Hei, god dag,

In the fall of 2018, I was sitting in an atelier tucked away in one of the small alleyways of Suzhou, China. There, I calligraphed a phrase into bamboo paper. Despite taking calligraphy classes at Suzhou University, it was amateurish, as a keen eye will spot in the first picture…


More than seven years later, I ran into Shiju in Auroville, who proposed teaching me calligraphy. When she heard I had already learned some in Suzhou, she was overjoyed.


The phrase she proposed to calligraph first was one of the famous lines of the Analects, Book 4: 父母在, 不远游, 游必有方. The meaning of this phrase can be interpreted as follows: When your parents live, don’t travel far; if you travel, have a direction. As I was painting the characters, a sudden wave of emotion ran over me: When I wanted to leave the Netherlands for China in 2018, a plan, a direction, was a firm condition for going so far from home. The entire phrase brings together the complex balance I feel between filial love, piety, and spreading one’s wings. :)

Shiju also taught me the respective bone inscriptions. These cracked me up. This little guy reflecting the bone inscription of 游 seems to be taking a shower in the rain…

On the fourth picture I am drying my ink brush on the fan. The last two pictures are of Xu Fancheng, or Hu Hsu, a Chinese translator who lived at the Ashram and translated the Auroville charter into Chinese. I hope that one day my ink drawings might reach his standard!