Velp Memories: A Gifted Childhood, Silent Fields, and the Paranormal Shepherd

I often think back to the time when I still thought I had an uninhibited childhood—at least, within the limitations that life gave me then. As I mentioned before, I didn’t have the very best childhood. I was hindered by illness and the fact that I didn’t know then that I didn’t understand the people around me, and they didn’t understand me—because I didn’t yet know that I was gifted and highly sensitive.

In my earliest childhood, I liked to look for peace. I had to clear my head. I always looked for the loneliest places—do you recognize this too? My favorite places were the banks of the IJssel, the river that flowed past my native village of Velp (GLD) in the Netherlands, or the stream in the Beekhuizen forest. But the most intimate place where I felt most alone in the 1960s was the Rozendaalse Veld, an area on the Rozendaalse Heide, where, for connoisseurs, there is now the off-leash field for dogs.

I used to cycle on my own, full of frustration from everything I had experienced at home or at school that day, past the V.V.O (Velp Football Club Olympia) terrain onto the Kluizenaarsweg. This was an "adult" climb on my children's bike. At the very top of that Hermitage road was a busy street I had to cross. Cars would speed down the S-bends from the Posbank towards Rozendaal Castle—here, extra caution was always required.

(Picture: Je bent een Velpenaar als… Joop van Limbeek met twee van zijn schapen.)

If you crossed that road safely, you’d continue along a stretch that passed “The Emma Pyramid,” a high sand hill you could climb to view the surroundings from above, heading toward Rozendaalse Veld. When I arrived there, I was always surprised by the other “exhausted” cyclists who came up just like me—I felt top-fit. I parked my bike in the lot and walked toward the sand drift. On a hill, I would sit in solitude. There was hardly a soul around. When I think back with nostalgia, I seem to remember that in those days, I didn’t even hear a plane or helicopter flying overhead. If I visit now, in 2025, I’m almost constantly disturbed by those “air monsters.”

Have you ever met a paranormal shepherd?

Sometimes, as a child, I would sit on a sand hill, lost in thought about what I believed others had done to me. I’d forget my surroundings. I now call that posture a form of meditation. I often heard birds around me and occasionally the soft ringing of bells—not church bells, but the ones worn by the flock of sheep belonging to shepherd Joop van Limbeek. In my imagination, this man wandered in solitude with his sheep and dog across the long stretches of heath in Rozendaal and its surroundings.

I always saw the man from a distance and thought, Without all the busy people around him, he must be very happy on this heath. I vaguely remember that in Velp, where I was born just two streets away from my family home, I sometimes had to deliver letters from my mother. Much later, as a young adult, I learnt that the shepherd had suffered a heart attack in his sheepfold in Rheden and had barely survived. After his recovery, he gained national fame as a psychic healer.

My life went on, and I met my current wife, Monique, when I was 55. One day, I went with her to her spiritual denomination, Rosa Veritas. It’s a relatively small denomination originally founded by a Dutchman in Australia: Mario Schoenmaker (1929–1997).

As I got to know the members and heard their names and backgrounds, I was very surprised. Two of them—Leo and Ans—were from Velp, my hometown. Ans had run a shop behind one of my mother’s workplaces, and Leo (van Limbeek) was the brother of the same shepherd and paranormal healer, Joop van Limbeek, whom I had admired in my youth. Leo, too, was psychic, like his brother Joop. In 2024, sadly, Leo passed away. But I feel very fortunate to have known him and Ans. What special surprises can sometimes appear completely unexpectedly from the “tube”?