Homeward Bound: Reflections on the Hildegard Way
·
Today the group checks out of Bad Kreuznach and makes its own way to Frankfurt, or wherever comes next. There’s no group activity built into this last day, and that’s intentional — a pilgrimage doesn’t really end at a scheduled event. It ends in the ordinary act of packing a bag and getting on a plane, carrying whatever the last ten days left behind.
Over these ten days, the group walked the actual ground Hildegard walked — Disibodenberg, Sponheim, Rupertsberg, the forests above the Nahe, the streets of Eibingen on her Feast Day. They stood in a monastery ruin that was sacred ground before it was even a monastery. They heard her music performed in the cellars where she once lived. They watched her reliquary carried through the streets in a procession that has outlasted empires.
The path is not long, but the walk is deep. You must not only walk there, you must be prepared to leap.
Hildegard von Bingen
What that leap looks like is different for everyone who takes it. For some it’s a renewed interest in Hildegard’s own writings. For others it’s simply the memory of a particular hillside, or a particular hour of quiet, that stays with them long after the trip itself has faded. Either way, the trail remains — 135 kilometers of it, waymarked and open, whether or not you walked it with us this September.
Hildegard’s 850th anniversary falls in 2029 — three years from now — and we’re already thinking about how to mark it well. If this series made you wish you’d been walking with us, join the waitlist to hear about the next journey first.