Wroga – Lust in je leven door te schrijven from Bodhitv on Vimeo.

I’ve got this calligraphy by Thich Nhat Hanh hanging next to my computer… Amen.

Suddenly I realized that my list contained no cyber-memories. No see you soons on Facebook, no goodbyes in emails, no be wells on Twitter. It struck me that I don’t say goodbye in virtual reality. There’s a lot of I want to see you soon!s and kind regards, ciaos and LOLs, but no proper goodbyes. Only reason I can think of is that the whole point of cyber space is that we never have to say goodbye since the whole thing is based on being connected. All the time. This virtual life is one long conversation, where we only take bathroom breaks. “That’s why I love it”, I thought, “I never  have to say goodbye online!”. Because I dread saying goodbye. Always have. It’s maybe even why I write, I realized when I read Natalie Goldberg’s commentary to this particular writing assignment, saying “the reason we want to write memoir is an ache, a longing, a passing of time that we feel all too strongly.”

When we’re online, we don’t feel that passing of time so nakedly as when we drop off a friend at the airport. We thankfully drug ourselves with the idea –and to some extent real possibility- of being connected all the time. Interestingly enough, the reason why we love it is also why we dread it. It’s exhausting to be connected all the time:

Yup, saying goodbye might be a bitch, but really what’s the alternative? Even being connected becomes a drag, eventually. Unless you hang in there and become a Buddha, that is.

I wondered whether my goodbye muscles would weaken when I spend a lot of time in cyberspace. I’m not sure. It made me think of apocalyptic prospects of humankind collectively moving into virtual reality in 500 or 5000 or 5 years. What would that be like? A fish bubbled up the surface of the lake but I caught sight of it too late. I rose, packed my stuff and made sure I’d say goodbye and thank you to this place –one of my favorite writing spots. I wandered back to my car kicking acorns ahead of me that my dog Eddie enthusiastically fetched, her nails scratching the pavement in uncoordinated joy.

I’m in a love-hate affair with words. Our first relationship crisis occurred when I was a teenager who suddenly realized that words could never express how I felt. I honestly feared that I could never completely share myself with anyone else as long as words had to do the trick. Teenaged style lonely and angry, I dramatically pasted onto my bedroom walls lyrics from Madonna’s song ‘bedtime story’: today is the last day/ that I’m using words/ they’ve gone out/ lost their meaning/ don’t function anymore.Strangely enough, this desire to let go of words all together pushed me into the most word-y job there is: writing. Inspired by writers who maybe couldn’t “get it all down”, but came remarkably close, I started using words as best as I could –and discovered a joy in that endeavor that to this day remains unequaled by anything else.

My connection to the dharma was crucial in transforming my relationship with words. The famous Zen saying that ‘words are like fingers pointing at the moon’ has been one of the most powerful instructions for both my writing and life. The finger in this metaphor that points at the moon implies that words give you a sense of direction, a notion where to look for the moon. But the finger that points is never the moon itself. It’s a simple metaphor, but like many simple things it doesn’t mean that it’s easy. Using words to point at the moon is a practice, very much like a meditation or running or guitar practice, requiring both discipline and surrender. In my case it tends to bring both great sadness and great freedom –often at the same time.

In my experience, the sadness comes from realizing that you will never “get it”. How could you ever really understand the person who you’ve started calling your mother halfway through her life? How could you ever transfer your dog snoozing in the morning sun onto a white piece of paper? How could you describe the love you feel for your best friend? It’s impossible. And these are relatively easy things compared to loss, trauma, birth and the meaning of life. The fact is that we are soaked in complete mystery. We don’t know where we came from and when we go when we die. We hang in a universe that is completely unknown to us. And just as the unspeakable cannot be told, this incomprehensible nature of the mystery called your life cannot be understood –at least not by the conceptual mind. That’s huge. Not only writers deal with this. It is not only a philosophical problem. Everyone at one point or another is confronted with situations where you realize you will never get it. When you wish you could express all that you feel, all that you wanted to say, all that you are filled with, but can’t.

The experience of sadness however, is always connected to the experience of space. They go together. We live between the act of awakening and the act of surrender, according to the poet John O’Donoghue. Our use of words embodies that predicament. We awake to our experience and try to share and express it as genuinely as possible, but ultimately we have to surrender into the experience itself. This surrendering creates a freefall kind of freedom. This freedom dawns when you realize that you actually don’t need fingers, or words, to know the moon. Although we try to understand the moon by placing it in the sky and launching rockets at it, that actually says nothing about the moon itself. We actually already know it in our most ordinary, inexplicable, non-verbal experience. By simply standing in the moonlight, by being in its presence, we know the moon. It is that incomprehensible, unspeakable knowing, which is too often pushed into the margins of mainstream culture. This kind of knowing without necessarily understanding takes great courage but in return offers tremendous freedom. It’s the space from which all things arise, constantly, fresh, unimaginable.

This kind of knowing takes courage. It takes courage to let go of words and all the insights, all the effort, all the tears shed and life lived that they carry. Just as sitting down on a cushion and being silent, it is a daring act to shift your weight onto the needle-point of now. It takes tremendous confidence to trust the space behind the words and our familiar world of concepts. But shifting our weight from the fingers to the moon –without losing a heartfelt connection to the fingers- is our practice. It is the doorway to both skillful, life-affirming communication and this wonderful, unexplainable, incomprehensible moment we call our life.

This article was published on Elephant Journal

When I was about three years old, my parents took me and my sister out of the city’s July heat on a bike ride to a cherry orchard. When the four of us settled around the torn open brown bag exploding with big, juicy cherries, I insisted on eating them whole. And with that I mean whole. Despite several attempts from my parents to first convince, then threaten me into abandoning that strategy, I swallowed hands full of cherries –my way. I must have been very avant-garde, because based on my parents’ vivid description of the bike ride home, even at three I gave meaning to the expression of “having your shit popping.” Needless to say, I have been eating my cherries properly ever since.

The way I learn things hasn’t changed much since my cherry popping days. Although I grew up to be quite a nerd, devouring books and theories, a Grand Canyon separates me knowing something from actually getting it. My parents –bless them- bravely let me sink in the pool when I insisted I could swim without them holding onto me, witnessed the effects of me eating countless soap bars and once an entire strip of my mom’s birth control pills and a few years later reluctantly saw me disappear into ecstasy filled club nights. Discovering the futility of telling me what to do must have prompted them into some kind of faith in my tumultuous internal logic, because it worked. I survived my childhood.

…read the entire article on the 35<35 website

(and don’t forget to vote!)

This is the handmade print on a t-shirt I got on a clothing swop party at my friend Maegan’s house… I have had it for years -it auspiciously fell out of my wardrobe today, so: HAPPY FULL MOON everyone! Don’t hide your madness!

Water, seas and oceans have always fascinated and scared human beings. In virtually every cultural imagination, water has been associated with the unconscious, the unknown, the dangerous, unpredictable, female element. Its soft, flowing nature can quickly change into a something that swipes you away; a force that makes you sink and drown. Seas and oceans, the culmination of water, represent a large, existential fear: a fear of the unknown and obscure. I seriously suspect that our ignorance towards the underwater world, its inhabitants and its importance is actually a fear towards ourselves. Towards the sunken, unfamiliar parts of ourselves. An angst for the monsters that are looming in the deep sea of our own minds and hearts.

The only way to misbehave against something is to create a certain imaginary distance towards it. That’s exactly what we did with underwater life. We’ve somehow excluded fish from the animal realm. But do you still eat fish?, that popular question asked of vegetarians reveals the non-animal status we have attached to fish. Our huge fishing nets leave a trail of underwater devastation, but who cares? As a species we seem experts in denying what is invisible, what’s below the surface. But everyone knows that what is below the surface has to eventually, inevitable, surface.

The destruction that is currently taking place underneath the surfaces of our oceans is a clear sign of humanity’s disconnection from our own subconsciousness. It’s a sign that we are cut off from the intuitive undercurrent that connects us with all Life. This disconnection has got us massively plundering life below the surface, in the hopes of finding something there which will make us happy and fulfilled. But it doesn’t work that way. Happiness doesn’t work from the outside in. It doesn’t work if it makes us crawl over the backs of countless fellow beings to get it. It works from the inside out.

The degree in which we are willing to touch the unknown, unfamiliar, scary places in ourselves is the degree in which we can care for the world around us. The degree in which we can love it. Care for it. Start to take care of your own deep sea monsters first. Get to know them. Find out where they hide.  Descend into the forgotten parts of yourself. Be curious and kind to what you encounter. Only then can we create a sustainable relationship with the life inside and outside of our worlds.

De originele, Nederlandse versie van dit stuk is verschenen in NON*FISH*A*LI*CIOUS: hét visvervangende kookboek geschreven de briljante Lisette Kreischer in samenwerking met Sea First Foundation.

August 7: 

‘First Thought, Best Thought’: developing trust and intuition through writing

August 14:

Writing with the Body

(Guest appearance by my dear friend and superb yoga teacher Hilary Brown!)

August 21:

Befriending your Inner Critic through Writing

More information and sign-up here

This course is based on my upcoming book, ZIN, released by the end of this summer.