Day 5. Pine cones and floor heating

There it was. Early this morning. After a cold sneaky stay in somebody elses caravan awning. The big question. Why? It drives me crazy at times. I try to stay away from it but it always comes back. Why am I doing this?
I was happy I took my gloves. An early Sunday morning. When I sleep in 'unusual' places I always make sure I am gone when the sun starts to rise.
I walked through woods again. I thought about the 'why'. But I know it doesn't make sense to try to answer it. I know the answer isn't in my head. It is in my feet. The walk is the answer. It is the question and the answer at the same time. But I haven't walked far enough to really know it.

I aimed for a campsite. I walked through woods again. I collected dry pine cones. Birch bark. Things that burn well. I hadn't used my woodstove yet. It was windy. I mentally prepared for a cold night.

While walking I realised I have to learn all the things I learned last year as if I never knew them. I forgot. I forgot how much time everything costs when you are living outside. How organised you have to be on the one hand (always put all your things in a fixed place) and how flexible on the other hand. A daily routine doesn't work. Not when you're on your own, not when you don't know where exactly you'll end up and what the weather will be like. There is no use to plan to start your day with yoga exercises and finish them by brushing your teeth. To eat your breakfast in the morning and your diner at night. To write a blog every evening and embroider your suit during the day. You do things when the circumstances are right. You do yoga after you made sure you left your illegal sleeping place and walked until the sun is strong enough to keep you warm during your exercises. You might eat your diner at lunch time. You write your blog when you pass a cafe with free wifi. You forget about your daily shower. If there is a tap somewhere, drink water. If there is a toilet, use it. Carry as little food as possible. It always shows up at the right moment, there will be coffee when you really want it, fruit trees when you need your vitamines, a shop when you were getting worried about your empty stomack. Although when you count on it too much it might not happen. But then something else might.

Things never go the way you expect them to go. That is what I like most about doing this.

So I arrived at the campsite with my pockets filled with pine cones. The owner of the campsite showed me where to put my tent. The field was empty apart from one mobile home. She told me there was a space I could use if it was too cold outside. She pointed at a door in the far distance. "The showers are there" she said, "and I will open the shed for you".

I pitched my tent. I walked to the shed.
I opened the door.
I took my first shower since I left Amsterdam. A long one. The water was hot.
The shed wasn't a shed really. It looked more like a 4 star conference room in a hotel. It had floor heating, sockets everywhere to power my equipment, a kitchen corner with a watercooker. Stylish wooden benches with soft pillows, leather chairs, big windows opening to a garden with three donkeys.

I found a small bottle of wine in my bag. Some cheese from Amsterdam. I played music on my Ipad.

Happiness.

Day 4. The wild salad bar and fancy china

I woke up with the sound of swan wings.
It was foggy outside.
27 kilometer to go.

I came up with an idea. But I wouldn't be surprised if somebody else already did it. I thought about it when I walked through the wood and illegally picked edible weeds. I had seen the sign, I've seen it often but it doesn't make any sense to me. I could be fined if they would catch me taking some chickweed with me but of course I could always eat the proof before they arrest me. Most people don't eat things straight out of nature anyway. And if you do it with care, there's no harm done to any species.
Anyway.
My idea is titled "the wild salad bar" and it is a movable salad bar, built on a small cart like the one I am using now. I can travel around with it, picking wild edible plants and turning them into tasty, healthy salads, very different from the ones (most of) you know. I could turn them into teas as well. Wild salad and wild tea. Maybe fruit salads too.

It was Saturday today and sunny. Everybody was outside for a walk or a bikeride. Everybody wanted to talk to me. It was nice, somewhat exhausting though. I still have to get used to having turned into a 'public figure'. I had an interesting talk with a woman from Afghanistan about possibilities for women in her country to do things the way I was doing them. A small group of walkers accompanied me for a few minutes to ask questions about my walk. An elderly man couldn't get enough of my story, he told me the other day another funny person passed his house with a strange vehicle.
This walking trip is defenitely serious business but I don't mind being funny.

People scanned my QR code. It worked well.

Later on I bumped into a pig wandering through the woods looking for acorns. I found the perfect hut to spend the night in but it was too early to call it a day. I bought some fruit from a table at the side of the road outside somebodies house. I love it when people do that. In the morning I had passed a house where they were selling beautiful tea cups and saucers. I had been tempted. Imagined myself at the end of the day building a small fire, boiling water, throw some fresh leaves in the pot and then pour it into the fine china, sit down in my three-piece suit and drink it while thinking over the day.

At the end of the day I found a deserted campsite. Empty caravans but the toilet building was open. Pity I didn't have a coin for hot water but showers are overrated anyway.

Day 3. The third first day.

I left. I practised leaving for two days. I dealt with the mountain of things. I wore my hiking boots to the corner store. I drove the walking cart around the block. And then I left for real. I wasn't ready but are you ever? I don't think I've ever been ready to leave but I haven't ever been ready to stay either. Being inbetween always.

I walked through Amsterdam. Like I have done so many times. But I saw it with different eyes. I never realised how many edible wild greens there are in the Vondelpark. I walked through the P.C. Hooftstaat, smiling. Amsterdam's most fancy shopping street, glitter and gold. The jet set buys their  outfits here. I carried my house behind me along the sidewalk.

I wondered what on earth I was doing. Again. And then there was this smell. I suddenly felt at ease, I felt it all made sense. Freshly cut grass. The smell of spring.

Amsterdam. Lovely city. You only really realise the value of things when you let them go.

I walked to the outskirts of the city. I ate the cookies a friend baked for me. I felt the first blister. I walked on. I picked sheperds purse and ate the seeds. I found a campsite next to a highway. It almost sounded like the ocean.

First night in my tiny tent. The coffin, as my friends call it. It is cold outside. But the sky is clear. I can see the moon. I can smell the trees.

I' m tired. No highway will keep me awake. Sleep.

"Great things always begin with sleep. Great things always begin by the thinnest edge."

(Christian Bobin, The Very Lowly)

Day 2. Mountains

I didn’t plan my route, I didn’t even know where exactly I was going until today. The only mountains I climbed lately were the piles of things that had to be done before I could leave. We all know these mountains well. Like real mountains, they sort of stay the same size always. They don’t really get smaller, they erode a bit, they appear to get higher at times, they change through the seasons but they remain located at the centre of the world, of your life, always.

I bought new shoes before I left.

In the shop they asked me what the terrain would be like, where I was going to walk. I told them I wasn’t sure. But I suspected there would be a lot of tarmac and especially in the beginning quite flat areas, getting hillier in Germany and finally, in the last part, in Austria, the real mountains.

I love mountains.

They advised me to get a light shoe with a flexible sole. I tried them on. I walked around. I thought of tarmac and the Dutch countryside. I thought of the Ruhr district, of well paved roads. But I couldn’t get the mountains out of my head.

Most of the light flexible A/B category shoes looked beautiful. I didn’t trust those shoes. Shiny see through soles, soft blueish leather, fancy details.

Once, when I lived a temporary solitary life at the most Western part of Europe, on an Irish island, I stayed in a pink house located opposite a mountain. In the late afternoon I would sit at my desk and stare at the mountain. Sitting still while the mountain was moving. Changing. Turning from grey to brown to orange to black to golden. Being covered in clouds or impressively naked. Being threatening or beautiful or comforting. Sometimes everything at the same time.

During the day I was biking around the island. On my bike, I felt like a mountain. Everything changing around me, I myself changing colours and texture, my surface becoming wet or shiny or dusty. The island staring at me. The mountains nodding when I wasn’t looking.

I tried to think like a mountain. I bought a pair of shoes. And today, when I was wearing them, I received an e-mail from Captain Klaus, the Nomadic Village mayor, announcing this year's location of the village. My destination is at the end of a steep climb. It is on top of a place called “Hohe Wand”, “High Wall”.

For now I am still below sea level. But the mountain in my head doesn’t mind. And my feet don't either. They are already imagining walking mountains.

Here's my final destination: http://nomadic.cd/2014/location/ 

(Today's story is for Danielle Besten. It is her birthday.)

day 1. leaving

Today was an exercise in leaving.

I left many times and returned to leave again.

I still haven’t mastered it.

I know it is easy.

Not too long ago I even wrote it was easy,

I wrote it is the easiest thing you can do.

Pack your things

open your door

close it behind you

walk.

But the easiest things are the hardest.

I thought of a poem a friend gave me last year when I walked to France and he walked with me one day. It is by Derek Walcott.


Love after love

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
 

(today's story is for Albert van Veenendaal, I am leaving the house he will be staying in)

QR

Some people would rather have wings but we don’t, we have feet. We were born to walk. Scientists say that walking gave us our brain capacity, walking turned us into the human beings we are. Walking made it possible for us to have the desire to fly and to come up with ways to turn our dreams into reality.

Walking made us fly. We can go anywhere. Still the easier it becomes to move through this world, the more disconnected we seem to get from it. We have to land again. Get close to the things. Be part of the world. Walking teaches us where we are, who we are. A slow speed makes our brain work fast. Makes us see more. Be more. And best of all: walking makes time disappear.

(from my article "A Soft Armour", published at the Dark Mountain Project website: http://dark-mountain.net/blog/a-soft-armour/ )