The management of this company is coming to ZeeVELD for the third year in a row. They feel at home here and it is warm to see them again. ‘You can set up a branch here,’ I joke. “That would be a good idea,” says the director. A refuge. I can sometimes feel the need for that.”
I fall silent. Flight spot… flight spot…
“You’ll stir something up with that word,” I begin hesitantly. To suddenly get up to speed: ‘You know, the funny thing is: seen from a monk’s point of view, the great weakness of man is that he thinks he must be himself a place of refuge. And what he calls his ‘life’ is a permanent defense of it. Which makes him feel the need for… a refuge.’
And I have to think back to one of my first monastic lessons: ‘Viewed from the city, it seems the world is turned upside down here in the abbey’, I once said to my monastic teacher. His answer: ‘and that’s how we look at the city: like the world turned upside down’.
What do I do in a day? Yesterday I was moving the contents of a GFT ton, today I can continue working on a new website. But whatever I do, it is only a stepping stone for the one exercise that concerns the monk: to learn to let go of the delusion that one has to be a refuge.
Who follows?
