Activist Feet, Sacred Ground: Hiking Lake Esrum

Yesterday, I walked 26.2 kilometers around Lake Esrum — a training walk for the Mammutmarch in Berlin this Saturday, where I’ll be walking 42 kilometers around the city.

I’m convinced I can do it. It will be a full marathon of movement, breath, and connection.

The walk around Lake Esrum, like many of my long walks over the past two years, became a way to live my own story and strength — through my feet, through the forest, through the ancestral whispers that linger in the old trees of Gribskov on the western side of the lake, and the majestic presence of Fredensborg Castle on the eastern side. These walks have become rituals of connection and meditation.

I thought a walk around Lake Esrum would serve both as a training session for Berlin and as a therapeutic way to connect with myself, the land, the history, and my own lineage.

This walk became more of a pilgrimage than a hike — a deliberate act of participatory consciousness. Each step was a conversation with the land. Each kilometer, a chapter in a story older than me, older than the map, older than the idea of Denmark itself.

I walked as a flâneuse with purpose. As Henriette. As a woman reclaiming her body as a vessel for activism and ancestral connection. The forest held me. The lake mirrored me. And somewhere between kilometer 12 and 15, I felt the thread — the ancestral one — tug gently at my heart.

Gribskov is the fourth-largest forest in Denmark and one of the oldest. Both Lake Esrum and the surrounding forest date back to the end of the last Ice Age — a process that began over 10,000 years ago.

You can feel it in the way the light filters through the canopy, in the moss-covered stones, in the silence that isn’t really silent. It’s a living archive of stories — some told, some forgotten, some waiting to be remembered.

There’s something radical about walking long distances in a world that values speed and productivity. It’s a way of saying: I choose presence. I choose to feel the ache in my legs, the rhythm of my breath, the stories in the soil.

Walking is part of my activism. It’s how I reclaim space, how I connect to the Earth, how I resist disconnection. It’s how I practice Story Living — not just telling stories, but embodying them.