Does Nature Care?

Six. Tired. The pull to stay horizontal.

The sun was stronger.

The walk begins in the same place every morning — out the door,
along the winding road between the Bodden and the reed fields
on the right, and the rapeseed fields to the left where the sun
comes up. Today the sky was clear. No wind to speak of.

But something was different.

The air. It arrived before anything else did — before the eyes
adjusted, before the feet found their rhythm. Warm. Soft. Not
the cold salt edge of the weeks before. Something almost erotic.
The Baltic breathing differently — warmer air moving in across
the water — and underneath it, threaded through it, the smell
of the rapeseed in full bloom.

The body takes it in before the mind has a name for it.

The Bodden was still.

Not the rippled, restless surface of the past weeks. Barely a
movement. No birds working the shallows. The reed beds standing
without bending. Whatever activity usually marks that water in
the early morning — absent. As if the lagoon had decided to rest.

Root day. The biodynamic calendar marks the forces pulling
downward through the earth — into the root systems, into
the dark below the visible. The body felt it before I read
the calendar. That pull to stay in bed was not weakness.
It was the morning doing what Root mornings do.

Today is May 1. Tag der Arbeit. A public holiday. No work.

I thought about that on the way back. Whether the timing was
coincidence. Whether the stillness, the warmth, the softness of
the air landing on this particular morning had anything to do
with the date on the calendar.

Probably not.

But probably is not the same as certainly.

The Celtic calendar names this Beltane — peak of spring,
fire festival, the veil at its thinnest on the ascending arc.
The fires burned on the hilltops across Ireland and Scotland
for as long as anyone kept records. The cattle driven between
two flames to bless them for the summer ahead.

But this coast has its own fires. Walpurgisnacht — last night,
April 30 into May 1 — bonfires lit across Germany, as they
have been for longer than the name. The Slavic peoples who
held this shore before the settlement — the Obodriten, the
Liutizen — knew the May threshold. Fire on the Baltic edge.
The lagoon holding the reflection.

This morning is what comes after the fire. The ash and the
stillness. The smell of something that burned and cleared.

The full moon rises at 19h.

I kept coming back to the smell the whole walk. Not trying to
name it exactly. Just letting the body register it. Warm air
from the Baltic and the yellow fields. Something old in it.
Something the nose knows before the mind arrives.

The Preacher said: there is a time for everything under the sun.
A time to work. A time to rest. A time when something moves
through that cannot be named.

Maybe the holiday is on the wrong day.

Maybe nature already knew.

Full moon at 19h. The plan is to be outside if the ground agrees.

The morning was for the root. At 17h the moon moves into
Libra — Root becomes Flower. The evening is for the fire.

Day 36 — 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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