For weeks, I’ve been wondering whether I should sell Haubi.

It isn’t dramatic. There’s no financial pressure. It’s more like a quiet, persistent feeling that something no longer fits. As if I’ve moved through something without knowing exactly where. As if I’m already on my way to something else without having any idea what that “something else” is.

Haubi, once bought as a tool for freedom, slowness, and life close to nature, has quietly become a project. An open loop. Something waiting to be resolved.

And maybe that’s the real problem: that everything—even freedom—can turn into an unfinished task.

By the time morning arrives, the viewing is already over. The couple who came to see Haubi are thinking it over. So am I.

Then, almost without noticing, something rare happens: a day without a project. No pressure to fix anything. No pressure to sell. No pressure to get somewhere. Just space.

After meditation, Morning Pages, and a walk, it becomes clearer with every passing hour. Today, Haubi isn’t something I’m trying to sell. He’s simply what I bought him to be.

I decide to fill up the tank, pick up a few things, and buy a small camping chair at Decathlon. The best days often begin exactly like that—without expectation.

Refueling turns into one of those small French adventures. Several gas stations reject my card. Eventually I find enough cash, buy a prepaid fuel code at Super U, and finally manage to fill the tank. Then it’s on to Decathlon in Digoin. A Compact Chair. Twelve euros. Small. Comfortable.

A few kilometers later, I find a spot beside the Loire. A large black locust spreads its shade across an open field. Behind it, the river moves almost silently. Apart from birdsong, there’s nothing to hear. Another traveler is already there—one of those wonderfully French hippie vans. A small Iveco with a handmade wooden cabin on the back.

I unfold the chair, make an iced coffee, and sit down.

And somehow, that’s exactly what makes the moment true.

Nothing is staged. The tree is simply a tree. Its leaves, its bark, the shape of its crown—it carries nothing except what it already is. The river flows because rivers flow. And I sit because there’s nothing else that needs doing.

The longer I stay, the stronger the feeling becomes. Not that I’ve arrived somewhere, but that I’ve arrived here.

The tree stops being just a tree. It becomes a quiet companion for the day, offering shade, warmth, and silence. The Loire stops being a blue line on a map. It becomes a presence. As if, in its own quiet language, it’s saying,

I’m glad you’re here.

Sometime during the afternoon, another thought begins to take shape. What if I followed the river upstream, all the way to its source at Mont Gerbier de Jonc? Not as a challenge. Not as another route to complete. Just as a loose thread for the coming weeks. An invitation to get to know this river.

With that single thought, an entire landscape opens. The source lies near the meeting point of the Ardèche, Haute-Loire, and Cévennes. I picture narrow roads, quiet villages, volcanic hills, chestnut forests, and forgotten places where no one else is around.

Then another river appears in my mind: the Allier. Memories of possible canoe trips. Paddling from gravel bar to gravel bar. Sleeping beneath the open sky. Not a plan. Just another possibility waiting somewhere in the distance.

By evening, it becomes obvious that the real movement of the day has nothing to do with the map. It happened inside. Waiting quietly turned into discovering.

The question Where should I go? became another question: What might this river want to show me?

The next morning, I wake up beside the Loire. I slept deeply. The black locust is still standing over Haubi. The river is still passing by. Slowly. Quietly.

Slowly and quietly, Dirk.

That’s the first realization of the day. Perhaps the only one that matters.

And for the first time, the thought of following the Loire to its source no longer feels like planning a journey.

It feels like the beginning of a relationship.

Six seventeen at the Lac de la Somme, and the water lies there like something poured. No wind. No bird with any urgency. I sit in the Haubi, the cup still warm in my hand, and the first question of the day is already here before I am properly awake: Do I sell the Haubi, or do I keep it? Right behind it, the second: Where now, and do I even keep going?

Both questions arrive too early. The viewing is scheduled for Sunday or Monday, and nothing about the situation changes before then. Still, they stand there, first thing in the morning, like two guests who show up before the door is properly open.

I let them stand for a while and look more closely. And underneath both of them lies a third question, larger than the two combined: What do I do with my time? Above all here, in the Haubi. Maybe it is not about selling or driving on at all. Maybe it is about happiness and suffering. About emptiness and patience. Themes as old as the first monks who sat down under a tree and simply stayed.

Yesterday evening, just before sleep, I listened to a talk on patience by Oliver Petersen. Words about patience, right before the day closes, and this morning that is precisely the task in front of me. Not as a resolution. As a fact.

Because something deep is making itself known right now, and it comes through the staying. Through being here, at the lake, with no plan for the next step. A small inner fidgeter moves closer, the one who would rather already be somewhere else, who already wants to see the next road, the next place, the next decision. I watch him. He sits there, fidgets a little, and I let him fidget.

Ramana Maharshi barely spoke at all. He sat. In silence. Permanently. Monks occupy themselves above all with the mind, not the next destination on the map. Here at the lake it becomes clear to me what a challenge that actually is: simply holding this silence, with nothing but myself and the water and a few birds calling somewhere in the distance. Everything around me grows slower. Noticeably slower. And the question What actually matters takes on a completely different weight when there is no urgency to answer it.

Can I simply be here? That is the real practice. And: can I recognize condensation, this tightening, this pressing quality, the moment it appears, without immediately doing something about it? Right now, for instance. There is a condensation. I see it. And that is enough.

This takes me back to my time in Portugal, at Monte Sobreiro. My hill, completely alone. Silence so complete it almost had a sound of its own. At some point I had to move on, with the truck, back onto the road. And now I sit here again, at another lake, in another country, and life places me in the same spot: in the silence, in nature, in this solitude that feels like an invitation. The invitation says: Stay here now. Like Buddha under the Bodhi tree.

The place it points to is on no map. It is a place inside me.

Because close, the word that has been with me for weeks, means something other than I thought for a long time. It does not mean that one day there will be a point where I am there, arrived, finished. Close means: let everything that wants to dissolve, dissolve. And give what is happening right now a hundred percent of my attention. This moment, at the lake, with the cup in my hand. This exact one.

Perhaps that is why it is so hard to explain, because it is so hard to convey. At the same time a longing grows louder the longer I sit by the water: simply to stand somewhere in the middle of nowhere and be. Like right now. And leave everything else to life, to the details that sort themselves out when you let them. I need little. Writing, walking, eating, drinking, sleeping. And encounters, when they come. When they do not come, they do not come.

Space exists everywhere, plenty of it. Spain, Portugal, France, Morocco. Vietnam, Thailand, Laos. Asia is perhaps where I would be most drawn to a hut, somewhere in nature. Still. Solitary. Observing, writing, reading, exploring the nature of things. Instagram and websites only when something genuinely wants to be shared, something that arises of itself.

The longer I let this sit here, at the Lac de la Somme, the clearer it becomes what a gift this is: to genuinely be able to be still. The capacity for stillness is one thing. Recognizing it as the greatest thing there is. That is something else. Everything is already here. I do not need to question it further.

From this perspective I see: life has placed me at this exact spot again and again. The spot where life was simple. Simple, without further label. I was the one who made it complicated.

The truly interesting question, then, is not about selling or driving on. It lives here: What actually happens when there is nothing left that has to happen? When there is only you and the silence, not for half an hour on a cushion, then back into the noise. But always. Twenty-four hours, seven days.

Against that background, OUTJOY remains an important place for me. A lighthouse, the image is already in the header. I am here when someone needs me. Freestyle. Less coach in any formal sense, more a mirror. And when something wants to happen, it happens, one way or another.

That is what close actually means. Close to the question: What is actually missing? Snail. Slowness. Sinking. Out there, in the end, nothing stays that brings happiness or fulfilment, nothing you could hold. The actual source lies deeper, where movement simply happens. Without ground. Without purpose. Without goal, without agenda. Simply because movement is the nature of life. Meaningless and completely complete, both at once. Permanent.

And with that view I return to my starting question. Sell the Haubi or not. Where to drive. It feels like a fork in the road with several paths leading somewhere, and yet every path lands again at the same point. I do not have to take any of them. Staying is enough. The paths come to me.

It has always been this way. Everything that truly counted came to me; none of it was plannable, none of it was a goal I worked toward. Even the greatest guru careers land somewhere eventually, and then the game begins again from the start: new paths appear, new possibilities, the next question of where next. There is no destination. You are already there. The mind simply says: This cannot be so simple.

Only in depth, in slowness, in slow motion, do things truly unfold. Only there does it show what something is worth, how intense it is, how full. Perhaps that is what is meant when people speak of patience: with patience, everything becomes very, very slow.

And what happens when everything grows slow? The opposite of what is visible everywhere right now. Reels, Shorts, AI: faster, faster, faster. But around the lake I see little that is genuinely fast. In theory, yes, a stone falling from the sky is fast. But the sun rises slowly. The moon moves in its own time. The breath, examined closely, is also slow. Plants grow slowly. Habits change slowly.

This fits the image of the paths leading away from the fork. They seem to go somewhere, and in the end you land again at a fork, exactly where you already were once. Like a matrix in which you always arrive at the same point.

The water at the Lac de la Somme still lies there, poured out, without hurry. The cup is empty by now. And the question the day began with stands no longer as a question; it simply sits with me at the bank, waiting for me to stand up. Or to stay.

The back pain sits at a 2, maybe a 3 out of 10. I notice it the way you notice weather: no problem, just a fact. Something the day is carrying today. Wednesday, 10 June, just after six, and I lie still for a moment longer than usual. I run the inventory: shoulders, lower back, the spot above the hip that has been loud for weeks. This morning it is quiet. Not gone. Quiet.

I get up, make coffee, and then I am sitting in the Haubi, on the hill above Le Creusot, cup in hand. Nothing is pulling at me. The brake light switch is fixed, the inspection is done, the listing for the Haubi is online, photos and everything. Six weeks ago I drove back into Europe with a list in my head as long as my arm. This morning, for the first time, the list is empty. I sit there with the coffee and think: and now?

And then I simply start writing. No novel, no text on any particular theme. I open the laptop, and within an hour more than a thousand words are on the screen, none of them planned. Something wanted to be thought. An observation wanted space. Afterwards I sit there and read what has come into being. At first I don’t even notice what I have written. What strikes me is that I wrote it at all, this morning, in this sequence, with this much room around it.

Here comes the part that took all morning to become clear. For me, Bitcoin and the question of whether my ideas and my work become money are closely connected; at its core, Bitcoin is my security, my income, the ground I stand on when I think about money. And my reserves are lower right now than they were a year ago. The market is in one of those phases that makes many people nervous. You feel it in the group chats, in the tone of the posts, in how often the word correction comes up.

In the past, that was the moment a very specific reflex kicked in. No general worry about money, but something more precise: an idea would surface, and immediately the test. Can this become money? Who would pay for it? Can something be made of it? Every thought, every text, every project had to pass through this needle’s eye, for years, automatically, like a tax that simply runs alongside you without you ever consciously paying it.

This morning that reflex is gone. The numbers are worse, and still the test is absent. I sit with that for a while, turn it over, because it doesn’t add up the way I would expect: if the reserves fall, the tension should rise; that’s how it always was. Instead, something else is there. A kind of foundational trust that it will somehow work out, that not every thought has to prove its market value immediately. Not because the situation has changed. The compulsion to make everything profitable has simply let go, and in its place is room for something quieter.

I go through the forms my life has taken. A shop in Hamburg. A biodynamic farm. There I delivered boxes, early in the morning, driving from house to house. A retreat center in Portugal, guests who arrived with their stories and left a few days later shifted slightly. Ten years in a truck. Outdoor education: teenagers, rucksacks, a fire in the evening and the questions that only come up at a fire. Vietnam, the beach at twenty to six, the plastic stool, the iced coffee.

From the outside these look like different lives. Different cities, different countries, different jobs, different versions of what Dirk does. But this morning, up here on the hill, with the coffee cup going slowly empty, I see the red thread running through all of it. It has nothing to do with shops or farms or trucks.

People. It was always people.

How they live. How they build a day from the same twenty-four hours everyone gets and end up somewhere entirely their own. What they tell themselves about why they are here. What they believe without ever having consciously decided to. Where their attention goes when no one is watching. Why they get up in the morning. What they call important, and what that word does for them. Why someone stays in one place for thirty years and why someone else moves on after three months: what is actually happening underneath both decisions.

I watch some travel content: vanlife channels, people out in old Mercedes trucks and converted campers, not unlike the Haubi. I enjoy it, and I understand exactly why it works. For half an hour you ride along, see the mountain pass, sit at a stranger’s campfire, watch the drone climb over the valley while the morning coffee steams on the dashboard.

And every time I notice where my attention goes instead. The camera is on the landscape; I am thinking about the person holding it. Why exactly this life, built exactly this way. What they are actually looking for, underneath the thumbnail, underneath the Sunday upload, underneath the welcome back to the channel. What the small community of viewers is directing their attention toward, and why. The video shows the pass; I am wondering who decided the pass was worth showing, and what that decision says about what this person wants from their life.

No judgment. Some of these people have been traveling for years from what the channel brings in, and that is remarkable in its own right. It is simply that I notice where my eyes go. The view is never it.

Lately the word philosophy keeps surfacing when I think about this. Not the academic sense, with footnotes and positions that have to be defended. The older sense of the word: curiosity about life itself, love of looking closely at what is actually there.

Most of what I write begins not because I want to explain something, but because I want to understand it better. Often when I sit down I don’t yet know where it is going. A thought arrives, my fear of money has grown quieter, and I follow it like a path into a forest I don’t yet know. From the entrance you can’t see the end. You go in anyway, because the path is there and something about it asks to be walked. Somewhere in the middle the shape of the thing reveals itself. Not before.

Today, for the first time in six weeks, there is room for exactly that walking.

The practical level has not disappeared. There is still a major service ahead: brakes, wheel bearings, the engine, the bodywork on the box that needs proper attention eventually. That is real, and it will have its turn. But this morning all of that sits further back in the room, alongside the money question. Both are present; neither is leading the conversation.

And into the space that opens, things come in. A glass of Riesling on a table somewhere, and the question of why exactly this pleasure, in exactly this glass, on exactly that evening, counted the way it counted, (and no, I have still not drunk any alcohol for 8 years, it is a memory). The structure of a Sangha: a group of people organized not around a product or a brand but around a shared direction of attention, and what that does to the people inside it. The attention of whole societies: where it points, and who decided that. Why people actually travel, really, underneath the Instagram answer. And the plain fact, here on the table next to the coffee: my fear of money has grown quieter, without the numbers being able to explain it.

It feels as if something has been uncovered that was always there. Not born this morning. Uncovered. A layer of practical necessities had been sitting over it for a while, the way dust collects on a table you haven’t used. The table was there all along.

Perhaps the work was never to find new ideas. Perhaps it is to look closely enough at what is already here.

The subjects are not elsewhere, waiting on a mountain pass or at a border to be discovered. They lie on the table. On the hill above Le Creusot. In a morning that began with a back at 2 out of 10, an empty list, and a coffee cup that went empty while I wrote a thousand words about why none of it is urgent anymore.

I only have to be here long enough, and quiet enough, to notice.

The coffee has long been drunk, and the hill lies still, looking out over Le Creusot in the valley below. Six weeks to get here. What happens in the seventh?

A drop hangs on the wire fence. Outside it is grey, fifteen degrees, a fine drizzle sitting over Rodemack, and the heating is running again. Middle of June. The high-pressure system has shifted. The drop just sits there. Round, heavy, complete in itself. Patient. It waits for the moment that is already on its way. It is just past five in the morning, the dreams of the night still present: murder, theft, prison — everything that wants to be processed. And still, attention keeps returning to something underneath all of it: I am. Simply that. Clean. The dreams have a different quality than before: attention stays with what is there.

The water lily opens when the conditions are right. That is the first image this morning, arriving while I still lie in the dark. The water lily follows a knowing that sits deeper than any decision. It opens because the moment is ripe: finished, complete, ready. I let it be there: this image, the drop on the fence, the still-heavy mood of the night, the grey sky behind it, the heating working steadily. I notice that something in me has stopped needing to resolve it immediately, even though I could — the open question, the restlessness, the dreams, the question of what comes next. That is new. That is the newest thing this summer has brought so far:

Can I watch what is becoming, while it is becoming?

By midday the sky has barely changed. Washing, a ten-kilometre drive to the next village, then to Lidl, then a coffee. That is exactly what I had planned for this morning, and that is what happened. On the way back to Haubi I sit for a moment, drink the coffee and simply watch what occurs. I notice: the chest is quiet. There is the grey and the rain and the unfinished day, and at the same time there is this quiet surface underneath. France used to be the stretch between Germany and Portugal. The transit corridor you moved through as efficiently as possible, because the destination was already waiting at the Algarve or somewhere in southwest Portugal. Four in the morning, coffee in a thermos, engine on, then nine hours straight — eight, nine times this route, ten times perhaps — and France was the road between where I was and where I was going. The body sat in the driver’s seat. The mind was already elsewhere. Mostly, anyway.

Today something else happens. The feeling arrives quietly, almost in passing: back to Rodemack has the weight of someone else’s suggestion. South is the right direction. A sensation. That is all. Open terrain, open next step, a quiet inner movement that feels like the obvious thing. I set off around midday. This is the first time in nine years I have left like this: around midday, slowly, the road the only thing that counts. It was always early, always fast, always a destination already doing the counting. Now the A31 lies ahead, towards Toul, then the D94 towards Neufchâteau, and the landscape grows wider, quieter, the sun appearing between the hills of the Haute-Marne, and I simply drive until something says: here.

Goncourt. A church, a bridge, a stream, a tabac. That is all the map shows, and it is accurate. Somewhere here by this small stretch of water that calls itself the Meuse before it grows large, Haubi finds a spot in the sun, and when I step out it is immediately there: warmth on the skin, light on the water, a silence that feels right — the kind of silence you recognise the moment you are inside it. I walk through the village. Very, very little: a tabac with beer on tap where a man is enjoying what is clearly a well-earned end-of-day drink, the path along the stream with old stones. Completely right. A German woman comes along the path with a dog — the dog sniffing, she smiling. You can walk beautifully here, she says, and gestures roughly in one direction, because the direction is obvious when you are standing by a stream. I say thank you. Then I find the sign.

Circuit des Ponts. 10 km. 2h 30.

I set off on the spot. The way the whole day is on the spot.

First along the stream, the water slow and clear, then along the railway line, the valley wide and open, sunlight on the gravel. Left and right the hills and wooded terrain extend. The trail markers appear: number 36, blue and yellow, on posts, on stone walls, always at the moment you begin to doubt the last direction. One after another. Then the fork arrives, and the sign points left and up, out of the valley and into the forest. The first hundred metres steep, the ground wet from rain, then the forest opens: old beeches, mossy stones, light working through the canopy, a floor of years upon years of fallen leaves that yields softly underfoot. Very quiet here. The kind of silence in which you hear your own breath, your steps, the forest.

Then on the ridge the markers stop. The route had walkers going the other way in mind, and my direction is on its own from here. This is terrain. I check my position on Organic Maps, read the topography, look for the catch line — that is the first thing you learn in the wild: find the terrain feature that holds you when all the markers are gone. The next road lies to the west. The valley to the east. Organic Maps, dotted lines, manageable scale. On the Jordan Trail this was everyday life: through wadis with a compass, on stretches where the promised signage turned out to be a rumour, five days through the southern desert with GPS and the next perceptible step. This is different terrain. Readable on its own terms. I orient myself. Attention stays quiet and alert, the way forward open.

And then, in a small hollow, a handmade construction of stones and wood, and beside it a sign: Source de la Louvière. A spring, directly from the ground. The water is cold, genuinely cold, and I drink, stand there a while, the cool forest around me, the water on my tongue. This spring simply appears. In the middle of the forest. With a sign.

While I pause a moment later to look at an old stone and wonder how it came to be here and what its history is — a deer, ten metres ahead. It stands briefly, looks, crosses the path and is gone. I stay still. Then on. Wild boar tracks everywhere, the ground churned up left and right. Fresh — that was last night. Tall grass, fallen trees, a field at the edge of the forest, then a barbed-wire fence running across the terrain. I walk parallel to it, thirty metres, forty, until the gap comes, and push through. The calves catch the bottom wire. And then: the railway line. The same gravel, the same rails I set off along earlier. Now from the other side, the village in sight, Haubi where I left him. The circle closes.

Ten kilometers on the clock. With the ascents and the cross-country section it will be a little over ten in the end. I am tired and very satisfied — the only right combination after an evening like this. The calves show traces of the last metres through the undergrowth. Haubi stands in the last sun, the summer moving through the valley, and I sit outside, legs stretched out, let the silence arrive.

This Friday still had the face of an empty day this morning: washing, shopping, open terrain. A day that holds what it is until it shows itself. And then it unfolded: Goncourt appeared as the next step, from the single logic of the direction that felt right. The walking route stood on a sign and waited for someone who stops. The spring lay along the path, cold and unannounced. The deer was simply there. The detour through the undergrowth was orientation under different conditions: stayed with it, held the inner centre. Each of these things arose from the one before. Everything from the moment, each one always already the material for the next.

That is the connection to the morning that I see now. The drop on the wire fence, hanging quietly, waiting for its moment. The water lily opening because the conditions are right. All of it from a movement that sits deeper than determination or speed, deeper than any travel plan. On nine drives through France that was invisible. Because the mind was already elsewhere, already in the next chapter, already at the arrival that counted, and France in between simply vanished. Today I was in Goncourt. In this small village that earns only a dot on most maps, that has a church and a tabac and a walking route that takes you up from the valley into the forest, through beeches and mossy stones and a named spring that gives cold water directly from the ground.

The drop falls when it is ready. That is the sentence this day began with. I held it in the morning as an image, as a question, as something on a trail that reveals itself while you walk. Now, in the evening, with tired legs and the last daylight on my face, I have the feeling that the day lived this question — step by step, from the heating in Rodemack to the barbed-wire fence above the field near Goncourt, the direction each time arising from the previous moment, the whole thing out of itself.

There is something here that can be described, and there is something here that slips past description. That is what is beautiful about it. Nine years with Haubi. Almost always a destination. Mostly I wanted to arrive somewhere. And this day — this quiet Friday in the Haute-Marne — is the first time France was a place.

What opens when you let go of already knowing what comes next?

Look at Goncourt.

The screen is black. The future is unwritten. This is the environment I love.

I’m sitting at Good Folks Café in Da Nang. Six more days until I leave Vietnam. Outside, the street is already warm. In here, it’s quiet enough that something else can begin.

I feel pressure to come up with something great. Something right. I notice the pressure the way you notice a hand on your shoulder — and I set it down on the table beside me. This is a different mode than building. This is descent. And descent happens by itself. Like a stone sinking to the floor of a lake.

I see myself standing at the edge of the water. He is the Builder — the one who throws the stone. He seems bored when there’s nothing to construct. But inside him, like those Russian nesting figures where one contains another contains another, there is the stone itself. The one that sinks. I follow the energy.

Steven King wrote about this in On Writing — that there’s a place in you where writing begins. Mine is the Black Zen Garden. Dark first. Unknown. I only arrive here when I’m exhausted by the world, when I’ve spent weeks inside intellectual work — understanding, structuring, building. This kind of writing is the opposite of that. This is meditation. Not knowing. Allow. The rules of gravity don’t apply. Moon boots.

The moment I touch the surface of the water, my shape changes.

I become a diver who can breathe underwater.

I’m not hungry. I’m not thirsty. I’m not fighting the current — I’m following it. I sink, and there’s something playful in the sinking. Legs kick lightly. Arms move in slow arcs. Then I turn face-upward, arms open wide, and let the weight take me. The world above the water simply ceases.

Even here, a voice finds me: That’s boring. Tell an exciting story. Another voice, quieter: Swim. Let go. Enjoy. I notice both. I keep sinking.

This is where everything I built over the last months was born. I feel it with my body, not my mind — the certainty that this dark, gravity-free place underneath the intellectual work is the source. The code, the structure, the words, the system. Everything. It existed here before I built it. It will exist here after.

The lake is always water. Not earth or air or fire. Water. Movement is slow here. If you want to be fast, you can’t. That’s the whole teaching, compressed.

I feel like I’m in the heart of everything — in the heart of Da Nang, of Bao An, of Minh, of Pai, of Münster. Like a source where all the places I’ve loved appear and dissolve, appear and dissolve, like breath.

Come home, Dirk.

Everything is here already.

I am no longer the diver — I am a manta ray. Broad wings. Moving slow. Each upward stroke is one breath in, each downward stroke is one breath out. The surrounding area becomes visible the way the world becomes visible just before sunrise — not all at once, from the edges, gradually. A grey-dark stone floor below me. The water around me is neither warm nor cold. It simply holds. Then I sense a cave. Something calls from inside it. Come here. Come here. It’s time. My wings rise. My wings fall. I move toward it.

The stone walls are dark grey. They catch no light, throw no reflection. I know who is waiting at the end of the cave before I can see him. The Dread Guy — the figure I’ve been circling since September. The one who sat with me at the fire on April 5th and gave me nothing, no name, only presence. He changes forms. Dread Guy. Shin Li. Magician. A unicorn that shows itself only when you’ve stopped searching for it. He is sitting at the far end of the cave, beside a fire. An underwater fire. I had no idea such a thing was possible. Here it is.

—

In the same way you cannot lose what’s outside, you cannot lose what’s inside. You cannot escape who you are.

I hear it before I reach him. The words are already in me when they arrive, the way true things are — you recognize them rather than receive them. The fire pulls me. He pulls me. I come closer.

We are facing each other now. I’m still floating. He seems to breathe underwater as easily as I do, as easily as the fire burns inside water. He sits in the yogi position, but sits is the wrong word — he floats in it, unheld, unanchored, completely still. Finally, he says. You made it. He says it the way you say something to a person who already knows what you’re going to say. No surprise on either side. Just arrival. You know that I am you and you are me. And I say: Yes. I know.

Nobody speaks for a while. The fire moves. The water holds. The stone walls hold. My wings lift. My wings fall. Across the fire, he sits weightless in the yogi position, eyes on mine.

Across the fire, the manta ray is floating. Wings lifting, wings falling. Breathing the way I breathe.

Roy.

And from the spine outward, the other name.

Yoda.

Across the fire, Yoda sits exactly as before. My wings lift. My wings fall.

Yoda, I say. Of course. So, Yoda — why did you call me? I heard you, even from further away.

Because — and he begins slowly, the way someone begins who is not searching for the words — I knew you needed some support. And some encounter. For clarity. Not for something new. There is nothing new here. We both already know. We just take the form the environment requires. We are both here to remind each other of this. I see it in you and you in me, Roy.

The fire and the water are in perfect harmony.

Then everything softens. The edges blur. The cave, the fire, the stone walls — they slowly dissolve, and my awareness stays, but the water is gone. I’m sitting on a rock in an open field. Flat land, dry grass. A steppe, wide and still. I close my eyes. When I open them — the cave is back. Instant. Yoda is there. The fire is there. I close them again. The field. It’s all there. It’s just what changes.

I sit in Good Folks Café, six days before leaving Vietnam. The street outside is warm. The screen in front of me is full now.

I am the man at the shore and the stone and the diver and the manta ray. I am Roy looking at Yoda and Yoda looking at Roy. I am the cave and the field. None of it contradicts.

You cannot lose what’s inside. That’s the whole thing. That’s what Yoda came to say — or what I came to hear him say, which is the same.

The fire burns in the water. I still have no idea how.

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The appartement is on the sixth floor, small and dark at a quarter to four in the morning. Below the window, a makeshift roof of tarpaulin, hastily assembled. The woman underneath it has already started her fire. The same fire every morning, for the soup she will serve at dawn. A bird sings somewhere, the same four notes it always sings at this hour. A scooter passes on the street. The screen holds a single window of text. Beside it, the bancha tea. Oat milk added until the color was exactly right, the color that already tells you how it will taste. I am reading Piranesi.

Piranesi is about a man who lives in a house with no outside. The house runs infinite in every direction: halls, vestibules, staircases beyond counting, tides that pour through the lower floors and withdraw again with the regularity of breath. Statues line every corridor: minotaurs, angels, a woman carrying a beehive, a figure holding a sphere aloft in the dark. The man who lives there moves through all of it with complete ease. He knows which staircase catches the early light, where the fish swim in with the tide, which alcove stays dry enough to sleep. He is, in a word the book earns slowly, at home.

I read for an hour. Then I set the book down and notice what arrived while I was reading. Not from it, exactly. From inside it. An image I had been circling for weeks, loose and unresolved. A sentence that had refused to come. A direction for something I could not previously see. All of it sitting quietly, the way things sit when you stop moving furniture around them. A fly lands on my wrist. I don’t move.

Something happens in the gap of doing nothing useful.

I keep notes in a vault I named Zen Garden. The name arrived sideways and then felt inevitable. A place where things are not filed so much as composted. Fragments, observations, sentences that belong nowhere yet. Ideas that arrived on a morning walk and landed in a note before they could dissolve. They sit in the dark until something grows from them. The raked sand around the stone. The careful space that makes the stone matter.

A Zen garden does not look like much is happening. That is the point. The emptiness is not absence — it is condition. Without the sand, no stone. Without the gaps between the notes, no resonance between them. Certain old traditions understood this about silence the way the Japanese understood it about gardens: what looks empty is often where things are becoming. The morning this note began, there was no café, no structured session, no agenda. Just the dark, a book about infinite halls, the tea still warm. Most frameworks for creative work would mark it in red.

What is so-called emptiness? Empty of what, exactly?

The discomfort of doing nothing useful is real and worth naming. Its presence tells us something. The guilt about the fantasy novel. The low-grade sense that this does not count. The pull to open a more serious tab. All of it is evidence of how thoroughly we have been trained to distrust the garden. To see only what can be harvested, never the soil it grows in.

There is a fire at the center of everything I build and write. I have used the word for years. Always knowing what it meant, and always finding it means something more when I return to it. Each return goes deeper. Perhaps because I stay away for too long. The fire is not the burning. The fire is the space the burning makes. The ring of warmth and light pressed outward from the center into the dark, the circle that forms around any real heat. People have gathered around fires for a hundred thousand years. The flame draws them. The circle the flame makes holds them. A place to return to. A center that stays. The inner home made visible in the world.

The clearing. That is what the fire actually is.

Below the window, the woman’s soup is almost ready.

A few months before that morning, a woman came to meet with me. She arrived tired in a particular way. The kind that has settled into the bones after months of too much. She worked hard, thought fast, cared about everything she touched. She knew what she needed. When I asked, the answer came quietly: just some space. Just to feel herself again.

Then we looked at how she filled her days. The space she said she needed appeared in her calendar, marked and protected. And each time, something had moved in. A meeting that couldn’t be shifted. A message that needed answering today. She had been diligent about protecting the thing she needed, and had not managed to be inside it once in three months. I reflected it back to her. She sat with it for a moment, then said: I keep scheduling myself further away from myself.

At a certain point she said: I can breathe. I feel space in my chest. I feel myself again.

She was describing the return to something she had always carried. The noise had quieted enough that it was audible again. What we settled on was small. Every evening, twenty minutes with a novel. A real one, with characters and rooms and a world she had never seen. The kind of book where you forget what time it is.

Her version of Piranesi’s halls, if you like. Twenty minutes in an infinite house where she already knew every staircase.

I have spent years building and rebuilding around the center. New systems, new structures, new architectures for saying the same thing in a different frame. Each time carrying the same energy underneath: once the structure is right, once everything is in order, then the home will be possible. It never worked that way. Each structure eventually felt off, and the pulling apart began again. The pattern has a name now, written somewhere in Zen Garden between a note on database queries and a half-finished essay on what afternoon light actually is. Identification. The belief that I am the thing I have built, so when the thing feels wrong, existence itself feels threatened.

The fire underneath the building was always there. That is what the fire means. It does not depend on the structure around it. The clearing exists before the fire is lit and remains after it has gone out. The inner home is not a destination that arrives when the conditions are right. It is the ground the conditions rest on.

Piranesi has this line:

“But what is a few days of feeling cold compared to a new albatross in the world?”

I wrote it into a note the morning I read it. It says something true about proportion. The discomfort of sitting with what is actually here, rather than managing it, is small. Smaller than it feels at the moment. What arrives in that presence is worth more than most of what the managing produces. The albatross is the thing that becomes possible when you stop making yourself useful. That is the return on stillness.

The inner home is not a resting place from the work. It is the ground the work grows from. Zen Garden. The raked sand. The space around the fire. When the garden fills with noise and structure and sub-planets, the stone is still there. The fire is still there, at the center of the clearing.

Go far enough into Piranesi’s house and the halls stop feeling infinite. They start feeling like the inside of something familiar. A man who knows which window catches the morning light is not lost in an infinite house. He is more at home than most people manage in a very small one.

This is what the reading gave me at a quarter to four in the morning. The reminder that the house was already here. That all the building, all the rebuilding, every structure raised and torn apart, has been, underneath everything, a very long way of learning how to stop.

The appartement still quiet. The bancha tea, the right color in the cup. The fire burning at the center. Piranesi in the hall of statues, completely at home. And somewhere in the upper reaches of the house, an albatross.

The last light goes at half past four. We’ve been building the fire since three — splitting birch, stacking it loose enough to breathe, laying the kindling in a nest of dry grass. Now the flames climb and the forest closes in around us like a curtain drawn from every direction at once.

Alex sits across from me, hands extended toward the heat, palms open. Behind her, the trees have disappeared — absorbed into a darkness so complete it feels like a wall. She keeps turning to look over her shoulder. “I can’t see anything back there,” she says. “Nothing.” I turn too. She’s right. Just black. The kind of black that cities never produce. “Strange how fast it happens,” I say. “Five minutes ago I could see the birches.”

The fire pops. A knot of resin bursts and sends a shower of sparks into the cold air. We watch them rise and vanish, one by one, into a sky so black the stars look close enough to flinch from.

The Adjustment

Twenty minutes pass. Alex stops turning around. The fire has become the whole world — warmth on the face, cold on the back, the sound of wood collapsing into itself. Everything else falls away. The day. The plans. The phone, which she left in the car without being asked.

At some point I look away from the flames. Not on purpose. My eyes drift sideways, and suddenly the trees are there again. Shapes. Outlines. I blink. “Alex. Look away from the fire for a second. Just let your eyes go soft.”

She does. A few seconds of nothing. Then: “Wait. I can see the trees.” “Me too. They came back.” “The ridge. There’s a ridge behind the pines. And something moved — a branch, or —” We both listen. A low sound, almost a breath, passing above us. “Owl?” she says. “I think so.”

She turns back to me. “How long has all of that been there?” “The whole time, I think. We just couldn’t see it because we were staring into the fire.” She looks out again. Softer this time. I do the same. The forest has a different shape now — wider, deeper, full of small movements that the firelight had hidden. Neither of us says anything for a while. We’re both doing the same thing. Letting the dark come in instead of pushing our eyes against it.

The North

The temperature falls. We’re deep into the evening now, the fire burned down to a steady glow, the birch logs white with ash. Alex has pulled her jacket tighter, her breath visible in short clouds that the firelight turns orange.

“You know what this reminds me of?” she says. “There’s this old idea — the North as a direction on the medicine wheel. Winter. Night. The place where everything slows down and gets quiet.” “I’ve read about that. The part of the cycle that everyone tries to skip.” “Because it feels like nothing is happening.” She pokes the embers with a stick. The coals shift and a new heat rises. “I’ve been in winter for months. That’s what it feels like. Everything I used to do — the speed, the output, the clarity — it’s gone. I wake up, and the day has no shape. I sit down to plan and nothing comes.”

“I know that feeling. The mornings in Da Nang when I’d sit with a coffee and wait for direction and nothing showed up. For weeks.” She looks at me. “What did you do?” “Sat with it. Badly, mostly. Kept trying to force something. Then at some point I stopped forcing and just stayed in the not-knowing. And it was awful. And then it wasn’t.”

An ember falls through the grate of logs and glows alone on the ground between us. We both look at it.

“Maybe that’s the thing about winter,” Alex says. “It doesn’t come with a destination. It comes with a quality.” “Stillness.” “And the kind of seeing we just did with the trees. Where you stop looking for the thing and let the whole picture arrive.” I nod. That’s exactly it.

The Listening

We sit in silence for a while. The fire crackles. Then Alex closes her eyes. I watch her face change — something softens around the jaw, the forehead. After a minute she says, quietly: “The wind is only up there. In the canopy. Down here it’s completely still.” I close my eyes too. She’s right. Two layers — movement above, stillness below. And underneath that, something scratching on bark. Small. Rhythmic. And underneath that, our own breathing.

“I never hear this much at home,” she says. “There’s always something louder.” “Same. It’s like attention works differently here. Less like a flashlight, more like a —” “A bowl,” she says. “Like it fills up instead of pointing.” “Jon Young writes about that. Wide-angle awareness. The way a deer stands in a meadow. Alert without tension.” “Present without focus,” she says. “The opposite of how I’ve worked my entire life.” We both laugh. It’s the same laugh — the one that comes from recognizing something you’ve been doing for years without seeing it.

The sound moves into the dark between the trees and doesn’t come back.

The Ember

The fire is low now. We’ve stopped feeding it. What remains is enough — a bed of coals that radiates without flame, the heat rising in waves that make the stars behind it shimmer.

“I spent last week trying to map out my next year,” Alex says. “Goals. Timelines. Revenue targets. I filled a whole notebook.” “And?” “Exhausting. Like building a house on a frozen lake. I know the ice will melt. I just don’t know when.” I look at the coals. “Maybe that’s the difference. Between orienting and optimizing. One asks where am I, the other asks how do I go faster. And faster only works when you already know the direction.” “I don’t know the direction.” “Neither do I, half the time. But I know this fire.”

She looks at the embers. The coals rearrange themselves as a log collapses, and for a moment the fire looks entirely different — the same materials, the same heat, but a new shape.

“It moves through phases,” Alex says. “The roar at the beginning — all that flame and heat. And now this. Quieter. Deeper.” “The coals hold more heat than the flames ever did.” “But they don’t perform.” “No. They just radiate.”

We sit with that. The parallel is obvious. Neither of us needs to say it.

The Dark

The coals fade from orange to deep red. The cold presses in closer. The forest sounds have changed — the daytime birds are gone and the night creatures own the air now. The owl calls twice from the ridge. Something moves through dry leaves to the west, stops, moves again.

Alex’s eyes have adjusted completely. So have mine. We’re both looking out into the dark with that soft gaze — the one that doesn’t grab. Just receives. The forest at night is a different animal than the one we walked through this afternoon. More alive, somehow. More honest.

“I keep thinking I should know what comes next,” she says. “But maybe this is the part where I don’t. Maybe this is the part where we just sit here and let our eyes adjust.” “I think that’s exactly what this is.”

The last coal holds its color the way a word holds its meaning after the conversation ends — quietly, completely, without needing to be spoken again.

I put another log on. Not because we need the light. Because the night is long, and some fires are meant to burn slow.

I’m sitting here on the sixth floor in Vietnam. It’s early. The tea is warm. The mountain outside the window stands still, as it always does. I start typing, and while I do, I think of you. I can almost see you — maybe in Berlin, Cologne, or Chiang Mai, maybe somewhere else entirely. The sky might still be dark. The coffee machine just started. Maybe you tried to send one more email or take out the trash when what you really wanted was simply a breath. Around you, things pile up — tasks, thoughts, laundry, expectations. You wonder when it all gets lighter, and when it started feeling this heavy. Was it always like this?

This morning, in the stillness before sunrise, there was that familiar pulse again. No thought, no sentence. More like a fine vibration just beneath the surface — a thin current running through you. On a scale from one to ten, maybe a one point five. The mind moves in to give it shape, because that’s what it does. Call it restlessness, call it flicker, maybe a faint pull in the chest, maybe something without a name. And then, almost like an echo, comes the question: Is something missing? It rises softly, as if trying to give this subtle vibration a body. Something inside feels along the edges, checking if everything aligns or if one small note has slipped out of tune.

Then something in me relaxes. Maybe. Maybe not. I sit here with my warm tea. No pressure. No need. And still — or maybe because of that — this soft vibration lingers, whispering: there’s something here, something asking to be seen. When I stay with it — breathing, sitting, watching — the noise settles. What remains is simple: tea, breath, the mountain, and me.

I’ve tried so many versions of life. Money and no money. Great loves and great losses. Punk, luxury cars, homelessness, designer jackets, cheap wine. The whole menu, every flavor. Each time I thought, this is it. And then again, there came a moment when something felt off. Too much. Too little. Untrue. Now it’s different. Maybe that’s all it is. I no longer push. I no longer wait for rescue, from the outside or from within. I sit here and write. It happens, right now.

Sometimes I sense that you read these words. Out of curiosity maybe, or resonance. Because something inside you hums in response. Maybe just for a second. Maybe like a quiet yes. That soft recognition: Yeah. I feel that too. I picture you reading this. Maybe at the kitchen table. Maybe on the train. Maybe between two moments that don’t leave much room to breathe. And then it happens — a small stillness. Because something inside starts listening.

Maybe you set your phone down for a moment. You take one unplanned breath. You feel the cup in your hand, the sound in the room, the light on the wall. And for a heartbeat, you realize: you’re here. Not perfect. Not finished. Just here. And I can almost hear your mind reply: “Nice thought. Five seconds of calm — and then back to taking out the trash.” Yes, you’ll take out the trash. But maybe this time it feels different. A little more awake. A little more at peace. Because this is it already.

There’s nothing greater waiting around the corner. What matters isn’t what happens — it’s how you move through it. And suddenly, even the smallest act becomes quiet joy, once you allow it. I just want to say this: I see you. Directly. Quietly. The way you see someone when you recognize a place you’ve been yourself — a place I still know. You’re right on time. You haven’t missed your life.

Sometimes all it takes is a moment where someone says something true out loud. No fix, no goal, just truth. That’s why I write — for this in-between space, where two people meet and neither needs to speak louder than the other. Me here. You there. Two open rooms. And maybe, right now, nothing is missing.

The Leather Is Cold

The leather is cold. I’m the first one here. The whole floor is empty — six round tables along the long sofa against the wall, every chair pushed in, every surface clean. That’s one of the things I love about this hour. The café belongs to the silence before it belongs to anyone else.

I slide into the corner of the couch, the one against the wall, and place my hands flat on the wood table. Teak, maybe. Dark grain, a ring stain from yesterday’s cup, a scratch near the edge that I’ve traced with my fingertip a hundred times.

The barista moves behind the counter. The sound of oat milk frothing — that sharp hiss, then the soft pour. A spoon clinks against ceramic. Outside, the street is still quiet. A motorbike passes, then nothing. Then another.

I’ve been sitting on this sofa since August.

Seven Months, Same Table

Seven months. The same leather couch, the same wood table, the same barista who knows my order before I speak. The same glance through the courtyard window where a large banana tree stands still in the morning air, its leaves heavy and wide, catching the first light. Behind it, the opposite building turns copper at exactly 7:45 — three minutes, then white again.

In August, I sat here with a sketchbook and a question I couldn’t yet spell. Something about fire. Something about what remains when everything else is stripped away. Shin Li was three months old then — born in May from silence, from walking, from mornings exactly like this one. I drew illustrations on my phone and posted them on Instagram, three times a week, and it felt like breathing. Inhale the walk. Exhale the image.

That was the beginning. I just sat here and things appeared.

What Grew

The first guest arrives around 8:15. A woman with a laptop, headphones already in. She takes the table by the courtyard, orders something cold, opens her screen. Her lips move slightly, the way people read when the words matter. The café is waking up.

In June, I sat in a jungle hut in Pai and wrote a thousand words before breakfast. The fire symbol became a logo. The website went live — aquarell aesthetics, a fire in the center, everything orbiting. “When you arrive here, I want you to feel welcome. As if you stepped closer to a fire, just to sit down and be.” That line arrived in the hut. It’s still true.

In August, I came to Da Nang and sat on this sofa for the first time. The long game began. Daily writing. Slow building. Instagram and blog, three posts a week. “I’m arriving. Slowly. But I’m arriving.”

In October, everything opened. A hundred and eleven files in one month. The Inner Landscapes card set — published, complete, a creative arc that resolved itself. Flight 307 — a dream about a plane that became a story about trust. Iron Hans. The biography. Empty Page Writing. Medium set up, the first article posted there. Every morning the same: wake, coffee, write a thousand words, walk. The most productive month I’ve ever had. And I was just sitting here, in this café, letting things come.

Then November. Someone said I needed a persona. I built eighteen files in a day. Someone said “do it differently.” I redesigned the website. December brought silence and reading — and from that silence, a name: OUTJOY. Follow the joy. It arrived, it wasn’t invented. In January, the German site launched. A couple in a restaurant said “do it in English,” so I rebuilt everything in English. February brought research — thirteen documents, pricing, a new persona named Alex, a tool I built from scratch called Gravity Field. March: a third website, this time in a single day. Ten articles written. LinkedIn. Calendly. A lighthouse instead of a compass.

Nine months. Each one built something real. Shin Li. The card set. The fire articles. The biography fragments. A tool that works. A website that stands. A name that fits. And between these — the rebuilds, the pivots, the moments where someone else’s voice became louder than mine. Five names for who I should be. Four platforms. Two languages. That part is true too.

But here’s what I see from this sofa, looking back through the courtyard at the banana tree: it was all the same fire. Even the detours fed it. The persona work made my writing more human. The English pivot unlocked a voice I write in now, every morning, fluently. The research sharpened something I could only feel before. Every sandcastle I built and let the sea take — I kept the skill of building.

The Sofa Waits

But here’s the thing about this place. It waits.

Every time I came back — after the rebuild, after the pivot, after the night I finished a website and felt proud for a moment before the voice in the back said it’s not enough, do more, something is missing — the leather was here. The scratch was in the same place. The barista poured the same milk. And the banana tree stood in the courtyard, unmoved, its leaves wide open like palms held up in patience.

The café kept its shape while I lost mine. And something in that consistency, that patience of a place, taught me what I couldn’t teach myself: that arriving is its own achievement. Sitting down is the beginning. The empty page is full already — full of space.

The Room Fills

By 8:30, the café has changed. Two more laptops open. A couple shares a smoothie bowl near the door. Someone speaks softly into a phone in a language I can’t place. The barista is moving faster now — two orders, three, the milk hiss overlapping with the grinder. The glass door opens and closes, opens and closes. Each time, a gust of warm air — jasmine, exhaust, something sweet from the bakery two doors down. Each time, the café swallows the city again.

I watch the room fill the way you watch a tide come in. Slowly, then all at once. And I think about how this is the rhythm I trust most: the empty floor, the silence, the first light. Then the world arrives. It always does. You just have to be here when it comes.

Last week, I had a conversation with someone I hadn’t spoken to in a while. We talked for an hour, maybe longer. He carried a lot — the kind of weight that comes from building too many things at once and losing the ground beneath them. I said very little. Mostly I listened. At some point he paused, exhaled, and said: “I can breathe again.” And I realized — that’s what this sofa has been teaching me every morning. The room holds still. I hold still. And something in the other person remembers how to land.

Two days before that, a man stopped me in a small restaurant near the bridge. I couldn’t place him at first. Then he grinned. “How can you forget me? I’m a special person.” And it came back — a night months ago when something of mine got lost and a whole neighborhood stood up. He looked at me the way you look at someone you’ve shared a storm with. “We like you very much,” he said. “You have a gentle and friendly charisma.”

A friend said the same thing the day before. Different words, same recognition.

Granola and Gold

I take a sip. Banana smoothie bowl today, cold and sweet, the granola still crunchy on top. The sun has moved past the copper phase. The wall across the courtyard is white again. The banana tree hasn’t moved. A motorbike honks somewhere. The barista wipes the counter in long, slow strokes.

Nine months. Shin Li. Eight hundred and fifty-one notes. Two websites, built and standing. Twenty-two articles. Visual poems. An entire card set — Inner Landscapes — drawn from conversations with silence. A session that landed. People who remember my face and say it out loud. A pattern named and seen. Two fires burning at the same time, for the first time, side by side.

And this morning, I woke at 4:45 and wrote in the dark. The screen was dark blue, the cursor blinking. My mind was calm. And I wrote the sentence that might be the simplest thing I’ve ever understood:

Everything is where it has to be.

The Other Measure

There’s a way of measuring a life that counts revenue, followers, impressions. A scoreboard. Numbers that go up or stay flat. By that measure, these nine months look like a long walk with no destination.

But there’s another way. The way you measure a tree — by the depth of its roots, the width of its shade, the steadiness of its trunk when the wind comes. By what it holds, quietly, for anyone who sits beneath it.

I’ve been sitting on this sofa since August. And everything I needed to find, I found by coming back to it. The fire was always here. The words were always here. The people showed up — at restaurants, on video calls, on morning walks along the beach at 5:40 when the light turns gold and the sand is still cool under bare feet and the sea says the same thing it said yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that:

You’re here. That’s enough. Start from here.

Tomorrow, Same Sofa

I close the laptop. The smoothie bowl is empty. The room is full now — voices, screens, the clink of cups, a laugh from the courtyard table. The woman with the headphones is still reading, her lips still moving. The barista folds a cloth. Someone opens the glass door and the city floods in again — jasmine, exhaust, the sweet thing from the bakery. Then the door closes.

Tomorrow I’ll sit in the same spot. The leather will be cold. The floor will be empty. And something will want to be written, because something always does, when you give it the space and the silence and the trust to arrive on its own time.

Thank you for reading.
If this stayed with you, there’s more to come.
Subscribe and the next ember finds you.

See you at the fire

Dirk