close, something damp from the reed beds, cow parsley at the path edge. Many smells. Still uneasy.
At the turning point I stopped and stood.
Everything around me was at rest. The reeds stood in it. The rapeseed stood in it. The Bodden lay behind it, flat and still. I was not at rest. I stood in the middle of all that quiet and remained uneasy.
Is peace the absence of violence? We have the words for it — war and peace, rest in peace, be at peace with yourself. The same sound covers different things. A country not at war. A person who has stopped fighting their own life. A body laid in the ground. We use one word and mean three.
I turned and walked back without the answer. By the time I reached the gate, the question was the size of one house, one table, one child walking to school on a Tuesday.
I cannot be a father every second weekend. That is not fathering — it is visiting. A child needs a father in the house, at the table, on the ordinary Tuesday.
Julika is eleven. She walks to school on ordinary Tuesdays. Mattheo and Sini are older — they were young once too, and the ordinary Tuesdays passed, and I was not always there for them.
Seven places are on the table. I am not naming them yet. What I am naming is what I need from wherever I land.
One of the things I need is the ordinary Tuesday. Not the special occasion. Not every second weekend. The Tuesday when nothing is happening — dinner, homework, a question about something at school, a silence that is just shared silence between people who live together.
That is what presence means. It is not a visit.
The peace question is not only political. Or it runs in both directions — from the treaty table down through the community to the kitchen table, and from the kitchen table back out through the community. From the ceasefire line to the ordinary Tuesday, and from the ordinary Tuesday to the ceasefire line. You cannot build peace in a community where you are not present. You cannot build it in a family by visiting.
I stood at the turning point with everything around me at rest and the uneasy did not leave.
That is not nothing. That is the question asking to be carried further.
Day 54 — Phase 8 — Fatherhood — Kidney — Agate — Durga
Gut Nisdorf, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Baltic Coast
© 2025–2026 Michel Garand | A Pilgrim's Fitness Plan | CC BY-SA 4.0
stewardship@ubec.network
