Carlsheaven unveiled

Today another blessed start of the day took me down to the riverside, where the swans and ducks were happy to snap some bread crumbs. No, “it really wasn’t only about you (or me)”...
There I was, breathing attentively standing on the humid, muddy border. And it felt as if I was back on that green river meadow in the Ardennes. More than sixty years ago.

For a couple of summers I was send to spend my holidays with a Belgian family. Camping rather wildly along that lovely meandering river La Semois near the French border. And that was an unforgettable kind of thrilling outward bound life, I knew only vaguely from my saturday boy-scout experience.

At dawn you would leave your straw mattrass in a ‘big’ old army tent. Take a bath in the river if you wanted to wash. First we would paddle upstream, to fetch a bucket of fresh water of the Little Brook, Le Petit Ruisseau. After mooring the kayak back at the camping site, there was breakfast in a small caravan.

It smelled freshly baked bread with farmers butter, croissants, and on top of the grounded coffee the boiling fresh water - le café-filtre - unknown to a dutch boy under ten. You could mix those odours with the smell of freshly mowed grass, the reed...the stuffiness of the old tent..

Great & very happy times of freedom and adventure in the big forests all around there, exploring into the deeply hidden woodcamps of the Belgian Secret Army, The Maquis, still ready for emergency use. I had to understand and learn to speak French on the spot. And I was an enthousiast, quick learner. Climbing and wandering deep into unknown forests, canoeing on the swiftly floating river..

And now here again, in our sweet Bad Karlshafen, on the river camping meadow...I could lay down forever on my back - if only the grass hadn’t been so wet - sing and laugh into the sky, feeling connected with this never ending original stream of energy:

This connectedness implies living poetically, or “ dwelling” would be a better expression. “Dichterisch Wohnet der Mensch”, said Hölderlin: “Poetically mankind is dwelling”. So, from within this living experience I found my “Carlsheaven Unveiled” - only one Mysty-Diemel-Dragon crawling up to its mouth. And after that a riverside-memory that made me longing for fresh grounded coffee, heavy farmers bread. And later on, of writing you this short letter from our small Oaktree-Hut.