The Cradle

Wake-up feel: 8.

Two weeks away — a workshop, a kind of mission, the attention on other things. No pages came from there.

This morning I woke glad to be back in my own place. A cradle, straddled by two mountainsides. Held in the hands of the mountains.

Up while it was still dark — the dark holds longer now, the equinox close. Some time at the screen. A lot of rain in the night. Then the light came, and the rain had stopped. Up and out.

I went up talking with my beloved daughter — my guiding star — on the phone, and inwardly too. The stream in the gorge, full of the night's rain — I heard it, and acknowledged its strength. More gentle than loud. The mountain path seemed to be waiting. A cheerful bird or two came to greet me.

Over the last days of the workshop a thought kept surfacing, once in a while: the victim. Was I considering myself one — a victim of my own doing? Why does everyone at war feel themselves the victim? Rising above it is not something I can think my way to. The pathway asks for listening — to what nature shows of it, and to how she shows it. The stars, the moon, the sun each have their say. The work is to tell their voices from my own.

In the days away I woke late in the night, or before the dawn. Before the light came — the stars. In six directions a bright star still stood at the tip of the mountain horizon. Stars keeping watch over us in the sacred Carpathians — mountains that armies and empires have crossed and claimed, one after another, down to this day. The Hutsuls — their culture, their sense of place — have outlasted every one of them. I do not know what they called themselves through all of that. I doubt it was victim. They still tell of Dovbush here — the one who went up into these mountains rather than bow.

I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help — so the singer in the old book, and he was not the first to go up when trouble came. In the old houses of these mountains the cradle hung from the great beam, and into that beam they cut a sign — six petals in a circle, the sun's mark some say, the thunderer's say others — so that what slept beneath it was kept. Six stars at six points of the horizon, and a valley slung between two mountainsides. The newer count kept the birth of the Mother of God thirteen days ago, while I was away; the older count keeps it today — a child in a cradle, the second Mary of the harvest, the door of autumn. Today the fruit, say those who set the moon against seed and soil through lifetimes, and over these ridges the moon climbs and fills, five nights from full: what is picked now, the old ones say, holds its juice and keeps.

The path had waited.

Day 93
Verkhovyna, Carpathian Mountains, Ukraine
© 2026 Michel Garand | A Pilgrim's Journey | CC BY-SA 4.0
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