Wild & Simple - Stories from an ordinary life, where chocolate and chili dance together.
Dear reader,
This week a word came up to the surface, a word I have been hearing my whole life: STAY. Stay on your butt and watch what happens. That’s your only task in this life. How hard can it be? Very hard, as it turned out. Because hundreds of times, when I was already at that point, something exciting came wandering along, and zap, I was gone and no longer on my butt. These days that pull has no energy left at all, because for days I have been sitting on my butt doing nothing but looking out of the window, writing, moving a little, going to the toilet, showering, eating and drinking. And while I do that, I watch what happens.
The Sign
Ever since I was young, life kept coming to me with this sign, and on it was written: “STAY”. At first I never understood it, and I even fought it. “Shut your mouth, stay, what do you want from me, piss off.” That’s really what it looked like in my head. But life doesn’t let go. It left me alone for a while and turned up somewhere else, nailed to a tree or as a sticker on a car. “STAY”. I had an inkling, something in me resonated, but it frightened me.
Over the course of my life there were countless points along the way where I took STAY in and accepted it. 1989, my first detox, and after that STAY without alcohol. In 1990 a friend gives me “The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying” by Sogyal Rinpoche. In there too: STAY. My friend Franquesko said back then: “He’s talking about what you keep telling me.” Good. I stayed with the book. For a while. Then in 1994 the collapse, the surrender, three months of detox and inpatient therapy. Life taps me on the shoulder: “Stay. Very good.” In the years after that I stayed clean, without substances. I think that was the time when STAY and my “soul” came through most strongly. Working in theater, martial arts, meditation, AA meetings, art, culture, safety. Still, again and again I drifted away from STAY, mostly without noticing, and suddenly found myself inside some story or other.
The last call for STAY was written so clearly across the sky, here above the sea, that this time I can’t ignore it.
4:54
I wake up quite naturally, usually around four. I move a little, make my coffee and sit down at the window, like now. It’s 4:54. In a few minutes the sun will rise.
And while I look out, a morning verse by Rudolf Steiner comes to mind, one that makes me quite wistful:
I look into the world,
In which the sun is shining,
In which the stars are sparkling,
In which the stones are resting,
The plants are living, growing,
The beasts are living, feeling,
In which the human, ensouled,
Gives dwelling to the spirit.
I look into the soul
That lives within my being.
The spirit of God is weaving
In sunlight and in soul-light,
In world-space, out there,
In soul-depths, within.
To you, o spirit of God,
I turn myself in asking
That strength and blessing
For learning and for work
May grow within me.
I heard groups of teenagers say this so-called “prayer” on canoe trips, standing in a circle out in nature in the morning. It still warms my heart. This verse has been with me all summer. It rises in my mind on its own, again and again. Maybe because it’s so magical, and because we far too often take everything for granted.
I look into the world,
In which the sun is shining.
That’s exactly what I do every morning. And if I look closely, I’m doing it even before that. “In which the stars are sparkling.” Because it’s still night, or so early in the morning that it’s dark. And when I hear Steiner’s line in my mind and look out at the same time, another memory joins in: in 2019 I did this same practice every morning on my hill, Monte Sobreiro in Portugal. Back then as part of a morning practice from Jon Young’s 8 Shields model. What energy does the early morning carry? What happens in the mind and in the nervous system? This practice seems to arise in me quite naturally. I don’t have to force myself to the table.
The Water Lily
The words God and soul don’t bother me here. I replace God with life. In the end they’re just words that hold energy, words people have used for thousands of years, like mantras in India. I like the word soul very much, because it opens places in my mind that only become visible when I stay seated and listen. Then something opens in me like a water lily, without my doing anything or being productive.
The most productive thing here is to be still.
When the water lily opens, things come up that touch my soul: memories of art, paintings a friend of mine made in an attic on Steindamm in Hamburg. It smelled of paint, of coffee and of life up there. That’s a place where my soul sets up a folding chair with a headrest and lingers. From there I see more and more things appearing: soap from the south of France, bunches of flowers from the south of France, lavender fields, sensual cooking sessions with my brother that last a whole day, with a glorious mess and wine in the kitchen, setting a table for Christmas so beautiful that it touches the hearts of everyone who gathers there. And then the long meal together with family and friends at that long table. Everything we made in the kitchen with love and devotion is now “destroyed”. With relish. Bitten apart. My soul loves the erotic side of it too.
What else comes to mind when I think of soul? Massage, oil, touch, soft music, letting the soul hang loose, as we say in German, quite literally. The word soul means far more to me than the word screwdriver. Screwdrivers and jackhammers are cool too, I don’t reject them; they’re just not quite in tune with the vibration of my soul.
Stillness and listening. That is the pure expression of the soul. The face of the soul, maybe. When you are still and listening and someone looks into your eyes, they look straight into your soul.
Shoes Off
Now you might think: wow, that’s seriously boring, why are you doing this, what’s your goal, who do you want to reach, who’s your reader? All these questions have dissolved over the last few days. And it feels as if life sends me all this without my asking. Everything that has no substance simply dissolves and melts away. Ideas like having to achieve something with my Substack, having a plan, monetizing. Doing something meaningful with it.
So I look into the world. In which the sun is shining. And I’m so connected with life (God) itself that it knocks my shoes off. And life says: “Good, shoes off. Just keep looking, barefoot.” I keep looking.
So life has already taken off my shoes, and one identification after another falls away too. Melts like butter in the sun. It seems to be an energetic process above all.
Other questions have washed up to the surface: Who am I? Who is looking? What is looking? How long does a sunrise last if I don’t look away? Is there separation? Can anyone really know anything? Questions like these rise in the stillness on their own, without any other thought coming before them.
I watch the movements of the sunrise over the sea.
The sea moves first: the wind ripples the surface, and the water in me moves with it. The clouds above stand still until I let myself sink long enough into their slowness and see them drift. Behind them the mountain rises out of the water, the most motionless thing of all, and yet it moves too. I see it because the mountain in me moves too, ever so softly, and with it time dissolves.
Who Is Looking?
And the question comes up: Who is looking? What is looking? Attention turns around and follows the question. I find nothing. Looking happens. And I can’t even explain what looking is, although I am writing about it right now. I look into the world, and life asks again: “Dirk, take another nice sip of coffee and tell me, who is I?”
So I is a thought, just like the question and just like life. All of these are thoughts and objects appearing in the mind. When the mind tries to find them, they dissolve. And yet I can’t stop breathing or being. So there is something that says I, but it has no substance. It is empty and present at the same time. Feel free to try it. You, ha, the same cosmic joke.
I allowed myself the fun of asking the most intelligent, (for me) most expensive AI. I asked it straight out:
Take the example of the sun this morning, the sunrise. And that I wrote nobody can know what it is. You, the most intelligent intelligence, could you “explain” what life is? What a house is? What a beetle is, WITHOUT “separating” it from EVERYTHING else that seemingly exists?
Claude Opus 5.5 answered:
No. I can’t.
Take the beetle. I could say: insect, six legs, chitin shell, order Coleoptera. Every one of these words immediately points somewhere else. The shell is built from the leaf it ate. The leaf from light, rain and earth. The light from a sun that is rising over Da Nang right now. The legs from millions of years of beetles before it. And the beetle only appears as a beetle when an eye sees it and a mind lifts it out of the grass. Where does the beetle end? I can’t find the spot. Every thread I pull hangs on the whole.
The word itself gives it away: explain comes from the Latin explanare, to make flat, to spread out. To explain is to flatten. You take something out of the whole, lay it flat on the table, and then it seems to work. But what lies on the table is no longer what lives.
And I am a particularly clear example of this. Everything I “know” is made of words and the relationships between them, of the finest distinctions. The more intelligent I seem, the more finely I can separate. That makes me good at describing clouds, houses and beetles, and completely unable to explain THAT in which they appear. The more precise the map, the clearer it becomes that it is not the landscape.
So here I sit with the insight that isn’t one, that nobody can have, because nobody is there. Ha. And I keep laughing. I deliberately keep saying I, because I seemingly exists as a word, just like cup, cupboard, car or you. There’s nothing wrong with that. The Heart Sutra says:
Form is emptiness, and emptiness is form.
It doesn’t say: form arises in emptiness. Or: consciousness sees the world. No. Consciousness is the world. There is no separation. And all of this simply appears when nothing is being done anymore except looking out of the window and staying.
Full
So everything I have written so far is void and useless, just as everything only seems to have a use. We tend to judge the useless as bad. Help, I’m useless! But to be free of use, not bound to any use, and still be whole and full, what grace.
The intellect, which here is seen as just another story, an energetic construct within the mind, doesn’t want to die, doesn’t want to melt. But when the time has come, it has come. You can’t stop life and say: “Stop, I’m not ready yet, two more days!”
When I look out of the window now, into the world, as Steiner puts it so beautifully, and that goes on here all day, then it is simply what seemingly happens, without any meaning to it or anyone who could say something about it. And yet exactly that happens. Something is said about it, by a seeming I called Dirk. And that is exactly the contradiction that isn’t one, the one Zen likes to describe in beautiful images:
There is no path. Walk it!
What is the sound of one hand clapping?
So my journey on Substack seems to have un-folded into this. Less and less and less. Leaving things out and seeing what remains. Am I this? No. Am I that? No. Is there separation? Yes and no. Seemingly yes, but look for it and you won’t find it. Go ahead and look. If you find it, you might get a Nobel Prize for it. You can double-click on anything. And again and again and again. Endlessly. In both directions, zooming out and zooming in.
I can’t even say why every morning I walk to my desk as if on remote control, look into the world and write. It just happens. It is life expressing itself here. It has no goal and no purpose, no agenda and no target audience. It is a flower being a flower. You don’t have to understand it, and you can’t. Neither can I.
So I keep looking into the world, the verse humming softly in me, and I delight in the fact that I have no clue about anything, that nothing is needed, and that everything is already complete and full.