Death Ground

Today is April 4.

Eleven years ago today, Julika was born. It was Easter. The world was cracking open the way it does in early April — cold still in the shadows, warmth arriving without permission. She arrived the same way. She has never stopped.

Easter moves each year — determined by the first full moon after the spring equinox. Her birthday does not. April 4 holds. The same Paschal full moon that sealed the first arc of this pilgrimage two nights ago is the one that, eleven years ago, placed her arrival into the world on this date. She was born from the same astronomical logic that structures this pilgrimage. That is not coincidence. That is attunement. She has always been the compass — I am only now learning to read her correctly.

Today I woke in a tent in a garden in Müllrose, Brandenburg — about a kilometre from the house where I cooked dinner last night for the people I love. Cold. Unable to sleep properly. I washed outside in the cold water, got dressed, and walked to a restaurant for a warm breakfast.

The same day holds both. It always will.

Sun Tzu calls it death ground.

The terrain where retreat is no longer possible. Where you have crossed the river and the boats are gone. Where the cooking pots are broken and there is nothing behind you — only what is ahead. On death ground, Sun Tzu says, fight. Not because you are brave. Because there is no other direction.

This is Day 9, Saturday April 4. And today is Julika's birthday. And I am standing on death ground. These three things are not in contradiction. They are the same day.

Upon my arrival on the afternoon of Good Friday, the day before Julika's birthday, my son Mattheo and my daughter Julika met me at the garden with warm tea and my favourite cake — banana and chocolate, chosen and baked by Susi. The children wanted to go out for pizza. The restaurant was closed. Good Friday — everything closed. We improvised. We ended up at the family home, and I cooked.

It was warm. It was harmonious. The dog was being washed. The children were loud and alive. For a few hours it was simply a family eating together.

Then I said goodnight and walked out into the dark. A kilometre away, in a separate garden, a tent was waiting.

There is no physical evidence that I ever lived in that house.

Thirty-one years in Germany. Three daughters and a son. A granddaughter. A life assembled piece by piece in a country that was never mine by birth but became mine by commitment. And now — a container in Frankfurt (Oder) holding what remains of my belongings, and a tent in a garden a kilometre from the house where I cooked dinner last night, where nothing on the walls says I was ever there.

She packed it away in two stages. Before her trip to Italy. And after, when she came back. Deliberate. Considered. Final.

There are a few pictures of sheep. From the early years, when we were still becoming something together. That is what remains.

I am not telling you this so you will feel sorry for me.

I am telling you this because this is what death ground looks like from the inside.

It does not announce itself with trumpets. It arrives as a cold night, a canvas roof, the smell of your own breath in the dark. It arrives as a kitchen where you cook for your children and then leave without a key. It arrives as the realisation — slow, heavy, like a stone falling from a clear sky — that the life you built is stored in a container and the house is someone else's now even though your daughter still lives there and last night she brought you tea.

Sun Tzu does not say death ground is comfortable.

He says it is the ground that makes total commitment possible. When there is no retreat, the body stops negotiating. The mind stops running the calculations of escape. Something clarifies.

I burned the boats. Not in anger — in clarity. I left for Gut Nisdorf on March 26 knowing I was not coming back to the same life. The pilgrimage is not a holiday. It is a structural change. You cannot make a structural change and keep the old structure standing.

The container in Frankfurt (Oder) is not a tragedy.

It is the proof that something real is happening.

This day is also a homage.

To the woman who carried Julika for nine months and brought her into the world. Whatever complexity lives between us now — and there is complexity — that act stands apart from all of it. Untouched by what came after. Worthy of respect on its own terms. She chose and baked the cake. She was at the door when I left.

Both things are true. The complexity and the respect. They do not cancel each other.

I walked out of that warm kitchen last night and I did not look back.

Not because I am strong. Because looking back would not have changed the terrain. A kilometre of dark road was what was waiting. Thirty-one years of a life I loved and lost and am still learning to carry differently — that was in my chest as I walked through the door.

I am also homeless.

I did not look back.

That is the only move available on death ground.

You go forward. You go forward. You go forward.

Julika turns eleven today. She brought me tea yesterday. Susi chose and baked the cake. Julika was born on this same April 4 into a world that was still cold and still cracking open — and she has been the compass ever since, for more days than she will ever know.

Birth day. Death ground. The same day.

The ground is hard. The ground is real. The ground is exactly where I need to be.

A Pilgrim's Fitness Plan — Gut Nisdorf 2026
Gut Nisdorf, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern — April 2026

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