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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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An almost silent city. Still dark. Numb early morning. My breath becomes visible. The humming sound of a motor. A grand piano hanging in the air.
I have dreamed of playing the piano for a long time. And fallen in love with an old Bechstein that a crane is now lifting into my house. I’ve spent the last few minutes watching the piano being readied, the hook attached, and now I see it ascending into the air. Some excitement. A few neighbours join me to watch, still sleepy.
Suddenly my eyes see a different picture: no longer the piano hanging in the air, but me. I see my feet dangling in the air, trying to find solid ground; I see my arms tied up so that nothing can escape from my hands; and I see how my voice tries to make words, unintelligible.
Am I half sleeping, or was I?
Soon, I will own a great instrument. But instead of happiness, fear invades me. I feel panic. Am I afraid of owning something that big? Am I afraid of all the learning that needs to happen before I can actually play? But why this sadness? And why does this heaviness feel so big? All the feelings that don’t fit this moment burst open. The ground is disappearing. I have no clue what is going on. My skin feels like paper. I watch myself becoming more and more distant. My world seems to collapse. It is slipping through my fingers, like silence.
A few days go by. I’ve touched the piano for only a few minutes. The bass is intense. The higher tones too shrill. The sounds resonate with something I fear. I know it is not just a tune. Whatever it is that is being touched, it is strong enough to destroy me. If I hold my breath, I can hear it inside me. It has all the time in the world, been there for such a long time. The roaring. It just waits, like a sniper picking his moment.
I try to shape what happens to me when I am not asleep; the nights are needed too. The light that separates night and day has been broken. There seems only to be darkness. I am sucked into a black hole made of different fragments of darkness. Who pushed the ‘on’ button of this crazy particle machine inside me?
After a few days I feel desperate: What the hell is going on with me? My strength is ebbing. My heart tries to douse the fire. Without success. My skin bursts. No blood, but water. Unstoppable. Like a weak little boy. I feel spoilt: I, who has everything, what gives me the right to feel this way? Wake up! Be strong! Enjoy! But I can’t.
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 Photo: Annemarieke van Drimmelen
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We drive away in the early evening, just at that moment when darkness suddenly descends, and trees shift from producing oxygen to producing carbon. Quite a long drive through the woods; not really a road, just layers of broken branches, crushed leaves and dried mud. The outside air slips through the window, bringing the nearby sea into the car.
The driver asks the usual questions I have become accustomed to over the last month: Where are you from? How long have you been here? Where are you going? For the people who live here, the questions are a way to get an idea of who you are. I answer quite fully. And I ask him about the candles I can see outside. “People meditating, using candles to keep away the bad spirits hidden in the trees.” Trees are important. I have seen trees with leaves that tell your future; I have seen trees with little dead babies wrapped in cloth hung on thick branches like exotic fruits; I have seen little black trees, home for thousands of bats, trees that look death and naked at night.
The longer we drive the more silent it becomes. The driver keeps asking questions, but it is as if the darkness takes away his words. It becomes more and more difficult to understand him. He loses words, blanks develop, and soon he’s little more than a moving mouth creating soft waves of air. Weeks ago, I met a friend of a nephew of the driver. He told me that if I should visit this area, I had to contact him. He wanted to bring me in contact with a “man with powers”. And that is about to happen.
The car stops. The house has no roof, just walls made of white stone. Naked walls, apart from a poster of a Buddha with the head of a bald, smiling baby. Stars and moon seem to be within reaching distance, like low hanging fruit.
The couch is covered with plastic. I sit down, sparking a sound that lasts longer than the action of sitting itself. I am offered a cookie: two layers of cake with a soft pink filling. My teeth are dancing. He wears a sarong – quite colourful, purple and gold – and a simple white shirt. His belly is big, yet he is quite tall and slim. His eyes are dark with the expression of a young boy: naughty, excited, sparkling. He doesn’t say a word; he communicates by laughing. He pours tea and looks at me, laughing. He shows me the box of cookies again, and laughs. I do not dare to refuse, my teeth offered another bite. Long moments of silence don’t seem to feel odd to him.
tagged: difference oneness master darkness trees Muslim
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 Photo: André Platteel
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Today, I am quite immortal. I open my eyes and see a sky full of stars; a landscape that’s totally silent. Wide open. Dark background deepened through the ages. No time. There is no time that can make darkness as deep as this. A thought escapes: this does not exist. It does. Even if I was nothing more than air.
I make a meaningless sound. Wait. Make another sound. Not loud, just for myself. I am trying to follow the rhythm of light and dark above me. And wondering: Is the darkness the silence between words or is it the light that represents silence? It makes a completely different rhyme.
There is no distance between my eyes and the stars; their light burns my retina. My eyes fly. Anything further than ‘none’ falls off the edge of my vision. The Northern Lights are radiant tonight. It’s as if they are leading the other stars in a flight so fast that movement becomes invisible. How can lack of movement be so moving?
I go into the living room. A big space. I see wood that makes a table. The table makes the living room. The living room makes the house. The house makes the street. What if this house decides to move somewhere else?
The light outside has decided to shine on some garbage that’s acting silently, hoping to be left alone. I clean, light some candles and think of her and of the last time I saw her. There is a hole in my thinking.
A sound. And with it returns the memory I failed to retrieve a second ago.
I push a button. A short distance away a door is opening downstairs. A few seconds later she knocks and opens the door of the room, leaving me no time to answer. Long hair; a waterfall of gold. There is a dark blue fly on the table, and the moment she enters the room it takes off, flying like a lost child.
She passes me, speaking with her eyes. My legs are burning. She walks to another part of the room. I had no time to see how she is dressed. There is a wall between my eyes and her. Thin. I could blow it away with my mind. She walks back, heading my direction. Stops half way. Undressed. She stands near a cupboard, a few metres from me. She impresses me.
Outside, the future is humiliated.
She curves her body, her arm resting on the top of the cupboard, her legs crossed, one of her heels curved upwards. She knows her classics. I could liberate her from her pose. Paradise is just a few steps away. To stand here, watching her, seeing her breathe and shape her body, makes me want to be air.
“I can never love you,” she says. “I could never hurt you.” She sounds sure but feels unclear. There are shadows between the words, shadows that behave like time stretching endlessly. Words can create such a feeling of powerless. Still, I feel more than I can see or hear.
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 Photo: André Platteel
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It was one of those days in which normality seems to have gone on sabbatical.
Two heavy bags hung from my bicycle’s handlebars and just as I was about to take one of them off the bike slipped from my grasp, the handle of the bag broke and the bag crashed to the ground. The bicycle followed, landing on top of the bag less than a second later. Glass. In pieces.
A vase I’d bought less than an hour earlier.
“Where are you going to put it?” the sales person had asked.
“On the table,” I replied.
“And what do you think the flowers will think about, when they are in the vase on the table?”
I had no idea what he was on about.
“Is it possible that the flowers will think they are standing on the table, not in a vase that is on the table? The glass is really high quality, you know. The flowers might make a mistake and look through the glass and become convinced that they are standing on the table.”
“Is that a good thing?” I had asked him.
“How clearly do you want to see? Do you know what you’re standing on? Come and have a look at something…”
I followed him as he went to one of the dozens of vases of flowers that filled the shop. It was a beautiful vase; a bigger version of the one I had just bought. It had orchids in it. Orchids aren’t my thing. But now that I looked closely I realised it was probably the name I didn’t like. A beautiful yellow and green specimen with lots of sensual branches drew me into another world.
“Now, see for yourself how clear the glass is and how quickly the mistake can be made. To me it’s not a small mistake but a big one, and it’s so logical that it’s made over and over again. You cannot imagine how important it is that the flowers know they are standing in the vase. Knowing what they stand in is of the greatest importance. I should say that it is essential that they know what sustains them and keeps them together. Maybe to know what it is that keeps them prisoner. I tell them time and time again that they are in a vase and not on the table, but they’re not good at remembering things, you know. The flowers. They’re not very good at remembering. Too busy flowering. And who’s to tell them they’re wrong.”
I place the other bag, which I had already taken off the bike, on the ground. I inspect the damage to the stuff in the one that fell. The vase is indeed broken. It wouldn’t be so bad if the flowers did believe they were standing on the table and that I could put them on it, I think to myself.
I put the broken-glass-filled bag next to the other, turn the key in the lock of my front door, open it, pick up the bags again and prepare to go inside.
My senses twitch.
Someone walking past, slowing down. My bike – I haven’t locked it. Forgotten in all the slipping, falling and dropping. I shove the bags inside and walk quickly back to my bike. The guy is 30 or so. Worn out jeans and jacket too thin for the time of year. Looks tired – probably not slept for days, I guess – bottle of beer in his left hand.
“I’d put the other lock on as well, man; that one’s useless.” Checked out. No shame. I take his advice and put the lock and chain that’s currently wrapped under the saddle and thread it through the frame and front wheel.
“What did you think: that guy’s gonna take my bike?”
About to answer. “Yeah, well, you saw that right,” he says first.
I can’t see if there’s still any beer in the bottle. The glass is brown. I want to head back inside, but he’s in front of me. With words.
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 Photo: Annemarieke van Drimmelen
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Although he had stood in front of the mirror probably a million times over the past decades, he had never before seen the little boy inside his heart. It happened by coincidence: he was walking in a shopping street, passed a window and suddenly clearly saw something inside him. At first he thought it was his reflection and that of something else coming together in the window. But the moment he saw the image he also became conscious: he felt the boy inside his heart.
Although he felt the little boy, he didn’t feel he was discovering something he had known was there all his life, something that was suddenly and finally revealed to him. He didn’t know the little boy; had never seen him before. He was not shocked to see him inside him; it just felt as if his world had become utterly new, in less time than time can measure.
He knew it by his breath.
He thought of his breath as a fresh meadow in Spring, blossoming grass telling the animals it’s time to come home again.
It was as if his heart had opened and he himself had just walked in.
He knew how it felt when his heart opened slowly, like a flower. He had known love. But inside his heart now was not a lover but a little boy. And his heart was opening not because he wanted to give it to a lover: there was someone in his heart already.
He moved closer to the window and saw how the little boy had found a small but perfect space inside his heart. The little boy was part of its flesh and blood. It felt so completely strange and so natural. He knew things were about to change for him. Everything always changes, so why not his heart, why not his breath?
He had walked away from the window; people had passed him, one of them almost bumping into him, he had closed his jacket; he had crossed his arms high, protecting the area around his heart. He didn’t want anybody else to see the little boy he, himself, had only just discovered. What he had found was too precious to show to anyone else at this stage.
When he arrived home he undressed and walked to the mirror. He stared at himself, met his naked reflection and saw two people. He had never before experienced his nakedness from within.
tagged: otherness image consciousness fear Spring flower blood change gravity darkness brightness heart knowing earth irony experience
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 Photo: Annemarieke van Drimmelen
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There are four of us, maybe six. It feels completely dark. The only light comes from the sky: thousands of stars and a sliver of moon reaching to the earth. Yet even though the sky above me is clear, the heavens still don’t provide enough light for me to see my immediate surroundings. Although we have walked this path along this amazing coastline at least a dozen times over the last five days, most of us carry flashlights. The near abyss is magnetic.
I am having a lazy time in the place that gave birth to the Human Potential Movement, back in the early Sixties. Actually, the Sixties never stopped. There are people gardening naked; the food comes from little gardens within the compound; girls are painting flowers on the walls of buildings; in the evening we gather around a fire outside and those people with guitars play Fleetwood Mac, Crosby, Stills and Nash and Bob Dylan.
I went hiking through the wilderness the other day. The sky changed second by second. I walked through rain, in the sun, through storm and even snow, all in no more than half an hour. I felt like Hugh Grant near the end of Notting Hill, with a bit of Indiana Jones thrown in. I tried to find my way through the tall trees and wild bushes. There was no path. Then, the moment the wilderness opened up a bit, my eyes met those of three huge, powerful birds. They stared and shifted their long, thin necks in my direction. They spread their wings – at least six feet wide, I guess – not to take off but to impress on me how big they were. At first, fear stiffened my body. I tried to relax and backed off a bit, still looking into the eyes of these creatures.
Condors.
I had read in a guide that they used to live here, but had not been seen since the end of the Sixties. Had they been hiding since then, or had they returned? Watching these Condors, I felt a strange otherness I had never encountered before. I felt so alive.
Sometimes it takes otherness to remind us what we are made off.
tagged: fire fear life heart Eagle Condor light darkness Esalen sky understanding spaciousness reality
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 Photo: Annemarieke van Drimmelen
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It was the 12th of October. A Friday. And the sky had already turned gloomy. For the last four days he had had recurring dreams of a woman he had never met, whom he had fallen in love with ever since. Although she may just have been a product of his mind.
He went for a walk in the woods near his house, and dreamed of her while he was awake. He forgot time and lost track – in a place he had known since he was a young boy. When he was a child he had tried to get lost but somehow never succeeded.
I almost lost track of him that night. It had grown darker and his body was no more than a vague form between tall, dark trees. Only when my eyes adjusted to the darkness could I make him out again.
He was a philosophical person, interested in life, but a philosopher only from a scientific point of view. He once told me there is nothing but language – through language we form life.
Out in the woods he ran into someone. A woman, the one he had met in his dreams. At first he couldn’t speak, then tried to make conversation. She spoke in a strange language, one that shared nothing with any language he knew, or I knew.
The sky turned a bit lighter – some clouds had moved on – leaving just one that was still dividing the moon in half. I could get a better picture of them now.
She didn’t use her hands to make herself more understandable. It was as if she had no idea that he couldn’t understand her. He listened carefully. Logically, there was no way he could form even an idea of what she was saying. For me she spoke in sounds, carefully, silently, like a Satie composition.
Why, I wondered, did I had to compare her speaking to something else.
They hadn’t broken their stride when they met, which is what most people do when they encounter each other for the first time. She just joined him in his walk and they had kept on walking ever since, as if their encounter was pre-arranged, bound to happen. He spoke too, sometimes. No longer in a language I could understand. Not in the language he spoke before he met her. Not even in a language similar to hers.
The light faded again. I saw darkness and movement in darkness. Their voices had become softer, as if the darkness absorbed the higher tones of their voices. But it could also be that they no longer needed to speak so loudly to communicate with each other. The words they spoke became less. Not like a conversation coming to an end – as if intensity now needed fewer words.
tagged: consciousness wholeness language darkness God Babel philosophy
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 Photo: Annemarieke van Drimmelen
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