Chalk Cliffs of Rugen: Our Inner Layers of Time
- Spunky Mind
- Oct 3
- 5 min read
Updated: Oct 6
Lately, running the trails by the cliffs near my house, I’ve thought a lot of the great chalk cliffs of Rügen, white guardians rising from the Baltic Sea like the walls of nature’s own cathedral.
Seriously. What is it about nature? Isn’t she always up to something incredible like this?
Not that the cliffs by my house are bad, per se (the geologic story behind them is fascinating in its own way), but the Rügen cliffs are grander and whiter, an ancient permanence that makes you stop in your tracks. They glow brilliant white against the deep blue water, towering and almost luminous in their presence, both grounding and awe-inspiring at the same time.
The Rügen chalk cliffs did not form in a day, of course. No, they are the slow artistry of the Earth itself: millions of years of seafloor life accumulating, generation upon generation, layer upon layer, compressed and uplifted, pushed upward and out of the sea until they are as tall and as brilliant as the day they were formed. Nature does not rush, but she is patient, and these cliffs are proof of it: enduring, beautiful, and demanding attention.
I like to imagine myself there, feet on the ground, sea wind in my jacket, gazing out over the Baltic. The cliffs do not simply rise; they breathe, so long as you can breathe long enough to take them in. They remind me that strength is not built in haste, that it comes from patience, not from tearing ourselves down, but from simply allowing each moment to compress and layer into our lives.
Mind as Cliff Face
Look long enough at the cliffs of Rügen and you begin to see your own face in their chalk layers. We are, after all, made in layers: ancestral legacies pressed into our DNA, building the contours of our face and bodies long before we take our first breath (or make a first step on Rügen!). Scientists estimate that our DNA bears witness to the last ~6–8 generations of our past (Nature Communications, 2018).
Cliffs also call to mind my own childhood. They take me back to running about as a kid on the cliffs of Santa Barbara, California, and out on the thousand-acre horse farm outside Portland, Oregon. Yet, we were not a wealthy, not by any stretch of the imagination.
The farmhouse had no central heating system (a wood-burning stove in the living room kept the living areas warm) and had barns that sagged and leaned at odd angles, but what I had was endless roaming. Roaming as wide as the sky and as long as my little legs could take me. The days spent outside, rain or shine, with the sky for a roof and the land itself as my classroom. A pure blissful adventure was always waiting outside my door at any given moment.
What I learned on those acres is what the cliffs are now teaching me: all of our experiences are layered into the wild making of our bones and brains. Every joy and heartbreak, every celebratory mile on the trail, and every season of life composes another stratum. Like the chalk cliffs of Rügen, we, too, are brilliant and weathered and shaped and gloriously, inimitably strong.
As Lao Tzu wrote,
“When the mind is still, the whole universe surrenders.”
The cliffs whisper that we don’t have to ignore our history to start fresh. We can stand tall in the strata we have already gathered, honor the ground from which we came, and trust the horizon that rises ahead.
Breathing In the View
From the edge of the chalk cliffs of Rugen, the horizon inhales and exhales for you. Waves crash below and spray salt across your skin, then recede into an empty silence. The sound of that retreat, followed by the crash and the pause of the tides, is the same rhythm found within us. Sunshine, or maybe a storm; joy, followed by stillness; agitation, followed by peace.
It’s the same rhythm I learned as a child, roaming the seaside cliffs of Santa Barbara, wandering the Oregon acres, the hum of horses in the field carrying my feet, and forest air in my lungs. Nature has a way of breathing us steady, of teaching us that even when the storms of life come, stillness always follows.
Our “inner cliffs,” then, are built of this. Some ledges call to us like an invitation to climb, while other plateaus are simply a place to stand and look out. All have their purpose, and the wind shows us that even stone can be shaped by softness. The waves remind us that beauty can be found in persistence just as easily as stillness.
Trail Tribe: From Cliffs to Swimrun
For the Trail Tribe, Rügen is not just a sight to see; it is a course to run. The ÖTILLÖ Swimrun Rügen wends its way right through those chalk guardians, stringing together cliffside trails with open salt of the Baltic Sea. One moment you’re bounding over a path like powdery chalk dust, the next you’re slicing through seawater, arms doing the work where legs will no longer reach.
Isn’t that the beauty of trail life? The dance between the rooted and the surrendered, the enduring and the flowing? We can no more resist the terrain than we can the rising sun, so we must move with both of them. To race on Rügen is to allow the cliffs and the sea to form you even as you form your stride. It is a reminder that resilience is never simply about muscle but always about layer upon layer of experience, of patience, and of grit.
Inner Chalk Cliffs of Rugen
Yoga, forest bathing, sea roaming, and trail running are all practices of scaling our inner cliffs. When we stand in mountain pose with feet rooted and arms outstretched toward the sky, we embody Rügen’s walls. When we roam a quiet forest trail, our lungs filled with oxygen-rich, earthy air, we are adding a little more patience and layering to our inner make-up.
I think of that little girl on the Oregon farm, a wood-burning stove for heat in the house and the land itself for warmth outdoors, finding freedom in wide skies and quiet trails. She is still here with me, breathing in the forest and layered into the cliffs I carry now. And like all of us, she is a story of sunshine and storms and all the stillness in between.
So, here's to the cliffs we carry, ancient in memory but alive in the breath of each moment. Always rising toward the horizon.
Cheers!
Kether
Ready to take these cliff reflections deeper?
Download your free Field Notes page here:
"To know yourself is to be rooted,
and to be rooted is to endure the storms."
— Zen proverb
