thomas m wilson

Last week I was riding a bike through the forests and lakes of the countryside outside the small village of Steinhagen.  The fields of wheat stood tall and thick and ready to harvest, and were bounded by forests of oak, heavy with clambering wreaths of ivy.  A lowering sky of grey but lambent cloud hinted at rain to come, but a deep rural calm lay over everything. As my bikes wheels rolled along empty laneways and paths, I felt like I was deep in the heart of Europe.  Small German red brick farm houses with steeply pitched roofs and half timbered walls peaked out of the wheat or corn fields.  Occasional horses munched beside ancient stables.  Hardly a soul was seen.  It reminded me of a painting by Samuel Palmer, fields pregnant with significance, even if you weren’t sure what kind of significance it was. 

Then over the weekend I walked around Heidelberg.  The old city sits in a wooded and green valley of the hills that create the eastern side of a wide flat river basin through which the Rhine river runs north away from the Alps, far to the south.  In this wooded valley Heidelberg lays along the river. Where Heidelberg’s old town is located at the eastern end of the city the slopes of the valley out of which the River Necker flows (a tributary of the Rhine), become very steep.  The city can’t expand into modern suburbs here as there is no space, there are only old buildings, wooded slopes and the quietly rolling River Neckar.  Yes there are plenty of tourists on the old bridge, but many of the streets are still quiet with the occasional bicycle or passing university student.  Over tourism isn’t overwhelming here. The castle on the hill has been a partial ruin for most of the past two centuries, and was admired for its picturesque location high above the city and nestled among chestnut and oak trees by Mark Twain, J. M. W. Turner and other romantic visitors, painters and poets throughout the nineteenth century.  Walking up the hill to this castle I was reminded of walking up the hill to the Alhambra: a steep and heart quickening stride up a cobbled lane through deep green trees to an ancient fortress high up above you.  The red sandstone that the castle of the castle’s walls makes for an unusual sight.  And from the windows, arches and terraces of the castle you look down and over the River Neckar, over the arches of the old bridge crossing it, to the other side of the thickly wooded valley, with a few nineteenth and eighteenth century mansions lining its further bank.  Above the mansions is a line through the woods, and that is the Philosophenweg (the Philosopher’s Path), along which generations of university professors and philosophers have walked, cogitating loftily high above the waters and the city. 

The city’s university library is another building in red sandstone.  Walking through its front entrance is a lesson in dignity, gravitas and beauty.  If only all library’s imparted such lessons in stone to those passing through their portals.  (I should know – often they don’t!)  This is a university library that tells its students that you are in an important place, a hallowed place.  Heidelberg University, incidentally, was the model for the modern research university in the United States, first kicked off by John Hopkins in the late nineteenth century at its founding in the 1870s.  Earlier in the day I had entered the Jesuit Church of Heidelberg.  I have previously had little interest in baroque Catholic German church architecture – generally I find it overly artificial and it leaves me cold.  However this church, with its tall white nave and glass crystal chandeliers, and small touches of green and cold colour at the top of the capitals of the pilasters on the nave’s piers, did touch me.  The organ was playing beautiful descending notes, and the place was illuminated by a pure light everywhere, with only a small handful of worshipper and tourists wandering through.   

Tomorrow I leave Germany, but I’m glad to have come if only for a few days.

What could be better than an adventure exploring Meteora in north-central Greece by myself? Arriving here I started walking up a dirt trail by myself – puddles here and there after earlier heavy rain.  And then I looked up and caught and with an intake of breath saw the monastery far, far above on the granite face of the mountain hundreds of metres up, appearing in a parting of the green tree tops.  I walked on up winding switch back cobbled paths through a fairy green forest, now and then another monastery would appear from another angle, through a glow of mist, and float high above the canopy.  I couldn’t believe it – I was alone, just accompanied by bird song, and I realised I had come to one of the great places of this world, up there with Petra and Sigiriya.  As I strode down the path I stopped to look at an ancient and thickly trunked plane tree dancing with wildly outstretched branches in a forest grove.  Stillness and magic.  I walked on, church bells assailed my ears from high above somewhere.  This walk was the closest I have ever come to feeling like I was a hero in a quest story – a hero to whom significant and mystical events and places would unfold in sequence. Surely I was ascending towards some kind of meaningful culmination, a sacred place on top of the world. 

The next morning I woke early and showered and breakfasted and walked out into the world of stone and stillness and birdsong and water and green leaves.  I walked through the little village Kasakri and into a congregation of huge grey sandstone monoliths through which the frail path I was following wound.  Many places in the world – most places in the world – are experienced by looking around one’s self horizontally, more or less.  Here one had to look vertically, as high above were waterfalls, towering walls of stone, boulders tossed by Titans, hanging monasteries in the air.  Water glittered on curving sandstone flanks in rivulets here and there.  Sweet and gentle birdsong bounced off sheer faces in the breathless air.  The path rose and swerved through bushes, under ledges, over creeks, down abruptly.  I came upon a growing light as I walked through one tunnel of dim green undergrowth, more light up ahead.  Then my head broached the end of the tunnel of green, and I found myself standing at the top of the path dropping down into a trickling crevice onto the earth a couple of metres below.  I could see out into the distance.  The forest was green and quiet in the a wide valley before me, and high up on the other side of the valley was a monastery, standing ethereally on a towering pillar of stone, seeming to float above the forest.  Again I felt as if I was a hero in a medieval quest story.  Strange meetings, portentous symbols in trees and stones, the onwards journey through a world soaked in meaning.  As I walked I felt like I was doing exactly what I should be doing with my life.  I was engaged and stimulated, by movement, by beauty, by mystery, by exploration.  I walked up a ravine and marvelled at how green these leaves were, be they oak or beech or whichever other species I was seeing.  I walked fast and realized that this ‘walk’ was sometimes a clamber – all the better. Again and again I broached clearings and saw towering monasteries.   I saw not a soul on the path all morning. 

Later that afternoon I and a friend went up into a monastery and found long queues of tourists, talking and laughing in German and French and Russian and Greek.  A drone passing overhead.   Cars and buses in the carpark.  The magic evaporated.  But it amazed me that all of this crowd (and there were lots of people) were not interested in the paths through the forests of Meteora. It seems most people in this world cluster to physical ease and spectacle without challenge.  Thankfully that leaves the paths clear for those who prefer to walk there.   So many of the sacred places of this world are suffering from overtourism, but the problem is easy to avoid in Meteroa in 2023. 

So that morning was one of the best walks of my life.  Spots in time to treasure in the memory. 

On one of my last days at Kalikalos I went down to Ntamouchari one afternoon and swam in the clear blue water. Then I went and found a table in Uncle Stergios’s taverna in the rocky harbour and ordered an orange cake. The small rocky bay is so perfectly proportioned and the human settlement that sits along its shore is so small scale and intimately fitted to its setting that one feels genuinely pleased to see such an accord between nature and culture.

My final afternoon I walked to Banika beach, and was taken at the beauty of the wild river splashing its way into the Aegean on a rocky beach, surrounded by vast sentinel like stone towers, thronged by drippingly, deliciously green foliage.  A snake sidled across my path, and a buzzard swayed through the heavens a few minutes later.  That evening I DJed an hour long set of uplifting deep ambient house music in the ‘long room’, a beautiful dance space on a long rectangular wooden platform that looks out on two sides into the trunks of a forest of chestnut trees with the ground falling away them into a valley below.  Henrik Schwarz ‘Please leave my head alone’ was a track, for example, with beautiful piano notes that people reacted really well to.  You could hear the bird song from the forest between the spacious beats so that the music seemed to be open to the spirit of the place, rather than ignoring it or over riding it entirely. I had also set up a poetry sharing circle for the Thursday morning before I left which went really well – I had read Auden’s Yeats poem and Yeats’ Byzantium poem for example. Sharing such poems reminded me of what poetry can be: it is one of the few things you could bring to the great events of this life such as a wedding or a funeral.  My secular church: poetry. 

I recommend you go to Kalikalos – you will all of a sudden have a human community, movement, sunlight, the sea, fresh food from the garden three times a day, and an amazing landscape around you.