As a young boy of maybe 10 years old I stood on the balcony of our German apartment high-rise and wondered about where life would take me. At the same time I was already very observant with the my friends' families and people in general to see how they lived, how they managed. How could I actively plan if I don’t know what’s out there? As I pondered this conundrum, I took as an example the outcome of other families' lives and ended up very disappointed with the prospect of engaging in some sort of cookie-cutter outcome to be like everyone else: go to school, get a degree, get a job, get a house, get married, raise children … I saw this approach to life as though humanity is nothing more than animals going through a predetermined cycle of events, like cattle ~ like monkey see, monkey do. Penguin colony ...?
I’d always been intrigued not so much with the phenomenal world and its obvious characteristics but with the subtle energies and nature of life and its hidden dynamics.
A life of just going through predetermined motions
couldn’t possibly be all there is…
As far as the obvious is concerned, I did enjoy the travels my parents took me on including Holland and Mallorca. Around age 11 by chance I stumbled across the opportunity to show people into available parking spaces on a parking lot for a local business park and found that most rewarded me with a few Pfennig (read cents) out of their pockets! During the latter half of our High School experience, that is, after I’d moved to the United States, my best friend Doug and I ran a Desktop Publishing business for a while which got us in contact with a variety of different people, their needs, and we can do to provide for them. What a cool experience! Incidentally, he was my first friend after arriving in the US in ‘81, and we’re still friends today. Other opportunities opened up years later that I’d have to ascribe to my personality, curiosity, initiative and willingness to learn. But it wasn’t until I experienced the dot com bubble bursting that I learned that one cannot rely on the corporate world for a livelihood.
Though I must say, even though the .com door closed, it opened the door to travel to Asia as one of my co-workers from Inktomi (2001) invited me to travel to Thailand with her and two of her friends. Experiencing the people, food, ancient ruins, snorkeling in exotic waters is exactly what I’d only dreamed about. Now I was sitting atop a river boat heading due South between Bangkok and Phuket. I felt so in awe and invigorated! What an adventure!
I think it was on that same 2 month trip that I diverged to meet a mutual friend in Hong Kong where she showed me around the city ... WOW what a huge place! I remember being out at a dance club all night that by the time we got to the train station to go home, the station was closed, only to open maybe an hour or so later to take us home at 5 AM!
Several years later read up a bit on Indonesian culture and language and after being shot up with immunizations (needed for any tropical adventure outside of big cities mind you), I headed over to Bali. The food is fresh and rich in flavor, there are many an artisans' crafts to see, snorkeling to explore and travelers to share stories with. It was breathtaking - I even went to see the John Hardy outdoor showroom with its amazing over ground and underground natural architecture not to mention their silver manufacturing process, e.g. how they make their bracelets. And if that isn’t enough variety, hopped over to KL as the locals call it, or Kuala Lumpur, to meet with a long-time friend whom I’d only spoken with via ICQ for years prior, to have dinner with her and her husband. She’d asked me at one point to help her edit her Anthropology dissertation towards her PhD about indigenous displacement and the adverse effects of modernization - from long houses to poverty and prostitution (from what I remember now). That was an interesting and sobering read!
Eventually I did go back into the corporate world for a while, at least until my inner being revolted so much against commuting and sitting in a cube and having to subject myself to a contrived culture that I finally called it quits. In parallel to this corporate life I’d met my wife Rhônya whose curiosity for color and beads and design led her to making jewelry and many other creative expressions. That coupled with my IT experience would lead us to build Bella Bohemian LLC into what it is today ... still perpetually evolving, but much more sophisticated than her original version 1 web site.
At this point in my life I've learned that one's balance is absolutely key. In order to live a good, healthy life, we also need to have learned about the inner and outer worlds and keep these in equilibrium. Life is not an intellectual exercise, it's not about making a buck, and it's not about dying with the most toys but about having lived fully and gained experience whereby we move on one day with a cornucopia of inner riches.
It is my hope to share some of my experience and learning with you and possibly engage in some mutually rewarding exchanges that will further enlighten us both ... along the way, as an expression of our inner worlds, we offer you useful, sustainable accents and tools to make your life more beautiful, healthier and easier, so that you can focus on what matters most.
Curious: What Kind of World do You want?
Blessed be,
Detlev
» it's really me
𓆃𓁳𓅟𓈗𓆸𓋹
PS: Despite this page being somewhat lengthy, it is not easy for me to just talk about "who are you, what are you about", here or in some contrived social setting. I don't walk around with "my story" in my head. Instead, I naturally find it to be much more fluid to be in a synchronistic moment to share a snippet of life experience, relative to that moment and the entities involved. Though some experiences I've shared in my Personal Journal.
One's being (energy : wave) does not equate to the sum of its parts (wave : particle).
