Nobody and the New Life

Flower day. Moon in Aquarius from 05h. Mars square Venus at 07:00.

Wake-up feel: 7. Sore from thirty kilometres two days ago, but present.

Yesterday I moved to Achim's Kunstatelier — the art studio beside the large naturalized swimming pond. A different ground to sleep on. Closer to the water.

I walked out at first light. As I stepped outside, a grey heron lifted from the swimming pond and was gone. In the distance, the crow I have heard every morning for eighteen days — silent. Only seagulls, far off, barely there.

The ancient Egyptians called the heron the Bennu — the soul of Ra, the first creature to land on the primordial mound at the moment creation began. It appears at thresholds, before what is new has yet taken form. In the Celtic tradition it stands between worlds — water and land, visible and invisible — belonging fully to neither. It lifts and is gone. That is its nature.

I did not know any of this when it flew. I know it now.

The walk was along the same winding road between the Bodden and the fields, the sun rising on the other side. Eighteen mornings on this road. This morning was the stillest yet.

During the walk, two words arrived: intuition, attunement. Not as ideas — as a question about the difference. Intuition comes from inside. Attunement is correspondence with something already present — the road, the water, the light, the new moon four days out.

I told myself: I am ready to begin a new life.

It did not feel like a declaration. It felt like a recognition. Something that was already true, waiting to be said aloud on a still road with seagulls in the distance.

I also asked myself: which wolf holds the grief of the past — the white or the black?

The old parable asks which wolf you feed. I was asking something different — about nature, not choice. Which one is carrying it? The black wolf because it will not let go, or the white wolf because it has chosen to bear it consciously?

The walk did not answer. I did not force one. The question stays open, which is where it belongs.

In the evening, our community dyad workshop. Two people sitting across from each other. Every five minutes, the question switches sides. The question is always the same:

Tell me who you are.

By the third or fourth round, the easy answers are gone. What remains is not emptiness — it is the ground under all the answers.

I realised two things, arriving together: I am a lot of different things. And I am nobody.

These are not contradictions. The multiplicity and the nobody are the same thing. When you cannot answer who you are, what is left is not absence. It is what was always there before the answers began.

The heron at dawn. The stillness of the road. The question of the wolf. The new moon gathering. The dyad in the evening, and the nobody that remained.

Day 18 held more than it announced.

© 2025–2026 Michel Garand | A Pilgrim's Fitness Plan
Gut Nisdorf, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Baltic Coast, Germany
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