The Garden, a fertile ground for the seed of fateweaving
Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights
During my stay in the garden I found myself more and more enveloped in an alchemical way of viewing the world.
This story is the beginning of a series of personal experiences that led me to develop an intimate relationship with my story. Out of this the idea of Fateweaving arose. May they entertain and hopefully inspire you, to pay attention to how your story is winding itself through your life.
The Garden was the first stop on my pilgrimage, without knowing that it was the first stop.
In the years before, I had undergone a deep personal meaning crisis and, even though I had come out the other end of that hole in many regards, before coming to the Garden I was in danger of falling again. Tectonic plate shifts in my life had me in danger of stumbling aimlessly through profane mundanity.
My girlfriend and I had broken up after seven years of being together, and continuing my life as it was, even though filled with diverse passions and responsibilities, did not seem like a tenable future path.
I tried to get into a sport psychology program in another city but was ultimately declined.
The potentiality of a poem, written way later in this story, resonated heavily with that phase in my life:
“My life still is a line and that way too straight, when a story should be my fate.”
Usually, if my life is in danger of becoming a line, I try to break it by going on solo adventures, walking with a tent for two weeks through some wilderness, in search of the muses singing new visions into my awareness. But this time it felt like I had done this too many times, and I needed something truly new, something I could not discover by myself, through myself. When in danger of nihilistic solipsism, going into monk adventure mode can be quite stupid. Even though I was 27 at this point, I had no intention of joining the 27 club.
As it tends to be with these things, the day I first formulated this problem, a friend told me about the Garden and described it to me as an experimental community space where people co-live, co-play, and co-work. A place to explore ideas and run workshops. I immediately applied and was accepted shortly after.
A couple of weeks later I flew to Porto and began walking four days on the Camino trail north to the Garden. By the time I finally arrived at the gate of the Garden it was one of the hottest days of August. I sat there sweating with my backpack, waiting for someone to come pick me up and show me around.
It was an odd feeling having a sneak peek into a place that truly was a garden in contrast to its dry surroundings. Flowers formed a corridor through which I heard the echoes of laughter and music, evoking mental images of a Dionysian cult.
I, and another German guy who could also not help himself but show up exactly on time, finally got picked up and we marvelled at the beauty of the place. Once it had been a wedding venue. Fountains, blue flowers, little streams and lakes made my heart rejoice. Because of its lush vegetation the Garden formed a microclimate, adding to the sense that upon entering one had truly stepped into another world.
But there was also a sceptical voice in my mind wondering if I had just dropped into some weird cult. That suspicion faded quickly. Within the first few days I realized that the Garden wasn’t structured around ideology or a fixed worldview. In fact, it was the opposite. There was no dominant worldview that everyone had to subscribe to. Instead, there was a shared openness to explore ideas together.
This was a stark contrast to how I perceived life back in the city. There often conversations are heated, and participants divide themselves along political camps. Connecting to other people and ideas in the Garden suddenly was not about survival anymore, but gave way to exploration.
I needed a couple of days to relax into it. Life in the city had dried up my lust for connection because more often than not I would choose to isolate myself rather than engage in soul-deadening social contact. But here everything was playful.
People organized strange and fascinating workshops, improvised rituals, silly games, and conversations wandered from philosophy to poetry to absurd but meaningful nonsense.
Even though the atmosphere was open and playful, I had brought a personal problem with me that prevented me from fully opening up.
My ex-girlfriend and I had experimented with an open relationship, and that had warped my perception of women in a weird way. I realized that I tended to perceive interactions with women in some kind of romantic or sexual context, even when I did not want to.
Somehow in city life I had almost no private interactions with women, and the ones I had were always tainted by a question in the background wondering if there was tension. Sexuality was not present and always present at the same time. That created an awkward dynamic that prevented me from engaging in natural conversation and that was draining my energy even when I was alone.
Something inside me kept projecting romantic meaning onto situations where it didn’t belong and longing for something that was seemingly not possible for me to realize.
One evening during dinner I talked about this with a few people. One guy told me that when he had lived in environments with lots of natural social intimacy, where people simply spent animating time together, that this tension disappeared. At the time I wasn’t convinced. But that conversation planted a seed.
A few days later someone organized a playful decision-making workshop. The concept was that by learning to reframe the risk of making decisions, they can be made more easily. To embody this, each person had to make a decision about something they had secretly wanted to do but were afraid to commit to. To help with that, we paired up as commitment buddies.
During that workshop I made a decision that would later become the central event of my stay at the Garden. I decided that I would ask a woman, who had caught my attention, if she wanted to marry me. To give context to this wild decision I have to add that someone had planned an unusual event for the community: a wedding ceremony.
The idea was that anyone could marry anyone, or anything. One person married a cannabis plant. Another person married himself. There was even a three-person wedding. It was ridiculous and beautiful at the same time. Because of the decision I had made in the workshop, I was now supposed to ask this woman if she wanted to marry me.
It was a perfect possibility space in which a dynamic that had played out over and over in my life was now accessible for reprogramming in an experimental space. But even though it was experimental, it was no less real and serious for me.
The whole day I walked around, cringed, and tried to avoid every interaction with her. I didn’t want to bother her by dumping all my internal tensions onto her.
I talked to my commitment buddy and told him I couldn’t do it, that I was way too serious for the playful vibe. But he gave me very simple advice: “Just make it playful.” Usually that kind of bland advice would have left me frustrated, but this person was the embodiment of playfulness himself, so I took it.
I put on a cowboy outfit with a hat, a lasso, and a few knives around my hip. Then I started walking around the Garden playfully, trying to catch people with my lasso. I quickly found out that it was really difficult to catch someone, even when they were stationary. I tried again and again, I think out of ten tries I only got one hit.
Then suddenly she entered the scene. She was dressed in a black dress with little Mickey Mouse ears and had a sword by her side. I of course immediately fell blindly in love and challenged her to a marriage with knife and lasso in hand. Funnily enough she was the one proposing that if I managed to catch her with my lasso, she would marry me.
We started moving. She swung her sword, I my lasso. And then time stood still, holding its breath. The lasso flew and I caught her on the first try.
Somehow unsurprised but thankful to the fates directing my hand, we hugged in excitement.
Then we parted ways to wait for the evening ceremony.
A wedding of a emo mickymouse spartan woman with a kinky cowboy. How on earth did I end up here?!
While waiting I felt a strange kind of bliss, like something had returned to me that I had long thought lost. I began to write a poem to that feeling that should become an answer to a poem I had written a year earlier while entering a deep depression. It would also become, without my knowledge, a strange kind of prophecy.
The hours drifted by while I tried to finish up my poem. Everyone had a wonderful wedding feast until the ceremony began. There was lots of laughter, even some tears, and heartwarming stories until at last we were asked to the altar.
Before we were officially pronounced man and wife, I read the two poems.
The Tree
You’ll find me under the tree.
I have missed thee.
Why did you leave? And where do you stay?
Will you shine through the eyes of a friend,
or will I find you in midst of my descend?
You’ll find me poor and astray.
I have cursed thy way.
Why did you rob me? And where do you hide it?
Will you appear in the haste of the herd,
or will I find you in the middle of a turd?
You’ll find me shy and alone.
I have turned my back to thy throne.
Why did you leave? And with whom do you stay?
Will you come with the rustling of the leaves,
or will I find you in the act with some thieve?
You’ll find me empty and ready to sin.
I have stopped searching for your kin.
Why did you tempt me? And what do you want?
Will you present yourself in the face of danger,
or will I find you in the soul of a stranger?
Will you return in my darkest hour,
and will I find you at last again in a flower?
The Volcano
For ages I've been traveling alone,
turning within turned me into stone.
How can you turn that stone into liquid?
Can you keep this most obvious of secrets?
Well, you have to touch it, kiss it, hug it, love it,
dance around it like a little bubbly wonderstorm.
And then in a moment of its weakness, cast it far into the cracks of love, between the fibres of the
earth.
To its downfall, birthplace, where the pressure is high
and the questions have no why.
There in the underworld with the pressure of the world upon it's
shoulders,
it turns red and hot and angry, ready to set the world on fire.
With a longing to see the world once more,
it bursts forth as liquid.
But unbenouced to it, the ashes left behind its path of wrath was fertile ground for new life to be born.
So, thanks for betraying me, for you turned me into liquid.
Thanks for leaving me, for I have found you once more my love.
Then we were finally pronounced man and wife, kissed, and soon started into an evening consisting of wild dance and hot-tub parties. At some point we ended up escaping the Garden to a field where we spent the night under the silvery watch of a full moon. It ended up as a one of the most beautiful days and nights of my life.
But the bliss did not last long. The next day the line of the poem became a reality for me:
And then in a moment of its weakness,
cast it far into the cracks of love,
between the fibres of the earth.
To its downfall, birthplace,
where the pressure is high
and the questions have no why.
I was so deeply touched by the beauty of the experience that the next day I was really thin-skinned and a bit afraid of being clingy and fucking it up. We had a small meeting in the afternoon where it became clear that she did not wish for further romantic entanglement, which I of course respected, but it still let me enter the underworld of my feelings. I felt again really weird around women.
During those days I ended up being subjected to a mystical experience that was not really undergone voluntarily, and to which origin it belonged is open to the fantasy of the reader. During this experience I saw a vision of crawling through a tightly knit net of threads, only to fall out the other side where a tall white fountain stood. It deeply puzzled me and I could not yet intuit its meaning, which will become relevant later in the story.
The day after, I felt I needed to ask my wife for a divorce, a ritual that would allow me to process these feelings and fulfil the prophecy in my poem. She agreed, and we met at the lake. We talked for a long time about our internal processes. It was again quite beautiful and it became clear that this interaction was quite symbolic for the patterns we usually end up in. But the beauty this time lay in us understanding every step of the way.
Then we staged another ritual. I picked up a big stone and declared that I was the stone. Then I asked her to cast it into the lake to fulfil the prophecy. When the stone dropped into the lake, a powerful energy came over me. I felt again that something had been lifted. Then we changed the last line in the poem from:
Thanks for leaving me, for I have found you once more my love.
to
Thanks for leaving me, for I have found you once more my life.
With that I felt like the story had come full circle, and I could now also find fitting words for what was behind my tension when it came to interactions with women. It was an anima projection. Out of a longing to enter into union with the unconscious, to once more feel the oceanic bliss experienced in early childhood, I projected that longing onto women, who symbolized my unconscious, for according to C.G. Jung the counterpart of a male consciousness is a female unconsciousness.
But now, through that ritual, I was able to rechannel these projections into my life. To see the divine feminine everywhere in the world, and not only in women. With that, the thing I had lost in the first poem also came back to me, but not in the form of a fleeting romance, rather as a love and commitment to life.
In the next days the aftermath of the ritual and prophecy continued to work through me, and so I expressed depression-like symptoms and relived the feelings of my breakup a couple of months earlier, just compressed within a few days.
Now a new week settled in at the Garden, my now ex-wife had left and something became apparent to me: time in this community flowed differently than in the city. Time moved in cycles rather than along a continuous line. All the rituals and the collective energy moved together in a way that gave rise to a feeling of knowing what the state of things was.
In this case it was a slow and quiet week, where everyone was enveloped in their own personal projects. I wanted to give a lot of workshops as an expression of my newfound lust for life, but nobody participated. So instead, I wandered through the Garden and through the hills, digging through the ashes of my psyche, when during one of these long walks a poem slowly stuttered its way into existence over the course of a whole day.
It proved to be the seedling of Fateweaving:
How to become a story:
You have to wait and walk around,
you have to lose touch and see your wound.
From past towards the sky,
you have to wonder and ask why:
Why do these feet have to wander this path?
Why does future flow from past?
Why can't it be the other way around,
from the sky towards the ground?
You might think direction is a must,
for the seedfull soil is full of lust.
You think, things grow towards the light,
and from above nothing comes but plight.
But I’m asking you to reconsider,
for your eyes might be just a mirror.
Which flips things on its head,
making things seem deep when they are flat.
But what if the force of time applies from everywhere,
so that meaning can't be found just here nor there.
Pulling and pushing, from towards to back and forth,
In the realm of story there is just one north, one guiding
question:
Is it true, could it be?
-That you're not only you but also a just a tree?
A tree getting pulled upwards by the light of time,
waiting for the sound of its leaves begin to rhyme.
And when you start to ask the wind if all the rhymes are true,
you realize that wind, leaves, sky and ground have always been just you.
So let your life be a story,
turn your fate into a quarry.
Mining for the answers, digging for the truth,
to realize once again eternal youth.
Seeking directionality is insanity.
Making your path visible is impossible.
You have to real- not analyse it: Is it true?
-It is, when you feel and finally become you.
By that point I was highly immersed in a magical, mythical way of viewing life. I had now fully entered the otherworld and was continually engaged in digging out new proverbial gold. But the question of where life would lead me after the Garden was still pressing. I relaxed into the story nonetheless, trusting that its own inherent logic would lead me somewhere valuable.
On the next weekend I visited a now friend; the other German guy with whom I had arrived at the Garden. It turned out he lived quite nearby. I was deeply inspired by him, not least by a workshop he gave in the Garden about “Dreamweaving” that definitely also inspired Fateweaving. Visiting him felt like walking around in the guts of a story. He painted vivid images of his visions of what should become of his place, which he called the Pearl, and of his personal project: crafting a new social media that, to appropriate his phrasing as I understood it, worked by the law of story and not the law of parasitic algorithms: https://opencollective.com/projectliminality
At his place there was even the opportunity for me to meet some friends of his who worked in a local school. The possibility of me moving there and working with them grew dear to my fantasy. But during those days a certainty arose that made it clear to me that I wanted leave my life in the German-speaking realm. Still, there was one week of my stay at the Garden left. At first I thought I had now experienced everything I had hoped for and that the last week would be smooth sailing. But it turned out to be quite a mysterious and future-dawning week as well.
The theme of this week was the “Resonance Lab.” A few professional musicians came and offered a songwriting workshop. We would meet daily to write and work on our songs. As I am bad at singing but good at reading, I worked on a poem that I wanted to title “The White Fountain.”
During one of the writing workshops, which turned out to be quite intense, the meaning of the symbolism dawned on me. The fountain was a symbolic place where I could express my life force fully by connecting with and nurturing my environment. I tried very hard to write The White Fountain, but somehow, I could not.
At the beginning of the week, while I was in the middle of giving an improvised workshop on prophecy writing to work on my newfound idea of Fateweaving, a tall man burst into the room shouting: “WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?!”
I was, of course, quite puzzled and thought to myself: interesting.
He explained that he had heard me talk about my concepts and that he would be organizing a ceremony within a week-long gathering of two hundred people in a castle in France, based on exactly the ideas I was just formulating.
A lot of people started gathering around us, and a strange atmosphere began settling into the room. First everyone wanted me to recite my poems. Then, after a while, the man, whom I will refer to from now on as the magician, started raving about the deepest and most startling philosophical ideas in such a coherent yet still discombobulating way I had ever heard.
He also pointed out a lot of strange things happening in the room. Among other things, he said he could see an energy radiating out of the side of my head. He described it like watching a white fountain play “with almost religious purity”.
I was pretty dumbfounded by that remark, because I believe I had not mentioned my vision of the white fountain yet, nor my attempts to write a poem about it.
He continued praising me and the poems that I had shared in the highest terms, but in a way that made me grow suspicious of him. When I get the feeling people are beginning to smear honey around my mouth I tend to get cautious about their intention.
Then he continued his raving. Everyone was struck silent, as if a storm-prophet had just entered the room.
Just to give context -no drugs were involved. But still everyone felt a little unwell, because an eerie atmosphere had settled over the group that had formed.
The magician and I had a private late-night walk around the lake that evening, during which I shared my suspicions about him. In the end, however, I leaned toward trusting him.
That night I had an energy draining and terrible dream about the magician . The next day everyone was still startled and concerned by this outburst of strange energies. Many people, including me, felt uneasy and had weird feelings around the magician. One person who was espeacially impacted wished for a walk with me to talk over this occurance. Our feet led us down the same path the magand I had taken the night before, only the other way around. Just when we got to the spot at which I shared my suspicious feelings with the magician, a strange sight jumped into my eye: a dead snake lied on the ground with a big dead hornet in its mouth. Of course my alchemical way of viewing things started to sound alarm, but instead of jumping to some woowoo conclusions, I noted it with not knowing vigilance.
Later as I was trying to restore the social balance by talking to the magician, I mentioned the sight I had encountered. He started interpreting it as our two energies somehow colliding and fighting each other, he as the hornet and I as the snake, soon his speech followed this thread to some occult mad wisdom, I listened to with radical open mindedness in one ear and radical scepticism in the other.
That same day I was supposed to go on a date with one of the most beautiful women I had yet encountered. This possibility had somehow arisen within the strange energies of the previous evening. Somehow my ring symbolizing Eros for me, got lost and she ended up with it. In a series of synchronistic events it found its way back to me through her hands.
We ended up creating a piece of land art in the blazing sun on some black boulders. We did not plan our artistic musings, but somehow, we ended up with a long path of braided golden straw leading up to a woven nest, in which we placed a piece of wood that looked like a small flame.
We named it the flame of life, which would become yet another symbol finding its way into the next poem.
In the following days I tried very hard to write The White Fountain so that I could read it on the last day of the Resonance Lab. But somehow, I could not write it.
Instead, I wrote The Path Toward the Fountain:
The Path
From beyond the stars to back to earth,
I was witness to my death and birth.
thought the story was over when it barely began,
where does it lead if I follow it to the end?
I don't know, but now that I've finally become myself
a new question arises
in form of a small hope just big enough to turn into a sorrow:
dreaming, grasping, imagining a new tomorrow.
Can I drift in the flow of time,
or do I need to capture what is not yet mine?
Capture the gold that I dug,
to refine and hoard it within my hut!
Deep in the forest dark and alone
I would fight myself to sit on the throne!
I would flee upon clouds of arrogance,
for the world is beneath me!
NO!
I want to be a vessel, but one with agency.
Able to fight, but first and last of all free.
Free from trying to narrow reality into certainty,
free to see reality as a play of synchronicity.
But what would I want to serve,
with what should I merge?
Well mountains and goats are the opposite of stagnation and roads.
The flame by the sea is the opposite of endless circling around me.
Stories and trees are the opposite of money and fees.
So, among mountains and goats I shall mature.
Under the light of my flame, I shall be nurtured.
Under stories and trees, I shall express my nature.
But still I wanted to write The White Fountain. I tried every trick in the book for evoking creativity and inspiration, but it would not come. Instead, Confusion found its way onto my page.
Confusion
Things are fused that should be apart,
things are apart, of which I should be part.
My life still is a line and that way too straight,
when a story should be my fate.
Ethereal grasping but my fingers slip,
a spell almost but never leaving my lips.
The self in panic claws onto thin air,
kills the dream and births a nightmare:
Dead matter trapped in the vast spaces between body and mind.
Where can I recover that which I couldn't find?
Where is the bomb and where is the fuse,
to burst open the cage of my muse
I was quite desperate, because I thought I needed to write the poem I had set out to write in order to finish some strange quest I was on. But somehow, I could not.
I became so desperate that I sought the counsel of the magician. He prepared a few candles, while the space around us seemed to darken. The atmosphere grew thick and light at the same time, as he listened with a penetrating gaze at my concerns. His stare was so intense, that it almost seemed to me that his eyes would start to double and sometimes morph into a single big one.
Then he told me that I had already accomplished everything I had set out to do, and that I could not yet write The White Fountain because even though the fountain was already playing and would always be playing around my head, what it symbolized was not yet a possibility in my life. Meanwhile he casually started rapping an impromptu poem about The White Fountain. It seemed perfect, but somehow later I could not remember a single line.
Then I realized that I had confused the beginning with the end. With the last poem about confusion, I had ended up exactly where I had started, and with that realization, I now had the poem series. Not the one I had wanted to write, but the one I needed to write. Instead of “The White Fountain”, I titled the series “In Search of the Fountain” (S.67 in “Wörter und andere Fabelwesen) with the following order:
First act: The beginning I confused with the end -Confusion
Second act: The possibility space is widening -The Volcano
Third act: The magic is working; the method is found -How to become a story
Final act: Considerations for the future -The Path
Now the end of the week announced itself with the open mic where everyone would present the artistic musings they created during the week. It was a truly beautiful evening where many souls expressed the results of their soulcraft, facilitated by a beautiful and otherwordly place.
I truly felt the work was done, the story was told and lived. The day after the harvest was there, and I was ready to follow the divine rule of sunday rest.
But apparently I made my peace prematurely, without the devilish angel that was the magician. So our paths crossed again and our feet took us on a long walk. First we searched for the snake with the hornet in its mouth, but came to find it had vanished.
Then we visited the land art my date and I had created a few days earlier.
On that occasion the magician picked up a reed, performed yet another magical ceremony: He circled the reed around his body while cracking his spine with grunting, gurgeling sounds just to end up gifting it to me as my magic wand. The mixture of fascination and repulsion at this sight did not stop me from feeling that now we had found friendship.
But we also made a deal: I would craft him a sorcerous dagger in exchange for a series of essays tailored to me about the magical arts. That deal would shape the future in yet unknowing ways, that are still to be walked upon.
Here I learned that even though when a story comes full circle, some threads can never be woven in completely. Because even though there are always stories within stories, a story also always leads towards another story. In this case that would become a magical gathering of 200 people in some old french castle once erected by a catholic who might have fancied occult pagan art a bit too much.
With that my time in the Garden was coming to an end.
I had met strange and fascinating people, dipped into a world of magic and myth, where enchantment was not peaceful paradise, but a space for morally challenging transformation. In the end I felt deeply grateful for a life that now felt more like a story than a line. Truly, I had found the fuse to the bomb, that would burst open the cage of my muse.
I was full of lust for life and also a little bit of sorrow, wondering how I could possibly integrate all these new and strange ways of viewing the world into a functional and communicable form.
That, in fact, became the task of the next few months, leading me to formulate the practice of fateweaving ~the art of regaining existential agency by developing an intimate relationship with one’s story.
But until then I found myself sitting on a plane back to Germany, holding a long and strange reed in my hand, feeling like Harry Potter returning from Hogwarts.
The magic wand: click here to view how the all the symbols of this story found their way into that piece
