Yuyutsu RD Sharma:

The human soul is like a parachute, if you don’t open it in the sky of your life, you drop dead,” grey-haired handsome legendary Dutch poet Hans Plomp would say something like this as you would move towards the historic artists’ village, Ruigoord.

Once out of Amsterdam’s Sloterdyk Station defining the rim of bustling city, you would initiate your grail to this artists/ poets’ heaven named Ruaigoord. You would pass through open spaces dotted with the industrial growth-huge oil tankers, Starbuck Coffee warehouse or ugly windmills. Hans would be by your side if you are lucky like I was. Otherwise the bus driver would stop his warm couch and point his finger to quiet little settlement of wooden houses by the old church. “Roikhoot!,” he would pronounce the village name as ‘Raikot’ like our own Kalikot.

On entering the village you would notice huge mossy church and its patron saint Gertude atop a tree outside Hans Plomp’s small cottage. “She is a magical protector, a Christian version of Germanic goddesses, Freya and Hella.” He would explain. You would see her holding a stick with mice climbing it up, symbolizing soul of mortals, which she carries to the Netherworld. As you would wander through the streets of this village, you would glimpse people doing yoga in their little house, making psychedelic paintings on the blankets hung on the walls of their living rooms with florescent colours and later spread them like young painter Roland does and dance all night long to the tunes of life eternal.

Once you enter the village, th-ese people would welcome you as if you were a long lost member of their own tribe. You would stop for a second on your way back to the village bar where young poet Peter de Jong would serve you red wine and Spanish music of Beatnik poetry cassettes in Allen Ginsberg’s own voice. Yes, you would stop as the deafening roar would resound in your ears and you would ask yourself – are you in Europe’s most fashionable city or in a remote village in Annapurnas?

By the bar you would see an old blue bus. Soon you would learn this bus once was the head quarter of Village’s Amsterdam Balloon Company that traveled all over the world and in the heady days of Hippie Movement came to Kathmandu. In the early seventies at the beginning of No Future Era, the inhabitants of the village decided to create their own future. They decided to travel all over the world to know its mysteries and bring the accumulated wisdom to Ruigoord to celebrate Landjuweel 2000 Festival. They organized concerts, dance, poetry, theatre, circus, rituals, video, kite flying, ingenious objects, totems, live radio, happenings sculptures and exhibition. The day I left they were to celebrate the 2004 Paradiso, the annual Festival of the village.

A century ago before this village was built, the area was an Estuary called IJ. Now it has become a reclaimed Polder. Some 500 people came to live here. They started their lives anew here, opened their own church, schools, shops, bars and remained an isolated community. In the sixties before ecological awareness dawned upon Europe administrators of Amsterdam decided to expand the city and the industrial areas around it. They built dykes, constructed industries. And in the process the surrounding villages that had flourished for more than a century were senselessly destroyed.

In the early seventies when a group of artists looking for space to start a creative community discovered this village, only twenty houses and a church were left. The old pries of Saint Gertrude church appalled by the destruction idyllic environment in the favour of mulitinational companies quietly handed over the keys to the group of artists. The deserted houses were squatted and restored. A new like began…

Now it is a post – apocalyptic oasis in the cultural deserts of Modern Europe, “claims Hans. “ Our roots go back to the Expressionists, Dadaists, Surrealists, Beatnik, Provo and Punk. We are on the side of irrational, mystery and shamans. That’s what we learned from Aisa. We are on the side of Shiva and alchemy of his shamans. We do not believe in the working man but we are ‘Homo Ludens’, the playful beings that German Nobrl Laureate Herman Hesse celebrates in his later novel, “The Glass bead Game.” The central character in book is called Ludo: I play. We are with dropouts of industrial progress. We wish to create in this village the joyful adventures of free spirits. We desire to create this open space where all the shamans of the world can dance to the flame of Lord Shiva.”

This writer can be reached at yuyutsurd@yahoo.com