dirk ottenheym

The screen is black. The future is unwritten. This is the environment I love.

I'm sitting at Good Folks Café in Da Nang. Six more days until I leave Vietnam. Outside, the street is already warm. In here, it's quiet enough that something else can begin.

I feel pressure to come up with something great. Something right. I notice the pressure the way you notice a hand on your shoulder — and I set it down on the table beside me. This is a different mode than building. This is descent. And descent happens by itself. Like a stone sinking to the floor of a lake.

I see myself standing at the edge of the water. He is the Builder — the one who throws the stone. He seems bored when there's nothing to construct. But inside him, like those Russian nesting figures where one contains another contains another, there is the stone itself. The one that sinks. I follow the energy.

Steven King wrote about this in On Writing — that there's a place in you where writing begins. Mine is the Black Zen Garden. Dark first. Unknown. I only arrive here when I'm exhausted by the world, when I've spent weeks inside intellectual work — understanding, structuring, building. This kind of writing is the opposite of that. This is meditation. Not knowing. Allow. The rules of gravity don't apply. Moon boots.

The moment I touch the surface of the water, my shape changes.

I become a diver who can breathe underwater.

I'm not hungry. I'm not thirsty. I'm not fighting the current — I'm following it. I sink, and there's something playful in the sinking. Legs kick lightly. Arms move in slow arcs. Then I turn face-upward, arms open wide, and let the weight take me. The world above the water simply ceases.

Even here, a voice finds me: That's boring. Tell an exciting story. Another voice, quieter: Swim. Let go. Enjoy. I notice both. I keep sinking.

This is where everything I built over the last months was born. I feel it with my body, not my mind — the certainty that this dark, gravity-free place underneath the intellectual work is the source. The code, the structure, the words, the system. Everything. It existed here before I built it. It will exist here after.

The lake is always water. Not earth or air or fire. Water. Movement is slow here. If you want to be fast, you can't. That's the whole teaching, compressed.

I feel like I'm in the heart of everything — in the heart of Da Nang, of Bao An, of Minh, of Pai, of Münster. Like a source where all the places I've loved appear and dissolve, appear and dissolve, like breath.

Come home, Dirk.

Everything is here already.

I am no longer the diver — I am a manta ray. Broad wings. Moving slow. Each upward stroke is one breath in, each downward stroke is one breath out. The surrounding area becomes visible the way the world becomes visible just before sunrise — not all at once, from the edges, gradually. A grey-dark stone floor below me. The water around me is neither warm nor cold. It simply holds. Then I sense a cave. Something calls from inside it. Come here. Come here. It's time. My wings rise. My wings fall. I move toward it.

The stone walls are dark grey. They catch no light, throw no reflection. I know who is waiting at the end of the cave before I can see him. The Dread Guy — the figure I've been circling since September. The one who sat with me at the fire on April 5th and gave me nothing, no name, only presence. He changes forms. Dread Guy. Shin Li. Magician. A unicorn that shows itself only when you've stopped searching for it. He is sitting at the far end of the cave, beside a fire. An underwater fire. I had no idea such a thing was possible. Here it is.

In the same way you cannot lose what's outside, you cannot lose what's inside. You cannot escape who you are.

I hear it before I reach him. The words are already in me when they arrive, the way true things are — you recognize them rather than receive them. The fire pulls me. He pulls me. I come closer.

We are facing each other now. I'm still floating. He seems to breathe underwater as easily as I do, as easily as the fire burns inside water. He sits in the yogi position, but sits is the wrong word — he floats in it, unheld, unanchored, completely still. Finally, he says. You made it. He says it the way you say something to a person who already knows what you're going to say. No surprise on either side. Just arrival. You know that I am you and you are me. And I say: Yes. I know.

Nobody speaks for a while. The fire moves. The water holds. The stone walls hold. He looks at me and I look at him, and there is nothing to perform in this, no correct way to sit.

Then — I'm watching him, and it happens. Not a vision, not a decision. Just a seeing, the way you suddenly see the shape hidden inside a drawing that you couldn't find before. I look at him — the Dread Guy, the yogi at the fire — and his name comes into view.

Yoda.

And then I look at myself, at the manta ray floating across the fire from Yoda, and that name comes too.

Roy.

We see each other's names by becoming each other. Two different aspects of the same truth. No matter which eyes I look through, I love the other one completely.

Roy, Yoda says, as if he's been saying it for years. Of course. Why did you call me?

Because — and I hear myself speaking from somewhere I hadn't spoken from before — I knew you needed some support. And some encounter. For clarity. Nothing new. We both already know. We take the form that the environment requires. We are both here to remind each other. I see it in you. You see it in me.

The fire and the water are in perfect harmony.

Then everything softens. The edges blur. The cave, the fire, the stone walls — they slowly dissolve, and my awareness stays, but the water is gone. I'm sitting on a rock in an open field. Flat land, dry grass. A steppe, wide and still. I close my eyes. When I open them — the cave is back. Instant. Yoda is there. The fire is there. I close them again. The field. It's all there. It's just what changes.

I sit in Good Folks Café, six days before leaving Vietnam. The street outside is warm. The screen in front of me is full now.

I am the man at the shore and the stone and the diver and the manta ray. I am Roy looking at Yoda and Yoda looking at Roy. I am the cave and the field. None of it contradicts.

You cannot lose what's inside. That's the whole thing. That's what Yoda came to say — or what I came to hear him say, which is the same.

The fire burns in the water. I still have no idea how.