Pilgrimage along the Ammer, Germany
from Martina Kansy and Christian Sanden
This was a four day walk for Mother Water who connects us all in the circle of life. The reflections are a co-creation weaving my and Christian´s impressions together
I got to know the Ammer two months ago. Immediately I fell in love with her, like a sister she listens to me as I listen to her. I knew she can teach me. There was a deep calling to visit her again. The intention:
to listen, to witness, to learn, to pray.
Starting every day in ceremony, dedicating every day to life itself, to healing, to peace, to the Beauty Way, as many indigenous traditions name the living in right relationship with the Earth.
One day we visit the two springs of the Ammer. I am touched by the innocence and purity of the water. Abundance, the pure love of Mother Earth, life, that she is gifting to us in every moment. Not taken by humans but gifted by our Mother. My prayers are prayers for the water, for the Ammer and all watersheds, that they may stay unharmed, healthy and in their beauty, knowing that the challenges, obstacles and pollutions will start soon downstream. Like a prayer for a new born child to stay safe and find its way through life in beauty and supported when needed.
Christian names in prayer the tenderness of the children in our world and that they may be sheltered… And as all life starts from the dark womb of the mother ……one of the sources arises as a dark blue pond, seemingly from her deepest depth, finding us dance a dance-meditation, that connects Earth and Sky, the Four Directions and our heart. We dance it in opposite directions sending the harmony of Yin and Yang to her path. The other spring originating in a forest called “Schattenwald”, i.e. “shadow forest”, finds us praying for peace that may spring from our individual and collective shadows. And as she flows, digging a deep gorge into the ground over the millennia, she accompanies a path of pilgrimage to sacred places aligned along her banks. All dedicated to the goddess in the robe of Virgin Mary.
Sending my prayers downstream I get aware of the many countries, landscapes, people and the war in the Ukraine, that she will pass with her waters. As the waters of the Ammer flow into the Donau, i.e. Danube, who takes her way through Germany, Austria, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, the Republic of Moldavia and Ukraine into the Black Sea, one of the hotspots of the war between Russia and Ukraine. And a day later we meet three Ukrainian grandmothers in “the middle of nowhere”. They seem to try to get familiar with the plants of the region where they landed as refugees of this war. I am deeply touched to watch them and their strength. How they arrive in a country of strangers and make contact with the Earth herself right there. We start a short conversation with them, they understand nearly no German or English, but eyes and heartlanguage meet. In the next lunch break our conversation turns to the question, how we would feel if our children would be sent into a war like this. The water of the Ammer seems to connect us immediately with the stories of the people downstream. It is all one, no them and us…..feeling their and our pain and bewilderment about the aggression and cruelty in the world against humans as well as against Mother Earth and all her beings.
And like the Ukrainian grandmothers make contact with earth and maybe their homeland through the beauty of flowers, we are gifted by an insight into archaic creation. In stunning beauty water has been dripping from the “Schleierfälle”, i.e. “veil falls”, creating stone with the help of mosses for millennia making us stand in prayer and awe.
Beauty that creates, beauty that connects.
Bathing in the cold water of the Ammer feels like healing and washing away stagnation und numbness in the face of our world seemingly falling apart.
“Wake up, don’t go back to sleep”: Every day of our pilgrimage there are happening strange things that remind us: A kind of explosion we hear and see in a distance, the test alarm siren on a national test alarm day, a big tree falling down not far away from us……
“Stay awake and present” seems to be the message.
Again and again in these days my heartmind connects with California, with the walkers of Walking Water and the story of the watersheds between Mono Lake, Owens Valley and Los Angeles and the endurance of all who were involved over the last 10 years to bring people together, to bring understanding and cooperation, to bring healing.
Another station of these waters we don´t visit but I am aware of: the Ammersee, a lake the river forms not far away. Close to it the European Council Network gathered in 2019 and nowadays close to it they started to drill for gas. Can I protest against it? We use so much energy in Germany and the damage, pollution and social and cultural consequences of its extraction in the moment don´t happen here. But other regions of the world, often in territories of indigenous peoples, are harmed massively by our hunger for fossil energy.
What does it really mean, to change my life in a way that I stop harming Mother Water? And how can I contribute to her healing? A line of a song from Lyla June (Diné Nation) comes into my mind:
“Water is life
…. He said it’s not a song
It’s a way of life.
You can sing it again and again
But can you live it?……”
With discovering the first little dam in the Ammer I also think of the story of the undamming of the Klamath River, also in California, and several generations, who dedicated their lives in engagement and ceremonies to the vision of the salmons coming back and the healing of this watershed and its land and peoples. Maybe some of you already watched this short video of the Bioneers conference 2025, if not, I recommend it to you. It is a presentation of Amy Bowers Cordalis. – you can find it HERE.
For me it is about hope, about strength, about dignity to stand up with the prayers and blessings of our ancestors in our back.
And these lines of her speech remind me on the power of dreams and visions:
“A lesson that I learnt from working with Klamath Elders is, that to create change, you have to see it. You have to believe in it first. And for many indigenous leaders at the Klamath, they had the audacity to be the first to call for dam removal. They had heard stories from their elders about what the river was like pre colonization, pre dams. They could see it.”
(Amy Bowers Cordalis.)
As my grandmothers and grandfathers didn´t teach me that way, especially these stories of indigenous activists are for me a source of hope and remind me that I can remember a timeless wisdom of humanity and that the visualization of change and healing has power.
I bow to all communities that are committing their lives to the healing of their land and water for years, for decades, for generations.
Gratefulness for these days, for the nourishment and the teachings about interconnectedness, waking up and the power of prayers and visualization for healing.