The Call from the Forest

Tuesday, April 14, 2026. Gut Nisdorf, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Day 19.

Wake-up feel: 7.

Up at 05:33. Exercises done. Then a walk — but not the usual road. This morning I chose a different way. Through the village of Nisdorf to its edge, then south-southeast along a road that runs relatively straight, fields and forest on one side, the Bodden in the distance on the other. If the sky had been clear and the sun visible, it would have been rising at my back.

It was cloudy. The sun stayed hidden. I walked with my back to where it was anyway.

The crow was silent again. Nineteen days — it has been the metronome of this place, the one constant sound — and now, two mornings in a row, nothing. What the crow is not saying has become its own kind of presence.

Moving through the village in the early light of the day, the birds were loud. Not one species — many, all at once, the full waking register of the place announcing the day to itself. There is a difference between the crow and this. The crow is a single voice. This was the village speaking.

I left the last houses behind and continued south.

At a certain point on the road, a roebuck stepped into my path. The proper word matters here — not "male deer" but roebuck, Rehbock in the language of this land. He was still. He looked at me. I stopped and looked back.

Eye contact with a wild animal at dawn is not incidental. It is a threshold encounter — two beings, each on their own terms, neither subordinate. The roebuck did not flee. He assessed. Then he turned and moved into the forest — not in panic but in decision.

I kept walking.

The peoples who lived on this Baltic coast before any written record tracked the deer with the same attention they brought to the moon and the stars. In the Nordic Bronze Age rock carvings left across this region, the stag appears repeatedly — not as prey but as emissary, as the animal that moves between the visible world and the one behind it. The Celts named this threshold quality in the figure of Cernunnos, the antlered lord of wild things, who stands at the border between the human world and the forest's interior. The roebuck in this tradition is not frightened off — it is the landscape itself turning to look at you. The question is whether you are present enough to hold the gaze.

This coast has carried that knowledge for five thousand years. The Funnelbeaker tomb-builders, the Nordic Bronze Age peoples who oriented their sacred practices to light and water, the Rani whose world-centre stood on Rügen, not far to the northeast but not visible from this shore without elevation — all of them understood the forest edge as a boundary where ordinary time becomes permeable. The roebuck lives at that edge. He is its sentinel.

On the way back, I heard him. From inside the tree line — a call. Territorial, or a mating call, I cannot say which with certainty. What I can say: it came after I had already passed. He had let me move through his ground. Now, from his own territory, he was naming what had just occurred. Not a warning to stop. A marking of the threshold crossed.

Nobody passes through unchallenged. Even when the acknowledgment comes after the fact.

The days are getting longer and slower. I am rising later, going to bed later. The rhythm is shifting — not breaking, but loosening.

And the thoughts. They have been moving, gradually, from past toward present. Not arrived yet. Still in transit. Most of the day I find myself with Susi, with Julika, with Müllrose, with the people I thought of as my family for fifteen years. The faces I did not say goodbye to.

One face in particular. Susi's aunt — the relative she and I respected and honoured most, I did not say goodbye to her when I left. I have been carrying that incompletion for nineteen days without naming it clearly. It has a weight. Not crushing — specific. The weight of something left undone that still has a form.

The Stomach — Phase 3's organ in TCM — holds what has not yet been digested. Not just food. Everything that has come in and not yet been fully processed. Grief is on that list. So are faces. So are goodbyes that were never said.

The body does not distinguish. It holds it all.

Three days to the New Moon. Something is still gathering — I wrote that in the anchor this morning and I still do not know what it is. The New Moon on April 17 will be in Aries. A beginning inside a threshold. The body knows this shape even when the mind cannot read it yet.

For now: a new road. A deer that called back from the forest. The days slowing down enough to hold what they need to hold.

The face of Susi's aunt — still there, still waiting for its proper ending.

That will come, in its own time, in its own form.

Biodynamic — April 14: Flower day. Moon enters Capricorn 04:17. Ascending lunar node 02h. Three days to New Moon.

Day 19. Wake-up feel: 7.

Gut Nisdorf, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Baltic Coast, Germany.
Phase 3 — Movement — Stomach — Emerald — Navratri / Durga.

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

Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0)

This document was developed with assistance from Claude (Anthropic PBC). All strategic decisions, philosophical positions, and personal commitments are those of the author.

Contact: stewardship@ubec.network

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