My heart jumps at the advent of fall. I love the moment when the heat breaks and crisp air invites me to walk and ponder. On a recent morning stroll, the ground wet after early rain, I watched a first brown leaf spiral down lazily.
And yet I am leaving again. I am flying to Istanbul, then Bali. I don’t know what awaits me in this next chapter, only that it is time to go.1
Until COVID my life seemed to have direction. I had a rough model of the world and how to get ahead: much of it revolved around money and what I hoped it would do for me. My life felt flat and colorless, and I kept drifting into depression, but I guess I accepted that as the price to be paid.
I don’t write this with regret. I believe I had to have that experience. “Nobody changes unless they’re challenged,” as Joe Dispenza put it. I had to back myself into a corner, find myself suffocated by my conditioning, before I could look for a better way. And of course, I needed the money.
The questions that now haunt my life, like what do I really want in life, seemed inaccessible then, like a distant island shrouded in fog. I feared the dark waters that surrounded it. Instead, I built shrines to lifeless idols. When I was offered a first glimpse of that secret place, deep in a psychedelic journey, the sight was frighteningly strange and beautiful. I woke up in a world infinitely weirder than I could have imagined. And I felt a hook in my heart. There was no going back.
Suddenly I wanted more, wanted to be more, or least be more of myself. But I no longer knew who I was. I held in my hands the pieces of my shattered mask. Like a blind man I had to discover the shape of my face by touch, slowly feeling its edges and texture with my fingertips.
Since then, the churning of change has been relentless. Last year, I left New York to explore the glorious expanse of the American West. This spring I sold my beloved Subaru in Salt Lake City and returned to Germany. After a lonely year on the road, I thirsted for company and new input. So, I signed up for a lot of events.
This summer I stomped and shouted at Sacred Ecstatics, sang overtones into people’s bodies at The Healing Voice, explored shamanic trance dance, and moved through old shapes during 5 Rhythms. I began to free my spine with Simon Borg-Olivier and let myself be shaken by life force during Seiki. I wiggled with Jacob Collier at his Tuscany Hideaway and jumped to the ceiling during AWARË’s set at Heal Play Love. Finally, I felt the doors to my heart blown open during a weekend with Joe Dispenza.
I hoped to be wildly productive. Write a quick piece after each event. Bam, easy win! Pretty much the opposite happened. I didn’t know what an experience meant while immersed in it and by the time I had a first draft, another adventure was around the corner. Not a pace I want to repeat, yet I am grateful I could fill my cup.2
Case in point, I wanted to send this note before leaving Germany. Obviously. Instead, I finished up on the morning of my departure from Istanbul, working in the back of the hotel’s little breakfast room. Except it still wasn’t right. Suddenly I was not feeling alright either, my body overcome with travel fatigue, sinus infection, migraine.
So, I am finally wrapping it up in Canggu, Bali, in a sleek and overpriced co-working space surrounded by influencers and digital nomads.
It was hard to get my mind into writing mode this summer when my rhythm was re-shuffled every week or two. I anchored my days in little rituals: movement, prayer and offering, meditation, a walk, picking up the pen. Every morning I crossed a little bridge to the nearby park and shared a song or two with the trees. With my feet in the grass, I contemplated my restlessness. Was this a movement toward or away from something?
Was I really healing, growing, following my curiosity? Or was I traveling in buses and on benches, in planes and on piazzas, in domes and dormitories because it was easier to chase a fantasy than sit with reality? Were these retreats my banana-nut muffin? This much I knew: writing had become stupidly fucking difficult. Like squeezing tears from a stone.
And of course it feels like madness to write anything at all, now that we can summon a language demon and let a data center pipe the words to us. But I can’t seem to help myself. “Technique accumulates around what you like doing naturally,” Jacob Collier told us. Well, he now conducts orchestras and I have a new notebook for the quotes of my teachers.
“Nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom,” James Baldwin wrote. Was I perhaps breaking under the weight of newfound liberation? Had I turned into another New Age dropout, a spiritual hedonist proclaiming Eat, Pray, Love until the money runs out? The nomadic life can be taxing. Cutting a path out of the tracks of convention is disorienting and the constantly looming question of ‘what next’ takes up a lot of mental bandwidth. But this disquiet runs deeper.
Home remains a fleeting experience for me, as if my destiny was not to belong but to be in longing. It often feels as if I carry some foreign object within me, something angular or spikey whose edges strain against my skin. It has been impossible to rest comfortably against anyone or anything. Perhaps I stay on the path of becoming in the secret hope that constant motion will soften this sharp sense of not belonging, the way time in a stream smoothes a pebble.
And while I long to be more than a writer, writing has helped me come to terms with the sharp turns in my life. I get frustrated with the slow process of translating my experience into language, yet this effort grounds me. It is a sobering contrast to the aftertaste of the infinite. And sharing the journey maintains an enduring connection to the world.
Moving the pen across the page helps me find hidden patterns and open passageways to the unconscious. Sometimes it feels no less sacred than the body in the depths of dance. Unable to tame my inner world, I let it emerge on the page until the ink births a living sentence, a shadow of my face, something I will recognize as part of myself no matter how much my life changes.
So long and safe travels,
Frederik
If I was trying to discover myself—on the whole, when examined, a somewhat dubious notion, since I was also trying to avoid myself—there was, certainly, between that self and me, the accumulated rock of ages. This rock scarred the hand, and all tools broke against it. Yet, there was a me, somewhere: I could feel it, stirring within and against captivity. The hope of salvation—identity—depended on whether or not one would be able to decipher and describe the rock. — James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son
Afterthought: always carry pen and paper.
Suppose you are on a train and a little boy asks what you’re reading. But the book on your Kindle is in English. Instead of trying to translate random words, you offer the boy and his sister your notepad to doodle and write their names. They might happily draw houses and hearts and snakes with a thousand wild coils while their mother gets some time off.
As usual, you won’t know what the encounter means, only that it is impressed into your memory, that it carries an energetic signature of significance. You sense that one day you will try to translate it into words. You might even try to share them with the world, simply because you can’t help yourself, because it is part of your way of being in the world.
Abschied: farewell, goodbye
You could say I’ve heard the Herald of the Change. Still one of my favorite movie scenes and soundtrack pieces.
In a similar vein, I tend to recognize my future teachers quickly but never know what I will learn. Sometimes it is a practice or skill, but often my encounters seem to be about a way of thinking, perceiving, or being. This leads to a delicate dance around note taking.
Of course I don’t want to scatter my attention. But I know that afterwards, in the sanctity of an airport cafe with a steaming cup of Cappuccino, the experience will come alive again, through the magic of words that tickled my brain. “Put the notebooks away. Just be present,” Jacob Collier advised us. Well, if you could stop being so damn quotable.
I empathize with the struggle. This is beautiful: “This much I knew: writing had become stupidly fucking difficult. Like squeezing tears from a stone.”
In the spirit of Hesse, I hope you find your bamboo grove!