Places of power: the inspiration of nature

Germans like to get away from things. Hiking has developed into a very popular sport over the course of the last years. More and more young people put their hiking boots on and roam through forests, mountain ranges or flat lands. It has recently become popular to hike to so called ‘Places of Power’ where the hiker regains his or her strength and finds peace of enlightenment. ‘Best of Hiking’ will tell you what exactly those Places of Power are, why they can be so refreshing and inspiring and where you can find them.

„The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious“ (Albert Einstein). This quote puts it in a nutshell: certain places in nature are fascinating in a way that is impossible to explain logically. This fascination goes far beyond being simply enthusiastic about the countryside or the building before us. Those places are called ‚Places of Power’. People have been visiting those places that magically attract us for thousands of years. Best known examples are pilgrimage routes – hikers then and now find themselves while hiking on those paths and describe their experience as inspiring, freeing or uplifting.

But to feel the special power or atmosphere of a certain spot one does not have to become a pilgrim. Maybe it’s the old oak tree with gnarled branches in the forest, the small, crooked chapel on the hill, the large formation of rocks that stimulates one’s imagination or the megalith in the middle of a landscape that let us feel that around those places the atmosphere is different, that there’s tension in the air, that power and stillness overcome the visitor without anybody being able to find an actual reason for this.

We are just a small part of a very big, mysterious whole. This knowledge lets every day troubles seem small, instead one finds peace to think about what’s really important. What are my goals in life? Who belongs to me and to whom do I want to belong? Answers suddenly come easily. Courage and newly found answers from now on guide us from our personal place of power to our every day life…