About
What matters most to me is to listen to the mystery of what I really am, from moment to moment. When living from what is true, life feels infinite and precious in its fleeting nature. Creation and dissolution are whirling in space, held by silence.
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Since a very early age I was drawn to poetry. It is poetry – and music – that let me stay in touch with the luminosity of being in a world that felt extremely dense and difficult.
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My poems emerge from the interface of dimensions – on returning from the depth of being back into the phenomenal world or when dropping from the phenomena into what is always there. When listening happens, words can offer themselves. Listening dives into the moment – the most mundane as well as the extraordinary – and the words arising offer the nectar of this “now” back to the source in its beauty and uniqueness.
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Language itself arises from source. In rare moments language transmits the perfume of its origin. That is what poetry is about.
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Writing poetry is a solitary enterprise. In truly being alone I am everything and everyone. A deep love of all creation and of being human reveals itself in this oneness. Poems arise from this flame of wonder and appreciation.
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A poem is reaching out as much as it is diving in. Desiring not only the infinite, but you, as well. A desire to touch is voiced in the words, a longing for true togetherness. When you receive the poem and we happen to bear witness of the mystery together, in our shared humanity, the poem fulfills itself. Its nectar is absorbed. Silence remains.
Thank you.
I learned to read and write when I was five years old. At this early age, when separation had not completely taken hold, there still was a sense of oneness and of the wonder of life. Words did not appear so much as conceptual, but rather as magical beings creating a world of depth, coherence and luster in which all was felt. At this time I was living in England. Although German is my native language and we moved away from England when I was seven, English remained the most poetic and intoxicating language for me. Poems kept arising in this language.
In my late teens, I started studying Russian. I had been so taken by Russian literature and poetry in particular that I devoted my academic education to it. Most deeply I was drawn to Osip Mandelshtam, but also others were important to me such as Pasternak, Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva. In Russian poetry I experienced a deep dive into life, where the mystery keeps shining through between the letters. I was also influenced deeply by Rilke, the German Romantics and many English and American poets. I embarked on a PhD on contemporary Russian poetry in California. Yet, I did not complete the degree. I realized I did not want to talk and write about poetry, but live it.
In 1998 and 2000 my first two books of poetry appeared in Germany (both by Dielmann Verlag in Frankfurt a.M.). I received several fellowships and prizes for my work in Switzerland and Germany. I also translated contemporary Russian and American poetry into German and worked as an essayist. Though there was praise for my work, I felt utterly lost in this period. The mystery had dried out, the words felt like conceptual wrapping with no substance at all. The felt sense of being was gone. I was living in an intellectual ivory tower.
I started seeking. I knew I had to quit the intellectual in order to plunge back into life, into the poetry of the Real that felt totally lost. I realized that my hesitation to dive into the Real came from all the hidden pain in me. I started to turn back onto myself and the wounds I had not been able to address before. After years of therapy, spiritual and body work I started to accompany other women who felt tense and dried up in their lives. In 2016, a Dutch book appeared, “Leven in wat je Doet”, sharing the experiences and lessons learned by slowing down, simplifying and daring to drop into the self.
In 2005, I had moved to the Netherlands to live with my Dutch husband and stepdaughter. My two daughters were born in 2005 and 2008. Mothering is a both humbling and enchanting path which has brought me to my knees and restored an overall sense of wonder and belonging.
In 2017, we moved to a rural place in the South of the Netherlands. By that time, I had let go of a lot of baggage, but only now did it really dawn on me that it was me that was still in the way. I had not yet let go of myself. An even deeper plunge began, day to day and moment to moment. Poems began emerging again, and in 2020 and 2023 two new books of poetry appeared.
For me a wonderful expression of the poetry of life is tending a garden with vegetables, herbs and flowers and living with animals – bees, chickens, goats, cats and a dog. And being adopted by the land I live on, by its forests.
Living in three languages with a few more on the background is a challenge. I miss words and expressions in all languages. I can never rely on language. It gives itself, or not. Sometimes I am drowned so deeply in reality that it is difficult to speak at all.
Poetry is a hazardous enterprise – endeavoring to voice the unspeakable in words. How can something as conditioned and limited as language express that which is limitless and never can be fixed? Yet, what feels really precious is beyond “I can’t” or “I can”. It’s about giving myself. And about the courage to play.