The Rhythm of Ascending & Descending

Some times our walking tours have a mysterious character. They can devellop themselves like an antique dance up and down staircases and galleries in an old palace or ruin. We are not marching or doing some nordic thing. We do not make mountain climbing tours. Even if we could call our walks our daily exercise. If you would join us, it would turn out to be some kind of childrens play. Childrens play? Are you serious?


If you walk in a non-purposive, playful way, you do not only move or dance through a landscape. But you also slip between inside and outside imagination versus reality. Winnicott would call that a transitional way of experiencing. Of course, such a space of shifting between creative imagination and meaningfull reality opens up for magic and poetic experience. In a rhythm of ascending and descending. Walking on, staying still, being stuck, stumbling down.


So we would try to make a tour d’horizon around Herstelle’s centre. Down from the Weser and St. Bartholomew, up to the Strauchberg along a steep grassy trail. Perhaps an old cross way. We found many flowers and followed the curving track through the fresh greening fields. From there you could look into the valley. And around.


And there, you see an old shed with many dead foxes on the roof. For a while we saw the foul brown corpses. Oh, those are bunches of moss. And that man over there I saw digging, he is vanished now. And there you have a splendid view on the cloyster building. And have you seen that old oak? Split off from its partner tree, fallen down all over that meadow there.


In this manner we went on, following unknown and know roads, tracks. Amazingly finding the acces to an old meadowtrail. With pittoresque corners and niches. According to an old map it would lead us down into the side valley. But it did not. We got stuck in the bushes, brambles all around. Finally descending through an anonymous wood over the old Jewish Cemetry. Like in a dream. Was this where we wanted to be?

Dark green gravestones, leaning or fallen. Awakening from dream? But at least we had reached the road back to the inhabited world. A strange experience. And there was adventure and discovery and magic in it.Like in a fairy tale. With Oxalis, Dead Foxes, Nuns, Splitting Oaks, Dead End Trails, Mossy Gravestones...