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Economic and ecological problems clearly show that we are not separate from each other, or the world. Through their familiarity with digital media, the younger generation is developing a sense of connectedness that is barely addressed in present-day society – a desire, aptitude, awareness of and talent for creating combined extra value. Together, the new competences that are inherent to today’s generation of young people are laying the groundwork for a connective society that will shake up accepted culture. The result will be an enormous shift in power and completely new ways of relating.
Our World will be published on the 5th of June but can be pre-ordered now for the special price of €27.50, a saving of €7.50 on the normal price. Go to http://www.post-editions.com/index.php?page=preorder-ourworld, choose “normal publication" and enter the code a1edm5x to secure discount.
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He stands on a stage he has made himself from found wood. There is no audience.
‘Good and bad are just a minor form of a bigger problem,’ he begins, his voice slow and rehearsed.
It had taken him many days to find just the right pieces of wood. He wanted to feel the platform was strong enough for his last words.
‘Judgement has an imperceptible desire for the end. Beyond all judgement lies decay, la grande fatigué, the yearning to reject life.’
He leaves his stage and walks to a recorder placed on a small table in the middle of the room. In a fast, sharp sequence he clicks stop, rewind, play and listens to his own voice. It no longer sounds strange to him. Pressing record, he returns and jumps easily up onto his stage. Repeating everything in a slightly different tone, he swaps a little and puts the French words last.
‘When we speak of good and bad, we speak in the most intimate way. We have lost shame and are not afraid to hide what we miss and what we want to be different. This intimacy suggests honesty and truth, but it cannot hide the decadence that is speaking through.’
He pauses. Professionally. As if waiting for the reaction from his public, which is not there.
‘If you are in love with life in the most intimate way, what is it that can be judged as good and bad? When I hear a piece of music that moves me, my feet become light, the air around me becomes more moist, the whole atmosphere changes. What is speaking is another sensibility in which nothing can be + more
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 Photo: Annemarieke van Drimmelen
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Chairs stand empty in a bar packed full. Evening has fallen. A warm spring night lies ahead. A waitress pushes her way through the crowd outside, picking up glasses, those offered and those left on a brick wall.
Leaning against this wall, he talks with his friends. Nothing particular. Just subjects arising in mind. Women. Careers. Unnoticeably, as usual, he is competing.
When it starts to rain, no one tries to go inside. Knowing it will pass quickly, they shelter beneath an awning. Too many people. The sudden heavy rain drowns out voices and he loses contact with his friends.
He finds himself looking into the face of a young woman he had not seen minutes ago when he was scanning the crowd. She is carrying a baby on her belly, wrapped in cloth that is knotted around her neck. He makes space, but not enough. They stare into each other’s eyes. She looks away. She puts her arms around the cloth, around the baby who is visible through the curves in the cloth.
‘I hate this’ she says, the words bouncing back from the ground and hard to hear. When she lifts her head again he asks if he can help. In the redness of her face, her eyes move quickly and her jaws are tight. The moisture on her forehead does not come from the rain.
‘Just talk to me’, she pleads. He does not know what to say. There is silence.
‘Talk’, she commands.
He thinks of questions, but immediately realizes that she is not looking for a conversation. She needs words only as distractions. She tries to + more
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 Photo: Annemarieke van Drimmelen
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He had reserved a table at their favourite restaurant, which they would visit after seeing a film at a nearby cinema. In the film, a little boy dies. The whole family is devastated but tries to ignore his death and get on with their lives. Thanks to living in denial, however, death almost completely takes over their lives.
She was still sad about the boy during dinner. He couldn’t talk her out of it by saying that it was just a movie and that if she Googled the actor’s name, she would see that he was still alive. She answered that these things happen in real life, too: people die and the sadness it causes can be so big that the people left behind die a great deal as well. Whatever he was trying to say to cheer her up, he was actually making her sadder, even more upset.
The restaurant had an outstanding name, but her meat was too red. And her beans looked frail. She hardly ate anything.
Then suddenly, out of nowhere, she said she wasn’t sure if she loved him – that she felt it was possible that her love for him could disappear. How can love be true if there is a chance that it could pass? He felt her distancing herself from him.
Tears welled up in his eyes, although he knew she wasn’t talking about their love.
She went to the bathroom and returned pale and sweaty.
He said 'sweetie'. She eventually filled the silence that followed by saying that she also doubted life, because life is not eternal, and how can you trust something that ends?
He ordered some coffee and + more
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 Photo: Annemarieke van Drimmelen
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She was raised in a family with three brothers, all very talented. She was probably the most talented of them all, but also the most modest. She studied philosophy and sociology. She knew ‘just a little bit’ about people and mankind, to use her own words. They would discuss these things at dinner. Meals were consumed amidst an accompaniment of always-sweet opinions, and the opportunity for everyone to say what they had to say.
Every member of the family was – or at least felt – politically active: they protested against war, they were vegetarian, and they donated part of their wealth to the poor and needy.
When they watched a film, almost always together, they tried to read a critical social or cultural allegory into it. They wanted to see justice in what they had just seen. The books they read – all of them tender intellectual interjections – were widely praised in highly regarded newspapers, so the idea that they might not be making the best use of their time never had an opportunity to come to mind.
In the midst of all this intellectual tumult, she had a secret. She adored a little book she had found years ago, one filled with wisdom the mind cannot reach. In the few moments that she was away from her warm nest, she read and practiced what the author wrote about, determined to reach a state far beyond the intellectual. She prayed and chanted. She hungered for the light she was reading about.
The more she practiced the more she felt her ground shaking. She no longer + more
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 Photo: André Platteel
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He had climbed for such a long time and felt proud to have reached the top that only a few men had reached before him. He felt proud to have listened to the inner voice that had told him to climb the mountain and meet silence there. He felt proud of the sensation of his muscles, proof of persistence and strength.
From the top of the huge mountain he saw the world stretched out before him, far away and out of reach. And again he was filled with pride, this time from seeing that the world is, indeed, nothing more than a picture, just as the sages had seen before him.
He waited for silence to come.
He took off his shirt, revealing well-trained muscles to no one (but you never know, maybe God was watching and would be filled with pride, seeing this son).
Silence came with thunder.
In an instant, he was lifted up and felt rocks hurting his body. It had taken him months to climb that mountain. And years of meditation to arrive at the idea of climbing that mountain. It had taken him the biggest part of his life to find silence. And now he had finally met Silence, he saw the world approaching in just a few seconds.
Blood poured out of his body. Silence bent over him; anger in his eyes, his claws sharp, his posture like that of a beast ready to attack.
“Would it take more pain and blood to kill the arrogance of a man who wanted to reach out above the world?” Silence roared at him. Our hero, afraid and shivering, didn’t dare to look into the face of Silence. His strong body and + more
tagged: arrogance silence body meditation
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 Photo: André Platteel
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It was almost finished: the detailed model of the memory he had spent the last few years searching for. A search begun after a short but terrifying moment one particular night (a night thus far unmemorable). The night had gone something like this: woke up; realized the reason he had woken up was a lack of breath; reached for oxygen that his body failed to absorb; opened his mouth only to find nothing there, nothing that was willing to fill his lungs; noticed he had left his body and saw himself choking into nothingness, just white, recently washed sheets around him.
And then, out of nowhere, something, a little sound (he thought), or at least something that sounded like a sound, something not so trivial, a vivid but veiled memory that made life flow again. That which had brought life back into him had not only brought back his body; his body was brought back into something, something full and sweet, something he knew he knew, but was forgotten. He became obsessed with the sweetness and fullness he felt connected with, something that he called ‘it’. Immediately the same night, the night now made memorable due to what had happened, he crammed his ideas and thoughts about what ‘it’ could be onto small, sticky pieces of yellow paper.
He was tracing ‘it’ and felt how he was coming closer and closer to knowing it. There were moments when he thought he would embrace what he was looking for in a split second, something ‘just around the corner’. But always, the thing he was chasing found a way to escape. The harder he tried the more he seemed to forget what ‘it’ exactly was all about.
He changed his strategies; he surrounded ‘it’ carefully and peeled the mystery from the thing he wanted to know so obsessively.
That’s actually how the idea of a model began. Since ‘it’ had hit a memory deep inside him, ‘it’ had to be something in his brain, he thought.
He created a copy of his brain with its collective memories represented by the sticky yellow notes, by images he had drawn or torn out of magazines, and by sounds he had collected. Sometimes (almost always when he was not so busy chasing) images entered his mind that resonated with ‘it’. He wrote them down and stuck them into his model: jigsaw pieces of a puzzle soon to be whole.
tagged: light spaciousness connectedness life Body mind memory
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 Photo: Annemarieke van Drimmelen
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He felt strange the moment he walked into the shop, but not because there was something weird about it. It was more the strange feeling you get when you walk into your new house, eyes roving the walls, the corners, the way the light breaks through the window, maybe following the contours of the few pieces of furniture that have been already moved in. Everything not quite familiar, the connections not quite there yet soon to become home.
Bookshops were like homes to him. Books were like furniture for his mind, longing to find just the right chair to relax in.
The owner of the second-hand book shop would later tell others about this customer. How he would spend hours and hours in his shop. How he treated each book, first touching the cover, moving his fingers slowly, like a blind man reading. How he would read the first five or so pages, his eyes never blinking. How he sometimes held a book just an inch from his nose and sniffed, trying to understand it by its smell. How the man, after great deliberation, would finally select a book.
The bookseller, his tone very serious, would then tell his friends how he was misled by his client’s behaviour. Although the man bought a masterpiece every time he visited, creating the aura of a connoisseur, he didn’t seem to know anything about literature. Despite the bookseller’s efforts to make conversation, the man had not the slightest idea about the book he had bought, about the author, or about the importance of the book for modern literature. And when his friends grew tired of hearing him talk about his client, the bookseller would protest, “But this has happened, this is true”, as if afraid his friends had lost interest in reality. As if the stories in the real world were somehow different to those in a novel. More urgent.
When his friends’ interest in listening returned, the bookseller would describe every detail of his client: his appearance (large, like a giant), how he smelled (like something that absorbs everything, the musty, dusty smell of second-hand books departing with him), what he wore (a heavy leather jacket, even in the summer, that was too short for his arms), his habits (liquorish in his left pocket, of which he ate four or five pieces per visit, noiselessly). Yes, the bookseller missed nothing in describing the man’s habits; he knew that a good writer would lavish attention on the behaviour of the characters in his novel.
Attention, that is what a good writer can give his readers. + more
tagged: Beloved love books inviting reality stories
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 Photo: Annemarieke van Drimmelen
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He closed the door of his house but in the act of closing could not forget the encounter he had had a few hours ago with his friend, the wolf, who actually had turned into a wolf and told him, in a language that was strange to him but which, to his surprise, he could immediately understand, that the world was made of foam, a tiny and transparent layer of experiences that evaporates the moment you try to catch it, foam that creates an illusion of substance and the idea that something lies between you and the world
– “be careful,” the wolf had warned, “make sure the foam doesn’t create the suggestion of two where there is really only one, and do not waste time putting energy into it for it will make you childish, like a child blowing soap bubbles who believes they are worlds outside him when they are actually created by the same substance that give form to the child itself” –
yet even as he was listening to the wolf’s howling speech, his brain struggling to digest the meaning of it all, the wolf was forging ahead
– “and when you waste time, be aware that this waste is actually the product of time, and that time itself can never be wasted, since time is just a creation of foam, as the bubble is a creation of the child” –
but these words didn’t reach him because he was too busy thinking over the other stuff the wolf had said, his mind drifting away and coming up with this strange but persistent idea that he trusted the wolf more than he had ever trusted his friend when he was just called Wolf but had not yet turned into one as this wolf probably had no need to make him feel small, saw no advantage to lying to him and would not use the manipulative strategies he had noticed his friend sometimes using (and to be honest, used himself as well) when he was still a human being, and because he trusted the wolf more than the man his friend once was the howling sounds touched him in unexpected ways opening doors of darkness that he saw and felt transform his body, making his legs weak, slowing his thinking, turning his blood a lighter colour, directing his breath to something unfamiliar, far away (like the ant he once read about who left his friends and loved ones to go to ‘far away’ and never came back) and while noticing all this happening heard how a voice had entered his body or actually how he had become attuned to a weathered voice that seemed to come from + more
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 Photo: André Platteel
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And you stand on that mountain overlooking a sandless desert, hearing three female voices while a man in white walks up towards you from a place without time.
It took a while for you to get there; and it takes a while for you to hear what is being sung to you. Step by step, the white-clad man draws nearer, a strong branch in his right hand to help him climb higher. He holds all time in his left hand. And in the fluorescent light of his eyes you read something vaguely familiar, something unsheltered and fierce.
You feel like a newly born, reaching out to these voices. How many steps does it require for you to grasp the words that are longing so hard to reach your ears and caress your heart? You know it takes just one false step to fall from this mountain.
“Dive into the infinite sandless desert!” a voice inside you commands. “That little river, crawling upwards, will carry you like a drop of rain returning to its source.”
You are on the point of answering this devastating command. But just before you do, you remember the last time you were thirsty, and how drops of water created an invisible thread connecting you with everything that is, enabling you to understand how God could create Heaven and Earth in an instant. It was not the first thing He created. It is what is being created all the time.
Some small stones lose the spot they had regarded as their home for centuries. A porcelain face draws near. The white cloth appears to be a dressing gown, nothing but a dressing gown, the name of an unknown hotel embossed on the left side, at breast height. Bare feet.
You have been warned about him. He throws his branch into Earth’s gaping wound. As it falls, the air becomes electric, making the three female voices stronger. He opens his arms and before you know, before you know it is happening, the two of you become entwined. One. He is huge. It is almost impossible to wrap your arms around his waist; you have difficulty balancing, but the moment your feet remember the holy ground you feel like a spring flower – rooted and ready to blossom.
His long grey hair is reaching out to your hands. Knowing that you grow younger with every breath you take in this position, he whispers something in your ear:
“Silence never moves.”
And: “Your heart: see what is happening within.” + more
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 Photo: André Platteel
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I had no idea that you could walk to the end of the world.
Finally, after hours and hours of walking, Goodness came to me unreservedly.
The ground had turned soft and sandy. I felt how the earth was sinking into me. My eyes had had time to adjust to the brightness of her beauty. Now that I was in front of her, I realized that she had been visible throughout my journey. Too close to see at first.
The more I walked the brighter and more visible she became. She looks amazing, dressed stylishly in black, not a colour I had expected. A furrowed face reveals infinite layers of life that you can see in a single moment.
“Welcome home; the place you have never left.” Her voice is tender. Every word placed carefully into silence.
“You are so alive.” I didn’t mean to speak, but it’s what happens.
“Life’s aliveness shines through us vividly when we remain alive and die in the same moment.”
Her feet start moving. Just a little. The rest of her doesn’t move at all.
A beautiful maroon flower in her hair.
Two feathers.
Somewhere.
“Don’t you miss the other world?” Her brightness catches fire deep inside me. I know there is no way back. It’s nostalgia speaking: I fear losing what I thought I had.
“From this perspective there is no other world. All worlds are included. And yet this place is beyond every world. Your question comes from memory. You are now no longer bound by memory. But you may use your memory freely.”
She pulls a torch from her pocket, creates a circle of light around her and starts dancing. Funny faces. Funny movements.
“Join me.”
We dance.
“From now on you are no longer in experiences; you are in relationship.” This woman could be my grandmother. She could be my daughter. She could be my sister. Or brother. It starts heating up. She becomes my lover.
I cannot help saying it: “I think I’m beginning to love you.”
“I know,” she says. “When you become intimate with what is, Love’s face appears naturally. Irresistibly. From now on, everything with which you are in a relationship will be recognized as love.”
tagged: love connectedness movement dancing sun connectedness life beyond opposites
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 Photo: André Platteel
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