Eat up or throw up

      ‘And sorrow is the illusion of emptiness.’

      Adi Da

      My school time came to an end. I was now nineteen years old, I had my high school graduation in my pocket and I now wanted to somehow participate in this world that so far was alien to me. Since my very early youth I loved to design and create. Already in my early years I used to sew all kinds of crazy clothes for myself and others. I set myself the goal, after completing an apprenticeship in dressmaking, to study fashion design or costume design at the university in order to add beauty and creativity to this world.

      The whole attempt ended in a disaster. In 1984 I came to Karlsruhe, a city full of clerks. During the first few days I would stroll through the pedestrian section of the city and was completely unprepared for the shock that hit me when I realized how gray the people were, how bottled up everybody was, rushing around as if badgered. Everybody in the city seemed to have internalized the same manner of living. I had never imagined it like this. I grew up in a protected rural private school of the Catholic Church, mainly with young, sympathetic, progressive teachers who came from the 1968 movement. At the apprenticeship place, however, there existed open sexism against women; almost everybody was hypocritical towards the top and pushy towards the bottom. In my naiveté I was caught totally unawares and didn’t want to accept that the work environment could be so cruel and dishonest. It was a torture for me that lasted for the entire two and a half years of the apprenticeship. I fought against the structures in vain and experienced the graduation as a welcome deliverance.

      Shortly before the end of the apprenticeship I started looking for a place to study at university. I visited Vienna, traveled to Munich and finally ended up in Berlin. As I stood in front of the Free University looking at the huge entrance to the building I was seized, as before, by a spontaneous and obvious conclusion. I saw thousands of young people swarming out of the entrances and quite suddenly understood that THAT was not what I was looking for and that here I was not going to achieve what I wanted; even though I didn’t have an exact idea what THAT actually meant or what my goal actually was.

      If so many people were acquiring the alleged (and phony) knowledge about existence and the beauty of the arts, yet the human world was so loveless and gray, then something was missing in the transmission of this knowledge. In fact, there had to be something fundamentally wrong regarding most knowledge of and about the world. At that very moment my university studies were finished.

      Now meanwhile I was living in the house that, at the age of five, I had inherited after the deaths of my father and grandfather. They both died within two weeks from each other and I was the one left as sole heir. My step-grandmother also had lived there after the death of her husband. It was a very nice house, situated in the middle of the village directly on a slow flowing river. It had two floors, a basement, a granary, a large barn and a garden. In front of the house was a stately linden tree that my grandfather had planted directly by the river before the 2^nd World War.

      My step-grandmother didn’t like our family, and even after years of trying my mother and I couldn’t establish any kind of friendly relationship with her. When she died seven years later we took over the entire house, however I never shared the house with my mother. My mother didn’t like the house and remained in her village.

      When I was fifteen I began to renovate the first floor and worked slowly, room by room. At that time my much older stepbrother occupied the second floor and lived there for a few years.

      So, when I was nineteen I finally moved in. The furniture was kept very simple. Just a washing basin, a stone sink, two gas burners for cooking, a big French bed in the middle of the room, wooden shelves on the wall, and that was it. The toilet was outside the apartment, and could be reached across a veranda. This house was to be my sanctuary and my abode of rescue for the next several years.

      I had tried to participate in ‘normal’ life, but after a very short time I realized that it made most people deeply unhappy. The crazy philosophers and writers were also not able to point me to a real access to truth and happiness, even though together they had written thousands of books. Where were the facts and the actual reality? Only in the mind? Whose life had really been changed? Where was happiness? Where was the one who understood all this and could explain it? Most of those people whose writings I really loved had ended up in madness over their own mind. The world was still drowning in a permanent swamp of brutality due to wars, armament, and unrestrained exploitation of humans and nature. School had prepared me for many things but not for this cruel and relentless life.

      So I then started looking for some other possibilities. I read books about other cultures and traditions that had chosen to live differently, some of which had for instance allowed women to have positions of power or where women influenced the society. I looked extensively into the basic ideas of feminism and ultimately, however, had to realize, after having read and studied countless books, that nobody, but really nobody had the perfect solution for the entire dilemma of the human existence, or could even explain it in a conclusive and verifiable manner. The mind seemed to permanently want to masturbate with itself in order to gain pleasure and satisfaction and thus as a direct consequence remained confined within itself. All of it just didn’t make any sense.

      After it was clear that the university studies were not going to happen, I looked for a place to substitute my military service with a civilian service in a school, doing community service for severely disabled children. I let my hair grow even longer and was now dying it red with henna. I met the woman of my dreams; I fell in love with my own utopian imagination of a wild-galloping Amazon with blue eyes who danced barefoot through