Home

Wake-up feel: 6.

2:42. The head woke first. Home, it asked. Where is it? What happened?

I let it run — the head deliberating, home turning over and over, the body wanting sleep. I tried to bring the two to balance, and started to doze. Rain. Birds.

3:42. Awake. Down to the swimming pond, into the water, swam. Exercises. Ready for the day. Then out to the winding road — the Bodden and the green reed to the left; to the right, the rapeseed, and the place where the sun comes up. No sun this morning. Rain clouds along the horizon.

At the threshold of the winding road, a doe. We saw each other at the same instant and both went still. A second, maybe two — neither of us moving, each holding the other in sight. Then she turned, leapt into the rapeseed, and was gone.

The rapeseed has handed its smell over to others now. The yellow is gone — the field has turned green. A Leaf day, and in the night the Moon went into Pisces: Leaf is water, Pisces is water. The bloom's showing is over. What is left is the leaf's work — to grow, unshown, toward what was set down.

My thoughts were still roaming around the question of home. Where is home for me now, I asked.

In my first years in Germany, people always asked when I would go back to my Heimat. I always gave the same answer: where my heart is, where I lay my head to rest — that is my Heimat.

After seventy-five days of pilgrimage and fourteen nights on the ground, I said to myself: that is not true. Home is more. Heimat is more. The people with you, under one roof. The kitchen table. The good days and the bad days.

In the distance, a roebuck barked. Once. Twice. Three times. Then silence. The birds kept on. Out on the Bodden, a lone pair of swans.

Halfway, a cuckoo, far off.

At the turning point I stood still. I listened — to the silence, then to the birds inside it. Then I turned back toward Gut Nisdorf.

Then the cuckoo again — behind me now. It landed in a tree. It called. Cuckoo. Cuckoo.

"Seven places were on the table. The number was never the question. Now I am listening, the direction has been read. I am here to serve, with. The needs of the people who have been close to me all these years belong in this too."

Day 75 — Phase 11 — Thought — Gallbladder — Onyx — Ubuntu
Gut Nisdorf, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Baltic Coast
© 2025–2026 Michel Garand | A Pilgrim's Fitness Plan | CC BY-SA 4.0
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