Out of Your Time
As you know, the Netherlands is a largely flat country, with areas often lying below sea-level. There are no rocky areas, no mountains—not even hills really. Yet in the north-east of the country, in the province of Drenthe you can find a whole series of megaliths older than the Egyptian pyramids. This is the area of the Hunebedden, which roughly translated means ‘a bed of stones built by giants.’ These structures are thought to be burial chambers constructed by the Beaker People from massive granite boulders more than 4000 years ago. However, the stones themselves are much older than that. They are thought to have been washed into the Netherlands from Norway during a distant ice-age. No-one knows for sure, but it would explain how these huge stones—sometimes weighing more than 25,000—made it all the way here.
At the end of summer this year we were in Drenthe for a few days holiday to enjoy the last of the sunshine before autumn sets in. We love to visit the Hunebedden—often found deep in forest and woodland, standing proud and majestic. My partner and I spend hours with them, feeling their ancient strength and endurance. When you touch them, you can feel the thousands of years packed into them and all their history. You can almost hear the people who worshiped around them. I experiment with drawing and painting them. Sometimes we just sit and soak up their atmosphere. It’s interesting to watch the effect they have on people. Some drop by as part of their walking, or cycling tour of the area, take a few quick photos and are off again. Others spend hours walking and sitting amongst them, stroking them and leaning into them.
Looking for somewhere to have lunch in the small town of Borger, we emerged from the countryside and to my surprise right there on the pavement in front of the café were this pair of Hunnebeden. They’d obviously been brought there—probably by crane—and arranged to look artistic as part of the area in front of the café. I sat on a nearby bench and watched the traffic racing past them and the people passing by. At first, I was filled with a sense of sadness—these magnificent stones, which had travelled so far and had such a depth of history about them just sitting there in the street completely out of their time.
Furthermore, their apparent displacement resonated with me on a personal level. As a woman in her seventies who strives to not be defined by her age and society’s ideas about older women and their place in the world, I can sometimes feel a sense of displacement. Our culture celebrates youth, and hungers to be always up to date with the very latest in technology, fashion, entertainment. All this can be fun, but the downside is that often the history is overlooked or ignored, and experience is dismissed as being out of date. Although I try strenuously to avoid it, I can now understand why older people so often refer to their youth, and talk about ‘their day’, or ‘their time’. It’s because too often we’re not completely sure of our place right now.
Then I looked again at the boulders—yes, they did not sit on the pavement among the traffic with the same ease and grace as they sit in the forest, but they hold their own. Stand close to them, touch them and there is the same strong current of age and history and yes, maybe memories as well. They don’t compromise with the environment around them but simply rest by the road at home in themselves. As we age, we carry with us years of experience, struggle, joy and even wisdom. We can have the confidence to draw on all that we have seen and done to face whatever comes in our path. Our accumulating years are a source of extraordinary richness and knowledge. We’ve come to know ourselves, to trust our own resilience and capacity and learn to look with patience and understanding at the places we find ourselves. It’s all there within us. Our time is where we are right now—all we need to do is to be our authentic self.
What do you think? What is it like for you to hold your own in a changing world?
