What the Ground Knows

Day 12 began at the Bodden shore before sunrise. Five wild boar — big ones — foraging at the water's edge. Unhurried. No anxiety about foraging. Just appetite and direction. I stood and watched until the light changed.

I did not know then that the day would end in a beech forest, trying to grasp the weight of my own loneliness.

The boar are not incidental to this landscape. In the Nordic Bronze Age, the boar was a solar animal — connected to Freyr, the god most directly associated with this coast, with fertility, harvest, and the soil. Warriors wore boar imagery as protection. In the Slavic tradition of the Rani — whose sacred centre at Cape Arkona on Rügen lies just to the northeast, beyond the horizon from this coast — the boar moved between worlds. Sacred to Veles, lord of the underworld, of soil, of what is hidden beneath the surface. The boar rooted in the ground. It fed on what was buried.

Five of them, at the threshold between land and water, at first light.

The ground was speaking in a language it has been speaking for five thousand years. I was just present enough to hear it.

In the afternoon I rode along the Bodden and turned into the beech forest nearby. I needed to be among trees. I needed the silence that is not empty — the silence that holds.

The beech is the tree this landscape has always used for exactly this. The Germanic word for letters of the alphabet — Buchstaben — means beech-staves. The beech was where the unspeakable found form. Where wishes were carved because there was no other way to say them. The Rani worshipped in holy groves as much as in temples — the grove at the edge of the field was continuous with the sacred centre at Arkona. The beech forest was associated with Nav — the Slavic realm of the ancestors, of what has passed but not dissolved. Not a frightening place. A necessary one. Where the living went to sit with what they had lost.

I rode in carrying loneliness. The forest gave me silence, birds singing, and more loneliness.

That is what forests do. They do not take it away. They make space for it to be what it is.

There is a word for what happened today — twice, without planning. In the morning with the boar. In the afternoon with the beech trees. The word is attunement. Not a practice I applied. A quality that arrived when the constructing mind was quiet enough to stop generating noise. The boar did not come to me. I simply stopped moving long enough to be in the same field as them. The forest did not offer answers. I simply sat inside it without asking for any.

Attunement is what the body does when it stops performing and starts receiving. Today the landscape was transmitting clearly. The question is always the same: is the instrument quiet enough to hear it?

This morning, yes. This afternoon, yes. Both times the message was the same thing, in a different register: you are here. That is enough.

I am trying to define whether what I am carrying is sadness or loneliness. I cannot. They live close together. The heart knows — the mind can label it later, or not at all.

What I know: I have not been in a state this quiet — this stripped of the doing — for years. The pilgrimage is working. That is not comfortable. Release, it turns out, does not always feel like relief. Sometimes it feels like vertigo. Like the ground opening to receive something you did not know you were still holding.

Phase 2. Large Intestine. What goes when the holding stops.

The boar at dawn, rooting at the threshold. The beech forest in the afternoon, holding the silence. The same landscape, the same conversation, the same question this ground has been asking for five thousand years.

What does the body carry that the doing has kept hidden?

Today: this.

A Pilgrim's Fitness Plan — Gut Nisdorf 2026
Gut Nisdorf, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern — April 2026
CC BY-SA 4.0 — Michel Garand