5: Last days of Denmark and the power of responsibility

It was the last weeks of June and finally the wind had spread out its cold, wintery arms wide enough to welcome in the warm kisses of the sun to melt into a mellow caress. Like a fat and excited toddler it smothered me with warm hugs all around my face my and naked neck as I flew down the country roads on my bike. The sweet scent of flowers lazy after a day in full sun followed me in with the warm wind; lilacs, nypon roses, and the blossoms of the elderflower.

I was headed back to the small house where I had been staying since becoming officially homeless. The house was next to the house where the pastor lived with his family. Way back when it was all first built hundreds of years ago, the place I was in was probably a barn for grain or live stock. But now it was a perfectly modernized little house with a full kitchen and bathroom; They used it for the parish work like choir practise and coffee making for after church. But it worked perfectly as a place you could actually live in, and so it had become a great little writer’s/ photographer’s retreat for me, while we were waiting for the pastors wife to go into labor.

It was 9 in the evening, it was still as light out as if it were midday, I was in t-shirt and shorts, my old red cap and sun glasses. All around me children were asleep by now and adults getting ready for bed. I looked out to my side at the endless fields of rye and wheat towards the ocean. I could see the bridge connected the two large islands that together with the peninsula of Jylland (and a lot of smaller islands) make up Denmark. The sun reflected off of the waters surface making it look like a large animal with a very special wavy coat of shimmering diamonds. There was a content quiet in the air.

This was my most favorite time of day; When it was almost over, when all that needed to be done had been done, when the getting ready for the next day was too and then sleep. The hours when we lean back a little, and take a moment to just exist. The luxury hours. That is when I most loved to be outside, hiking in the fading sun, or biking like right now. Just being with Mother Earth, in sweet, quiet conversation.

In the fields the almost neon green translucent stalks of rye moved in the warm wind. They looked like thousands upon thousands of tiny ballerinas in bright green tricots waving long green feathers solemnly over their heads as they danced together.

- This, I thought to myself as I was carried by the wind and the flowers and the rye-ballerinas down the country road:

- This I am going to miss when I leave my country behind. 

It was only one week away now. The flight that would take me to my first official stop on my journey. The thought was still as foreign to me as grown men in speedo’s. I couldn’t imagine going on a journey out in the world with no end date and no set itinerary. No money to speak of, no way of knowing if I would have places to sleep and enough to eat along the way, sick, and alone. And yet – it would seem – that was exactly what I was doing. Fear made my insides turn into slabs of granite grinding against each other like in an old-fashioned watermill. Any rye near me now would turn into flour within seconds. Then I remembered:

I am not doing this. It is not about me. It is about God.

I had lost everything so many times in this life time, I had finally come to know what I had always known, but also always tended to forget again; Don’t built your home in the world of things. They aren’t as solid as they look. Do not put your faith in the material. It will all fade and disappear. Or be torn from you in an instant. When you really think about it, essentially the material is the most immaterial of all.

I think that really we all know this to be true. I wonder if maybe that is why some people fight so hard to keep their worldly belongings intact that they begin to think everybody else is just out to get it. That this is what is really happening, when they want the poor to not live right next door, or think the poor are poor because they are lazy, and so they can intentionally bleed the system dry. When they want the refugees of the world to not come to their country because they will just try and take as well – and then they vote for leaders who want the same things. It’s almost like they know that in all of their own wealth, they really have nothing, and they are so deeply afraid that even their nothing will be ripped out of their hands. So really, they do know exactly what I know as well; none of us really have anything, we all have nothing. For all of the sometimes wildly expensive things, some people surround themselves with, they still truly have nothing. And they want to think of anything but the fact that in the end they will loose it all anyway. Because in the end we die. Every single one of us. And on that day – do we die a better death because we are surrounded by material wealth?

I don’t know, I don’t hold the answers. Maybe I too want one or two things that hold importance for me with me on my final day. But I just know that for me, in the end holding on to things would be a dead weight keeping me where I shouldn’t be. Letting go of belongings meant becoming lighter. And becoming lighter helped me remember what was real; That no thing will ever make me happy in itself. It isn’t constant. The only constant is God. And all I wanted was to be more with God. So I let go of the things.

To me in the end all that is real is the Light. The tiny dancing stars that flow through all things. That are in us and around us and in between us. That warm glow that emanate from seemingly behind and through people who stand in truth. The white eternal river flowing in the heavy depths of the Universe, constantly creating, constantly undoing.  

God.

The Divine Mother, nurturer, creator, upholder.

Kali, the Destroyer of worlds.

The Source of All Things.

Allah, Buddha, Vishnu, Baha’u’llah, Ahura Mazda.

All of the angels, all of the devas, all of the tiny helpers, the Trees of Wisdom, the calling of the Wind, the Truth of the Sun, the Knowing of the Mountains.

Us.

That is real.

No thing can define us. No house know who we are.

I, too, love beauty, I can get such a rush of joy from clothes or getting a hair cut or even wearing make-up sometimes. If I had money I would probably love spending on things. Especially living in a society that places such value on them, that we so easily are led to think they do define us. I, too, prefer to look like a normal person, and to be honest being poor and not having had money to buy the newest outfits has been a source of great shame to me.

But I know in my heart of hearts that in the end I am not defined by what I wear. Or by if I weigh too much, what I eat, how much I exercise, where I live, what my education is, if I have one at all, what books I read, what the color of my skin is, what I call my God. In the end I know I am God, that we all are, and that none of us are. Is that heresy to you? Please forgive me if this sounds judgmental, that is not my intention at all: If calling all of us God sounds like blasphemy to you, then I can’t help thinking that maybe you have simply not accepted (yet?) that you are the only one responsible for your own world. I can’t help think that maybe you would really like to not be the one to bear the burdens of both all the good and all the bad. It needs to go somewhere else. Maybe you even need to have someone to blame who is not yourself for all the struggles of you life, and to you God fits that bill. That’s ok. To each their own. Funny thing is you could say, I do the same thing; I know in the end I control nothing. But. There is a difference between knowing I am not in control – and refusing to take responsibility. Mea culpa, the Catholics say. That is truth to me. Not that we are sinners, I don’t subscribe to the ideas of sin and guilt. But that we are responsible. All of the trauma we have experienced in our lives, all of the hurt, but also all of the wonder – it is nobody’s fault. And nobody is a sinner, not even yourself. But. It is somebody’s responsibility. And the only one responsible for changing your world is yourself.

Taking on responsibility is hard, because it means it is nobody else’s job to change your world. No one will come and save you. You have to do the work yourself. That is exactly where the freedom lies as well.

Remember in the Bible the story of how Jesus saved the paralyzed man? The man was so sick he couldn’t even get up from his bed on the ground outside of the house Jesus was headed to. So as a last ditch effort to save him self, the man reached out to touch the hem of Jesus’ robe. People were mortified, it was probably disrespectful that the man didn’t get up and greet the great prophet as you were supposed to. And he even touched him, even if it was only the robe. How could he? But how could he not, he was desperate. Jesus of course was unfazed. But he didn’t put his hands on the sick man, or order food or water brought to him or anything else you might expect you would do in order to try and help someone in trouble. All Jesus did was say one sentence. The most powerful sentence:

-       Pick up your bed and walk.

And the man did. He was healed. He could walk. But the point was not the walking. The point was the bed. Of course it wasn’t a thousand dollar fancy bed with a thick mattress that you would find in bedrooms today. It was probably nothing but at most a simple cot bed. Maybe just a robe the man had placed to shield him from the dust of the road. That wasn’t the point either, though. The bed was a symbol. It was all the baggage the man carried. Literally – but even more so figuratively. Jesus was telling him to finally take it on, his ‘baggage’. The bed was his story. All he had lived through. All that defined him. That he finally stopped lying passively on it, consumed by his pain and hurt, and instead took it on, lifted it up, and carried it – that was the miracle. He took his baggage on. He stopped waiting for anyone else to come rescue him. He stood up, he lifted it up – and he discovered he had not only the ability to do so after thinking he was weak, but he had the strength as well.

To stand, lift – and walk.

All he needed was to be reminded of the fact that he had everything inside of him already. Not just the pain, but the strength to deal with it as well. He just needed to own it. That is the power of taking responsibility for carrying your own baggage, that is the strength of looking straight at your worst pain and knowing it is there, but that it does not define you. Then you can deal with it from a place of honesty and truth. That is the miracle. Jesus didn’t do anything. He just pointed to the fact, that there was no separation between him and the paralyzed man. The man is all of us when we doubt, Jesus is all of us when we know, Jesus is in us, the paralyzed man as well, and when we know that, we have room for both of them, and room for all of us, because we know we are all just glimmers from the same source, and everything dissolves and all that is left is the Light.

I knew this to be true. Now was the time to live it as well.

As I pulled up my bike and leaned it towards the yellow brick wall of the house I had been staying in these past three weeks, I stopped for a second. The wind carried the scent of flowers with it here as well, there was elderflower blossoms and nypon roses in the hedges lining the road up to the pastor’s house. The family was about to become a child larger, there were three adult and four children plus one in the in between. One day all of those five children and maybe future siblings would have had their hands on the rope swing in the middle of the court yard, swinging under the canopy of green.

I looked at the pastor’s house, they were all asleep now, all the windows were dark. Soon the night would have settled over all of the land, every single stalk of rye indistinguishable under the heavy blanket of night.

- Not bad for a pilgrimage’s beginning, but still. This I will miss; blowing down country roads on my bike in a warm night filled with the scent of flowers and the street lined with bright red poppies. The freedom, being outside, feeling the wind on my naked skin. This I will definitely miss, I thought to myself as I unlocked the door to the small house.

And then the question emerged:

- But what will come in it’s place?

I realized I couldn’t even picture what could be waiting for me when I left this country behind. I had no idea. I had hopes for a few things. Wild dreams for others. But having a clear notion of what would be meeting me along the road? Nope, not even an inkling.

I had been poor for so long, I actually didn’t really know what people did, when they didn’t just move through everyday life. I had been on vacation once, a long weekend in London. It was a year since I had even allowed myself a night at the movies. And for me being deprived of the things people normally fill their days with had absolutely helped me realize a different kind of existence was even possible; the one where the callings from the depth of the soul mattered.

But now figuring out what I would really enjoy doing on this journey was a priority, I realized. Because deprivation can also be a form of holding yourself back. It's the classic lutheran idea of life needing to be hard in order to be acceptable. That you had to grind your teeth hard, keep your head down and work till you dropped. Not sing. Not dance. Not be (too) happy. But wasn't that just one opinion? Who had decided those were the rules we all had to live by? I decided, I was done. Or that I would work hard on being done anyway. I might not be rich and I might not have money for the movies. But I was definitely allowed to begin figure out what made my soul sing. 
From the beginning I had known that part of this journey for me was to find my way inside to myself to better find my way in the world outside of me. What is below reflects what is above. What is outside reflects was is inside. I wanted to go inside, and listen. Heal. Find the quiet place. To do that I felt called to make this journey. Something was pulling at me. I needed to go. To find my own true voice by honoring this calling - that WAS the way.

Right now I couldn’t even say what I would enjoy doing if I had a chance to pick all for myself, I was so clueless. Riding my bike, yes, that was one thing. So being outside. Close to nature. Check. I needed to make a list. List are always the answer.

Figuring out what would make me happy, what I would enjoy doing, was definitely high up on my pilgrim to do list.

As the wind died down a little, I went inside to sleep like the rest of the people of the village in the quiet of a summer’s night in the countryside of Denmark.