|
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
tagged: voices God light singing bird heart
permalink read: 8083 print forward comments: 1 add comment
|
 Photo: André Platteel
|
|
The window needed shutting: the rain was getting in. Autumn wetness drumming on the windows, drowning out the sound of Keith Jarrett breathing loudly as he played his black, polished Bechstein. The speakers whispered: “The rain, the rain, we will defeat it.”
But they couldn’t.
You were lying on the velvet green couch, meeting it with your simple silk ochre dress. More albums on the ground. Van Morrison, Bartok, Sigur Ros and some that were unfamiliar to me. You were ignoring them, just like you were ignoring the music and the rain; your eyes were on me. An unknown scent of aliveness came at me from all sides; from the books, from the glass chandelier, from the flowers on the table and from the windows the rain was trickling through.
Your legs were at an angle, trying but failing to reach the wooden floor. An inch separating your right foot and the ground. Your left further away. Your left hand on your belly, your right hand next to your body. Lean hands; small wrists; long fingers. Your shoulders rested against a cushion, your head was tilted back. Your golden hair was like a monotone rainbow.
The whole of you seemed to melt into the air around us.
It felt to me like perfect balance: the rattling rain, Jarrett’s playing, the shape of your body on the couch, the colours of your dress, the faded green velvet, the scent of aliveness.
The velvety structure of your eyes made me go deeper inside myself. There was no way I could reach out to that look. I had to meet it somewhere deeper. What does something that is being reborn every moment feel like?
I felt how everything that seems to be unique is connected to all other things as well. A code? It was more than a mathematical formula in which different letters suddenly form logic; there were holes in the formula, opening up to as yet unborn worlds about to unfold. Never-ending spring. Blossoming. I felt dazzled: too many shadows became forms, too many forms disappeared into the holes. I felt happy. I could have laughed hysterically. My soul appeared to have holes too: every single sound, every single colour, every single touch and every single taste was absorbed. I lived in everything, and everything lived in me.
tagged: consciousness God understanding love connectedness flower silk Jarrett Bechstein
permalink read: 8183 print forward comments: 0 add comment
|
 Photo: Annemarieke van Drimmelen
|
|
He came in from the cold, his skin as thin as paper, his head covered with angel hair, arms and legs carried by the wind.
It was around five in the afternoon, exactly five weeks previously, on the fifth day of a cold month. The weak, low-hanging sun had spotted him first, following him all the way to the seat he took at a long oval table, not far from where I was warming my hands around a mug of hot chocolate, my fingers sticky from the cream. Seeing his face turned the chocolate cold. Frozen hands. You could see his veins, his muscles, his bones, his tissue, his structure; you could see what was inside him.
I stared into a face I knew so well that was simultaneously completely and utterly unknown to me. A face like my own.
He put the bag of colours he was carrying on the table. He stretched out a hand to me. It was weak and warm. Ants. I could feel his blood streaming. “How do you do?” A glass shattered into a thousand pieces. I could not let go of his hand; the ants building a bridge between his and mine. “Listen,” he said, the sound of a fallen glass hanging in the air behind us, still tangible. The moment the sound was gone, he asked: “Where did that sound go to?”
I started warming my hands again: sip of chocolate; cream in a two-day beard. I read some headlines that didn’t make sense, trying to regain my own space. His eyes were inside me, watching me from a position I could not occupy. I surrendered to his eyes.
He told me his life story, his words pale and crispy, coming without a hitch. His story was too long to fit one life; his experiences too diverse to fit one man; his adventures too grandiose to fit one time. Centuries passed like the watery reflection of a lantern in a black canal.
The moment he finished his story, he turned into a child and showed me the colours in his bag. There was no room in his excitement to ask questions. Dozens of leaves were spread out on the long, stained, wooden café table, forming a Matisse pattern. He giggled. His blood turned a deeper red. “They have all fallen, fallen softly to the ground.” He clustered the colours; red, orange and yellow dominated. He spoke to me through the colours of the leaves, telling me that he had had to return from the world the sound of the falling glass had gone to, and that his return had to do with solving one question. The colours were clear about that: paper man was a man with a quest.
tagged: God colours blood stars heaven spaciousness
permalink read: 6957 print forward comments: 2 add comment
|
 Photo: André Platteel
|
|
I haven’t seen him for quite some time, although our blood is the same and his hidden scars are no doubt to be found within me too. He drinks coffee; I drink tea, just a block away from where I live. He eats a chocolate cake, fast, as if he is afraid to really taste what he eats. Fastness, there has always been this fastness with him: no time to tune our hearts, ever. Now that he’s becoming older, fastness manifest itself as unease.
He has his black leather jacket on, zipped, ready to leave any minute, although another coffee is on its way. I watch his lips turning dark brown, and take a sip of my tea; salty-tasting water. He dyes his hair dark ever since a few of them turned grey, covering the aging that would actually suit him so well. Although I’m watching his lips, I suddenly see that he is dressed completely in black. I can barely remember him in colours. And with that vague memory, the past suddenly arrives as a hole between us, our conversation disappearing into its nothingness. No words left to say ‘after’. Our jaws are muddy, having difficulties digesting the past.
He is dying of something that he had hoped to live longer. My mind is full of anger, screaming ‘how could you ever’.
I turned what I loved into light again
And God wrote in the air about love first, death
His kitchen full of white
The sea so blue
Impossible to know where it all begins
He looks at me and talks through a mouth full of chocolate. And although his tongue speaks words that disappear before they reach my ears, I hear his voice reaching out to me, trying to tell me what my heart already knows: that he couldn’t have done it differently. His voice and my knowing, holds me fast.
When the world screams for peace, there can still be war
Between ‘then’ and now it is dark
And for it to become bright
The world that we hold between us, needs to leak
Its anger and tears
For years I have wanted to really meet him; confused by the idea that there was something in him still to be discovered, that somewhere deep in his heart there could be something more true than what I had encountered. But this is all what he is, and all what I am: this ‘thisness’, right now. The search for someone different made the hole bigger. And this thisness is much more than my ideas of him.
“When are you going to marry?” he asks me, chocolate still covering his lips. I am surprised. It is such a sweet question. “I would love to see you get married to her.” + more
tagged: father light circle consciousness God love wholeness life
permalink read: 8191 print forward comments: 0 add comment
|
 Photo: André Platteel
|
|
The butterfly has tried to make itself invisible. Its colours are the same as those of the tree it clings to: brown with dark lines. Its body is flat, its back slightly arched and it is this that betrays it.
The child ignores the butterfly. His mind is focused on something else, something that seems to be alive, but not alive like any living thing I have seen before. He is sitting on the ground, legs spread, his tiny hands moving like a T’ai Chi Master. Consciously. Slowly. Almost silent. His knuckles are woolly as if he has worked with his hands for decades. He wears a short, knitted overcoat. All sorts of browns blend together, tricking the eyes into believing of being just one colour. His corduroy pants are tied at the waist with rope. His trouser bottoms rolled up. His hair is dark and still thin; his eyes big and black; his nose tiny. You can never judge from its size how a child’s nose will develop.
The child stares at me, all the while his hands still moving, creating a space for a sharp-clawed insect (or is it an animal?) to move. The creature tries to attack the child, but the child is too silent to get hit, to get hurt. He raises his hand. The creature rises with him as if connected by little strings. It’s using its wings, but that doesn’t distract it – its sharp claws continue to attack the child. The creature is blue. Black.
“What is it – that thing?” I ask my guide.
“It is his imagination. Given to him by holy man.”
“Why doesn’t it fly away?” The guide’s answer to my first question hasn’t yet registered with me.
“There is no fun in your imagination flying away from you, is there?”
Some time later we are standing before a door. We have been walking for at least seven hours to reach this place in the mountains. A beautiful walk through small Berber villages and plains of solitude. The last few hundred meters involved attaching crampons to our shoes and leaving tracks in the fresh snow.
We met several people along the way; with mules; with guides; with complete families – all coming to visit the holy man. Our holy man is someone different: he is still alive and everyone can come to visit him.
The guide pulls a red cigarette packet from his pocket. His right hand is red, too. The cold hits him on the right side. When he inhales he closes his eyes, releasing the smoke casually from his mouth. He lives around here, so he told me, but he dresses like a big-city boy: baseball cap, jeans and a leather jacket.
I hear the sound of a radio coming from the other side of the door. I think it’s REM, but I am sure I must be wrong.
The door is green; made from different kinds of wood but painted to create the impression that it’s all one.
“Does he know we are coming? Do we have to knock or ring?”
The guide doesn’t answer.
Now someone is knocking from inside. My guide throws away his half-smoked cigarette, his third while we have been waiting. It disappears in the snow.
No filter. + more
|
 Photo: Annemarieke van Drimmelen
|
|
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.
|
 Photo: Annemarieke van Drimmelen
|
|
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
permalink read: 4679 print forward comments: 0 add comment
|
 Photo: Annemarieke van Drimmelen
|
|
Five hours north of New York, following the Hudson River all the way, I reach the Adirondacks. At Lake George, the start of the Adirondack Mountains, I will attend a week-long silent retreat with Gangaji, a teacher in Advaita, the Hindu philosophy of non-duality.
A half-year earlier my girlfriend and I had also attended a retreat with Gangaji, at the legendary Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. The experience was mind blowing. This time the retreat is at a YMCA, a big venue built in a beautiful style that pays tribute to those typical family holiday destinations of the 1950s, the ones that have been so beautifully captured by photographer Martin Parr and in the film Dirty Dancing.
The consciousness of all being one has been burning in me ever since I discovered Advaita, seven years ago. The experience of Wholeness that is at the core of Advaita has led me to investigate who I am – a process that is ongoing. Gangaji is a great teacher: through silence you experience the essence of who we are. Her pointers are clear and she is sweet about any question that arises.
After a few days spent in silence, experiencing the intense love that comes from the feeling of being all connected, it suddenly feels weird to be in this retreat. I feel a strong hunger to know ‘outside’. Of course, if all is one, there cannot be such a thing as ‘outside’ and ‘inside’. However, being in this retreat feels that way: you have to wear a name badge all the time; alcohol is forbidden; you have to stay and wait for five minutes after Gangaji has left the room; you have to answer certain questions; and couples are advised not to hang out with each other all the time. It is true that every ‘social community’ has its rules and regulations, but it is just this knowledge that leaves me with no reason to stay.
After four days, my girlfriend and I decide to leave the retreat: it has never felt so good to play truant; it has never felt so strong to demonstrate the experience of freedom for real. We spend hours driving south beside the Hudson River, hit the Holland Tunnel and enter downtown New York. It’s rush hour; New York streets don’t have lanes and we get squeezed between hundreds of cabs. Finally, after being stuck in traffic for yet more hours we reach our hotel.
The last day of our stay in New York we decide to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art where there is an exhibition of Dutch Painters. The Age of Rembrandt features 228 masterpieces displayed together, works of Frans Hals, Johannes Vermeer, Gerard ter Borch, Pieter de Hooch, Jacob van Ruisdael, Aelbert Cuyp, and – of course – Rembrandt van Rijn. Being Dutch, we feel a bit like Japanese, eating only Japanese in every country abroad.
tagged: NewYork consciousness BigSur spirituality Gangaji Esalen MartinParr DirtyDancing MET painters Advaita India God connectedness fear
permalink read: 7378 print forward comments: 0 add comment
|
 Photo: Annemarieke van Drimmelen
|
|
It’s foggy outside and I have a flashback to one of Antonioni’s films – Identificazione di una donna – in which a couple decide to break up. Stuck in fog, she gets out of the car and disappears. He tries to go after her, shouts her name, but the fog is so thick that he not only loses sight of her, but of his car as well. He’s lost. As always, Antonioni illustrates beautifully the mental state of his characters by showing their surroundings.
There is no breaking up where I am right now, besides the waves. The weather is not only murky, it is rough, too. But even waves, no matter how high they are, return to the sea.
It took me two hours to get from Shelter Island to here. Montauk is at the absolute end of the island of Long Island, and the landscape is totally different from every other part of it too. Greener and less organized. And the waves make this place a secret surfer’s paradise.
A friend of mine had advised me to turn left just before the lighthouse. I drive into a green area with no cars and no people. I park my car and get out. The fog not only takes away the visibility, it also absorbs the sound. Through a thick whiteness, I see a gigantic radar system on a white house.
I walk further, through the forest, and the fog starts to become less intense. I hear a dog barking, but see no dog. Through trees I see three concrete walls with black letters: ‘No entering. Closed to public.’ I can’t see how you could enter, even if you wanted to. In front of me houses appear and as I come closer, a whole street becomes visible. Green and yellow houses, a church, even, and something that looks like a village hall. Here too, there are no people, and there is no sound, besides the barking of the dog, which has become louder. The barking doesn’t seem to come from the streets – it sounds like it is coming from under the ground.
The houses look like they are made from wood, like the houses in those typical US fishing villages. Up closer I see that the houses are actually made of concrete and that the wood structure is actually paint. There is no way to enter these houses: the doors are concrete, too. And so are the windows. And as with the three concrete walls, earlier, here too I am warned not to enter. The warning works on me like a puzzle: how can I enter these concrete fake houses?
Out of nowhere a dog runs up to me, barking as if I am his biggest enemy. A man shouts something at the dog. I can’t hear what he says as I’m too busy wondering what to do to stop the dog from attacking me.
tagged: consciousness Antonioni NewYork Montauk time mind God
permalink read: 4428 print forward comments: 0 add comment
|
 Photo: André Platteel
      |
more articles in the Archive
object
event
