One Magpie
Day 41 at Gut Nisdorf
Wake-up feel: 6.
Woke at 4:50. Looked east. The sky was cherry red — deep, saturated, almost edible. A delicious cherry red, I thought, and the word surprised me.
Fruit day — fire element, warmth. The body reaching outward. Moon in Sagittarius — expansive, philosophical, pulling toward the horizon.
Exercises done. Out into the morning.
A few minutes in, just before the winding road — Bodden and reed beds to the left, rapeseed yellow to the right, sun beginning to clear the horizon — a Eurasian magpie flew a few metres in front of me. Crossed my path. Landed in a tree. Called.
Not quite song. Not quite alarm. Something between announcement and inquiry — bright, rattling, made from a branch just ahead of me, directed at the morning air, or perhaps not at me at all but into the same air I was moving through.
One magpie. In the old northern European count, one is for sorrow. The custom is to greet it quickly, avert what follows. I thanked it instead.
What the cultures of sense of place would make of a magpie chattering in a tree is a different question than what the counting rhyme makes of it. In parts of Central Europe, the magpie sitting in a tree in front of the house and calling meant one thing: someone is coming.
I was a few steps from the winding road. I kept walking.
The magpie stayed — chattering as I passed, not scared, not hindered. Still in the tree as I moved further along the path.
No danger discerned.
Day 41 — Phase 6 — Taste — Small Intestine — Diamond — Ecclesiastes
Gut Nisdorf, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Baltic Coast
© 2025–2026 Michel Garand | A Pilgrim's Fitness Plan | CC BY-SA 4.0
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