The fog slowly crawls down the mountain, finding its way through the trees. The cold that is creeping into my bones announces the rain that is soon to come. I choose to stay and feel the roughness of nature, accepting it as being just as important to grasp the whole as the sunshine that is so much easier to celebrate. I had dared to leave for a world hidden far away, one not advertised in the city but can be found once you make the first step towards finding another something. Out there I had found a vibrant collective full of idealism, vision and longing for connection to Mother Earth - not just as an observing visitor.
Without electricity the illusion of the moving sun tunes everybody into a life closer to nature, with water from the well and only the sounds of insects, wind and the river. Everything slows down and the thought of time as a number that indicates how long since or until, fades away. I begin to watch all the beings around me and start to feel like one little part of everything, rather than being a superior part of nature that is served by the rest of it.
There is a lot of beauty in the simplicity of activities that everybody can offer and is invited to join. They give a sense of communal creation that bonds us. But I soon begin to realise that I have spent a lot of my years resonating with an environment of cultural complexity. The fine nuances of Chopin’s work and the elegance of ballet have long found their way into my movements, and the ancient and magic sounds of a drum circle can only make my heart and body swing for so long. Is there a way back to living only this simplicity and is going back actually moving forward as they say here?
Some of us come for just a brief visit. Some are fully invested into making the tribe’s vision a solid reality, and others seem to have spent too much time out in this world without any anchor other than the body that carries them. The community, the trust in the ways of the universe and us all being one, is believed to be everything we need. Every meeting is meant to be lived right now, never applying the idea of a possible future and it emulates the way all animal creatures out here go about their ways. Living this appears to be a state of enlightenment and so far away from the concept I grew up to believe in. It creates beautiful meetings, makes magic happen in connection with others - living fully present in every single moment makes us fly so high! But it might be just a day after and our connection that felt so intimate and wonderful as a shared experience appears to be forgotten, washed away by all the other encounters that came after ours.
How often can my heart bloom in a meeting before it loses the ability to open up and shine with all its colorful strength and beauty for a new connection that will as well end in a blink of an eye? Are we truly connecting as two human beings or as a part of one that we all are anyways? Is it possible to live a life based on this idea, without building ongoing, stable relationships? How long can one walk without other human hands to rely and hold on to, not just for the moment of being present in the same place but also when the safety net of the group is far and the days are dark?
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At this point in life, I am a visitor in this Utopia and will always return to the world made of concrete, bright electric lights, loud beats in dark cellars, rushing from one thing, pushing me up to another. My level of excitement always wants to be turned up to the maximum, never leaving space for just being me without needing others to know my worth. Those others are always in their bubble of the next thing they have to do and the next place they have to go. Meeting another that I thought I was connected to and creating a moment together does not flow but needs to be planned. Often plans are overthrown at the last minute, communicated through a screen.
The people here see me as a hippie and the ones that I see as that have resistance to the city boy they see in me. Jumping around like a crazy one, taking my shirt off when I get too hot while losing myself in a dance is crossing the line even here in Berlin, where they say everybody is allowed to be the freak they want to be. No group ever accepts me as a valuable part of it. I see my potential in being a bridge between those two worlds, and following this lonely path may be my destiny as a photographer.
I feel empty. No matter how many more things, drugs or culture I consume and beautiful skins I touch, I am not feeling life happening. The limit of excitement that I am able to experience lowers more and more while the holes I fall into afterwards become deeper and darker.
Where can I go next and what am I looking for here, or in the ‘unknown place’ elsewhere? What is my purpose and are there others to share my gifts with? Do I actually find something or someone else in another location or is it true that it isn’t about where you are but how you are inside? So if you are able to shine your light anywhere, whatever is right will come to you?
While playing the games of the city I find your Spanish temper on the modern marketplace of human connections. We start a fire and once the flame is strong enough to light the first big piece of wood, I throw in more and even bigger ones while lifting it up as if it was an Olympic fire of highest importance that will never stop burning. I am overwhelming you, projecting my ideas of life onto you, unable to hear yours and slowly feel if they are compatible. We crash, I have to go far.
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… somewhere where she isn’t, but others like her. Somewhere free, simple, naked, raw and beautiful! I need to fear the waves but run towards them so that they hit me harder. I need to lose the ground to become nature’s thrown around toy. I need to feel one with everything, to feel life happening inside myself until screams burst out of me, loud and uncontrolled
So here I am on an island that seems so unreal, so far away from the rest of the world, that it is possible to let go of all layers covering our bodies, and with that all ideas about how to be attracted to each other. It doesn’t take long until seeing nakedness, in all its beauty and imperfection, sheds the link to sexuality that society made for us.
It is freeing to feel connection to you without the urge to melt with your beautiful body. We are discovering each other like children who don’t even know that this picture of naked Adam and Eve in paradise could be raising fantasies that go beyond our innocent play. This island is our playground on which we find adventures with such simplicity. All it takes is a naive idea at sunset and the simple southern-tempered decision to just go for it without a trace of preparation. The German in me is challenged, wants to bring more than an idea onto the journey into the dark. But as I let myself fall into this decision life proves that the adventurous path will lead us to a good place with warm-hearted people.
And just like Adam and Eve, eventually we have to leave paradise to go back to our lives in different countries that we still hold onto because nobody ever taught us how to live differently. The step to go find out by ourselves is one that still seems to be gigantic. A first and also the last kiss, tears rolling down our cheeks, our fingers lose touch before we step on different boats - hoping some of that beauty we found will have planted a seed that we can carefully grow without each other.
I find it hard to admit to myself, but in clear moments of honesty I see that another heart to walk the path with is the greatest longing inside - driving me to wander the world. But up until now, no-one out ‘there’ ever inspired my heart so much that I would want to take their hand and go on a journey together that is greater than the ones measured in miles.
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I have been through dark times on the road, times so lonely that I feel it wouldn’t make a difference if I fell off this cliff and disappeared. When every human that filled one moment or another with closeness, joy or just presence is far away from the here and now. When the only thing that is, is emptiness. When there is no grounding in the past, no meaning in the now or hope in the future, then why bother with any of this? But one of those three must be strong enough to keep me going, so I do.
As soon as I make a step outside of the small, safe spaces that the spread-out community of travelers created, I enter a world that doesn’t hold space for someone living outside of the structure of incoming and outgoing money. The more time I spend disrespecting their ideals, the more disgusted of the world they built I become, and the more I feel like an outlaw. Life becomes a chase of places to lay my head safely, it is adventurous and I feel alive, but I become more exhausted with time.
Going back to the life of possessions - a beautiful living space between four walls and a constant obligation to invest my energy into keeping them seems not to be an option for me anymore. Life is for living and if I feel no life here, what would I stay for? These heavy material loads need to be dropped and I am the only one able to make that difficult step of closing the door, handing over the key and walking away for the last time. Finally I am opening to the new - welcoming life with all its beauty and darkness.
I only need a little and everything I need is enough. I want to trust in finding whatever I’m supposed to have and run into the dark with that certainty. And life will prove once again that if I walk with faith, there will be a way.
„Er war kein Schüler mehr, der die Welt durchs Fenster sieht, seine Wanderung kein Spaziergang mehr, dessen Ende unweigerlich die Rückkehr war. Die große Welt war jetzt wirklich geworden, er war ein Teil von ihr, in ihr ruhte sein Schicksal, ihr Himmel war der seine, ihr Wetter war das seine. Klein war er in dieser großen Welt.“ aus Narziß und Goldmund von Hermann Hesse
2014 - 2016 in Europe, Asia, Israel