The Cornmill on the Diemel Riverside

For the fifth time this week Dee&I started our morning walk, just before 8 am. The sky was promising pink-grey&blue. After descending and crossing the Weserbridge we traversed the sleepy small town. Here and there you saw people you know already. There was the spry old lady I met at the riverside some days ago. Now pacing to the supermarket for the groceries. The gardener bringing his mother to the Church. The wineseller letting her dog out on the terrace. As we went - Dee a bit faster than I - we talked a bit about the the disfortunate developments in the town’s business life: empty stores, lack of employment for the young. What will the future bring?

This time my companion felt a bit uneasy. I had proposed to cross the town a make the short Diemel-round. Dee felt insecure on the lengthy prospect of this. Could we make it within an hour? To my estimation we would perhaps need an extra five minutes. But my guess was not very helpful. Moreover I am making a hold on places with in imprint of beauty to search for a photographic scene. But if it is not yet clear, that in this kind of walking, “finishing in time” is not an issue, this feels like loitering or strolling. What a waste of time!

Then I try to explain how vital it is not only to exercise attention to breathing from Hara, but also to be mindfully open to the beauty of the surroundings. Not so much as a world of knowable facts, but as an open space wherein the unknown still has to be discovered, unveiled. A world full of colours, natural beings. A world full of history. A world permanently streaming like the panta rhei of the river with it whirlings. Just like us, inhabiting this world of change.

A world full of wonderful windhorses, magical corners, cloud-monsters, mysty tree formations. I like to hang over a small bridge, searching for an unexpected reflection, playing of the light. What could be more attractive on a mild Saturdaymorning hovering between after summer and early autumn. Enjoying all this as intensely as possible while you walk. Nothing else to achieve, please!

Such as that Old Highhouse of the Cornmill, towering over the Diemel-Riverside. A place to stay and paint, or at least making a sketch of it. You want to return for breakfast? Of course, who would not like to smell a fresh espresso at a cafe counter. Or a roll, baked from flower from the Cornmill. But unfortunately, since the Sixties, the Mill is out of function with regard to corn. That is to say: the Corn Mill&Highhouse is out of function, but the Water Mill is not. The old wooden wheel has been transformed into a modern turbine.

Thanks to the Everstreaming Diemelriver it produces up to one fifth of the local electricity-need. That’s another kind of example of what it means “to go with the flow” of history, accepting the given of being out of function, and finally transformation into another source of energy, creative conversion within a Eternal Returning of the everstreaming flow of life, never the same, through permanent change.