HEIDI
Raised In An Ashram
Part 1.
Emotional Rating:3/10.
Easy read.
2 deaths (+6 million)
A story of a life forged in chaos & love in the 1980s to 1930s.
Growing up in a cult/experiment/movement.
Raised In An Ashram
Part 1.
I grew up in wild hippie communes and ashrams all over the world, from the vibrant, buzzing, hot, and sticky jewel of my heart that is India, to running around Ibiza as a child in the 1980s. Like a current that sweeps you up, I too slid into crazy adventures…with other kids whose parents were also ‘finding’ themselves. Mainly, though, I was holding on for dear life on the back of mopeds, often driven by 12-year-olds.
I am one part daughter of an olive oil producer from Crete (suspected) international peddler of midnight substances, lover of many, and who at the age of 14, smuggled his little Greek Adonis-like body on a ship as a stowaway, from Greece to New York.
On the other hand, my mama’s side, the descendants of large and strong women from a quaint teeny-tiny village in southern Germany (where time may have stood still).
There, I'd fetch milk in large cans and rode on dogs, swam in lakes and in rivers that wound themselves around our farmhouse. This is where I lived with my nan Irml, whom I loved very much, providing warmth, a slow pace of life and a well-needed routine.
Here me in my traditional ‘Dirndl’ dress that I wore when I was still sweet and innocent, living in the south of Germany…one side to me for sure.
…And here the other side of my character :)
When I was only one year old, my upbringing took a sharp and unusual turn. My mother left my father and joined an Indian cult. The story of how that happened will be a whole other chapter of intrigue, lust and drug smuggling. But for now, here is how it all began.
My mother spent her entire life searching for something. At this point, she was looking for ‘herself’ in Oregon, the U.S.of A.
I was not allowed to go with her. You see, my mother's parents (who were very traditional) insisted that I was not to be surrounded by (fabulous) freaks and beautiful intellectuals, who barely wore any clothes (that was the sticking point, I think). Also, the hippies would make out with each other a lot…also not cool with my Nan.
At the age of 3 or 4, I ended up living with my grandparents for what seemed like years, as my mother went off the rails in the desert. We’ll come to how ‘wild’ in another chapter.
I spent my precious time on two halves of the South German farm, which was separated by a slow river and a wooden bridge.
One side of my family was very down-to-earth. This was the side my grandmother Irml and my grandfather Ernst lived on. The farmhouse was always tidy and had a distinctly 1970s feel. A cermaic stove that would heath the rooms, an avocado green kitchen in which food was always being cooked. Creatures were constantly being caught, butchered, smoked, pickled, kneaded, taken from the ground, the river, or the forest.
Seasons felt honest. Buckets with black eels would litter the house, or old farmers would convene and suck up to my grandfather ( he owned lots of land).
My grandmother, however, was a lovely, kind, kaftan-wearing, round lady. She had dreams of travel and art, though life rarely allowed her to chase them. My gran was an orphan. Her mother died at birth, and her father disappeared under mysterious circumstances, rumoured to have “slid” off a tall mountain after a dispute with the local Nazi party. As a child herself, Irml became a ‘helping hand’ on the family farm. Like so many other homes in the 1930s, the boys went off to war, leaving big holes in the hearts of those women who had to work and stayed home.
Before World War II, my grandfather was raised to be a good German boy. Ernst was his name, and he was the sort of ‘long-lost’ son of the family. As a small child, he went to a German mountain ‘youth club’, in retrospect, a fine place for the Nazis to get their little (initially harmless, then) evil ethos programmed into him. Alongside many fun activities and a purposeful sense of community, he’d play amongst other mountain-dwelling youths, in adorable suede leather shorts and traditional braided hair, girls roaming freely among the wildflowers. He loved horses and dreamt of creating a thriving farm.
It was 1939. Hitler and the rest of the disenfranchised Europe, with its idealistic but mad leaders of the 19th century, got in their own and everyone else's way. All the German boys and men went off to a sickening war. First on the list for world domination was Poland.
It seemed as if the whole world had lost its senses.
Russians captured the invading Germans in Poland. My grandfather was amongst those unlucky souls and was taken to a Siberian prisoner of war ‘work camp’.
Meanwhile, my teenage grandmother came to work on the farm. She was reading the letters out aloud to his sisters, Ruth and Berthel.
I later read them too, and they sounded naive, childlike, and hopeful. He’d ask about the animals and how they were doing. Then, as the years passed, his words were other. A little voice stretched thin across the paper. Young Ernst aged rapidly. He survived there for another 9 years!
After World War II, Germany was to be rebuilt. My grandfather returned home, a different man. Minus 40-degree winters and seeing your friends die would do that to you. In a land far away. Alone. Injured and in pain because of a bad accident that meant his leg was severely broken. Causing him immense suffering whilst in camp and throughout his life. This is when my grandmother, Irml, fell in love with Ernst. They married, and expectations of wifelyness had to be met.
Back to my story. While my mother was away, living her 80s technicolour dream, my gran and great aunt Ruth would cook, bake, and do crafts together. In summer, we’d make packed lunches and bring beer to the farmhands labouring on golden, shimmering wheat fields. In autumn, we’d go to our forest with the dark pine trees, the moss, the stag and the large birds of prey. We’d collect wood to light the fires in the farmhouse.
Warm sunny days were spent in our garden, which grew heavy with berries. Within a hop and one skip, we’d catch our lunch from the river. Our neighbours would bring salads and cold drinks, and we’d eat together. Then the kids would jump in the river. It really was lovely.
For Christmas, our big family would bake enough to feed the whole village. Braiding pleated buns, the finest kipferl, which dissolve in your mouth. We’d make beautiful things, and I loved the women in my life very much. Especially my grandmother, she lit up when I walked into the room. She was that type of person who, despite her heavy burdens, never laid them on me.
I was fortunate enough to have another branch of the family that lived on the other side of the little wooden bridge. A stone’s throw away. My great-aunts, Berthel and Ruth, lived there. Those people ate their bread with a knife and fork!
I loved spending my time playing hide and seek with my cousins in their walled garden, which was huge and groomed. The floors were polished, and the house always smelled of beeswax. The tables were draped in stitched linens, and the women wore pearls and red lipstick. This was the affluent side of my family, comprising judges and the like. Classical music would echo through the wooden house. The clocks alone would fetch a fortune at Sotheby’s. We’d have coffee and cake together on Sunday. My (poor, worn out by me) relatives were also very kind, and we had lots of parties where we’d dress up for birthdays.
We liked the context and history, and so that was always woven into our family gatherings. Great-Aunt Ruth had spent a good 20 years (of her absolute prime) ‘relieving’ chickens’ bodies of their little heads. She owned a chicken farm and decided she’d never marry, so being a boss-lady and taking lovers was more her vibe. We did things like dress up as chickens with hand-sewn outfits and recite poems about Aunt Ruth. We’d laugh, eat, and dance.
My great-aunt Ruth, my grandfather’s sister, seemed to have wandered out of another century, from an old Germany of wooden shutters that creaked in the wind. Perhaps she was a little mad, but then, a world war has a way of rearranging the mind's furniture. She was tiny, insistent, and precise, like a needle forever threading its way through cloth. And beneath all that steeliness was a deep kindness, the sort that slipped out quietly.
My favourite thing she’d do with me was take me in her little yellow ‘Beetle’ and we’d go to the lakes and swim in the rain. She had a German Shepherd dog too, called Yette, and she’d always made the car smell, but those are the kind of memories that made being a kid very special for me. We’d sleep in her huge bed, which was my great-great-grandparents and she always had a heated blanket in the winter. Strangely, though, she used to add a bit of Olbas oil to our nighttime tea…I don’t think she knew that it wasn’t meant to be ingested.
I thought she was cool. She was resilient and as hard as nails, and she was always there for me. A survivor who stayed kind (unlike my grandfather, who was inflicting trauma on those who loved him most).
The hardest thing to do, in my opinion and shows the greatness of mankind, is that despite adversity, suffering, and pain, one can keep an open, generous heart. The women in my family believed in people’s ability for connection and love. Not everyone whom I met on the paths in the darkness owns that ability.
As you know, and as it happens, life always moves like a river, changing.
One day, after having pined for my mother and wanting nothing more than to be with her again, all of a sudden, she was just there. Right in front of me. She had just come back from America.
One might judge her. Why on earth would she leave her child behind? How selfish could she be? But things are not always as they seem.
The best way I can describe her is that she was from another place…I sometimes believed that she was barely from this earth. Forged from something other. I remember this so clearly. I was at the small Bavarian community hall, where I stood, small and dressed in my shiny mermaid leotard; my heart was in my throat. There SHE was. My mama was very tanned and pretty. Her hair was a little blonder and very long. She gave me a huge cuddle and sat with me in the back of our family's brown Mercedes-Benz.
She held me and told me that my grandmother, Irml, with her warm, round face and long black hair, who had played endless games of Lego with me and had been my literal home, had died. Time slipped sideways, as if the world itself had tilted just for me. A few days before, Irml had let me eat her cordon bleu steak in the hospital bed, watching me with a quiet satisfaction that now felt impossibly distant. To bring her luck, I picked four-leaf clovers and wore one of her knitted dresses, green and yellow stripes hugging me.
I felt relief that my mother was real, finally with me, and at the same time the world seemed to tremble at the edges, questioning why they couldn’t both be here. I never got to say goodbye, never felt her warm hands on my face one last time. Mama’s strange words floated in: “Irml has left her body… gone to the other place.” And in that moment, everything familiar flickered and shifted, as though nothing solid had ever existed, as though the air itself could vanish beneath our feet.
The ‘place beyond’ became a frequent destination of those I loved in my future life.
My sweet, wild and untethered mother took me from the biscuity bosoms of my gran’s house and drove to a big city on the other side of Germany, where we tumbled into a commune in Berlin.
It had white-Italian carpets, which I remember staging one of my dramatic deaths on.
As I was a clever child, and obviously unclear on death. I’d decided to cover myself in ketchup and thus delicately displayed myself across the pristine corridor with the most splendid and largest kitchen knife I could muster. Cleopatra had nothing on me! I was a heroin. My mother LOVED THAT* (not) so much. I suppose it's better than years of therapy. Also, not the German naked inhabitants of our boutique commune.
My mother's sister, Fritzi, also lived in Berlin, which was nice.
Berlin was a lot to take for a child who still liked her feet on the ground. I’d already glimpsed Ibiza, so I had some measure of the world, but this city was something else entirely. There were countless things I was not to touch. Heroin lurked in the corners of the 1980s and Berlin was not Bavaria. My mother, a romantic at heart, flamed through a string of men, each promising her love. Smoke curls from the cigarette dangling from her fingers, twisting in the air like a little grey ribbon I want to grab. Her guru preached detachment: the letting go of ego and surrendering so as not to get attached to anything at all.
As my mother had Albert Einstein’s IQ (yes, it’s true). Because she recognised a restless soul(me), she decided I was ready to get up once again and leave, taking me on more adventures. We packed the little belongings we had (mainly a vast, massive bag full of cash worth probably around a million in today’s economy) and off we went to India.
Me in an Ashram in India, 1986, being given the name Shikha…(meaning flames of love).
I remember this so well. Everyone is laughing because I kept looking at the wise man’s hands instead of his lovely face.
My mother is here in the turquoise leopard print trousers.
And here another one in India
Pune 86’
The ‘Kids House’ …our own little place to go wild…whilst our parents meditated. I am the kid with the pink headband and the all-over facial beard ;) I still know most of these kids! All of them are amazing humans.
Living in India was both magical and a little wild. You can read more about my ridiculous (and occasionally ill-advised) adventures in part 2!
After India, my mother and I skipped, schlepped, and hopped our way across the globe. And then, when another season in India no longer seemed like the place for schoolbooks and timetables, I found myself in Devon, England, at a wonderfully eccentric hippie school. It was here that I grew tall in ways children aren’t really meant to, collecting stories and sights that settled on me like the drizzle that never stopped, like crows on telephone wires, like Margaret Thatcher’s England pressing in at the edges.
This place was one of a kind! Crazy-fun-scary-Wild-sometimes lonely- always adventurous, certainly an experimental hippy situation!
Here is our school photo, 1987. England
The day I arrived I was picked up from a quaint little train station in Devon by a a dude in a van. The drive was lined with old trees, sheep in the fields and a empty bath in the courtyard with some kids skating it and listening to really loud music. It was all looking all very 80’s.
The guy in the right hand bottom corner, Anu, taught me how to take photos. We’d listen to David Bowie and I’d help him process photos in the dark room. He was a true inspiration and probably one of the reasons I became a photographer and my beautiful aunty Christa ( another one of my mamas sisters), who took me to fancy art shows in metropolitan places. ‘she’d say If the kid isn’t going to shower then at least she’ll know who Bill Viola is!’
I loved this place so much. It was a mixture of crazy, idyllic and in the middle of nowhere…surrounded by hills and lush nature…and some poor local villagers who wanted to know why a 7 year old, tiny girl speaks like Eddie Murphy with a German accent (yep, my education consisted of watching American videos with cool guys kicking butt).
Although, just small children, we didn’t really have any rules as such, so basically we just learnt how to live with each other. I think I knew how to cook a 5 course meal by the time I was 7 years old. I could also spit very far and I had a sharp tongue that would get me into trouble. I was probably just acting out because I was feral and probably a bit lonely at times. Also, looking back now, I think I was very tired because I didn’t have a bedtime.
We’d have food fights with jelly, have long meetings in the morning, singing ‘yellow submarine’, meditated, painted, watched 80’s films in a huge snuggle pit of 150 kids.
I slept, ate and played with lots of children in a big house in the lush English countryside…running wild & feeling free and in no hurry to be anything but a kid. This was probably why I didn’t learn to read until I was 12 years old. I always preferred building dens, getting hench (to beat up boys) and to be completely honest, I basically thought I was a ninja! Eventually the school grew and so did I and when I was a teenager life again had it’s way of making change happen.
Although I loved this free & chaotic place, I don’t think I could put my son in a boarding school abroad...ok a better word for it would be a kids commune.
These days, what I love doing the absolute most, is hanging out with small humans in nature. Creating images that are natural, fun and full of love and feeling gratitude for the freedoms I have been afforded by those who came before me. Especially my grandmother and my mother, who are both together in the place where the light is bright.
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Authors note to the reader:
This story took place in a time when the world seemed wide open.
Before women would travel by themselves. My mother was an intellectual, a staunch feminist. Activist and had read all books under the sun. She had already joined many movements in the 1970’s and was looking for something else beyond the grasp of intellect.
Writing this, I believe she would have thought she was ‘right on’, sticking it to the ‘man’.
I guess, she kind of did. I’d often witnessed her mute authoritarians or bureaucrats who’d dare to limit our freedom. There was always bribery if that didn’t work. In those days she would not have known about ‘white’ feminism, her movement of hippies, inadvertently being colonisers or culturally appropriating practices like yoga and other forms of therapies. Some of her adventures would not have ‘given back’ to the communities who’d invited her with open arms. For this I am sorry! I know she would be too. I will make repairs when I can, for myself and also for those who came before me.
Stories have many sides and most of my life was directly impacted by fascism in 1930’s.
personally, I believe my mama just wanted to get away from the trauma that was passed down just after WW2. She wanted to be free. Because of this, there were times where I would be raised by others. All of my little hippy friends had parents who’d often be swept away in ‘bliss’ and in deep devotion to our guru. As small child I had to look out for my brothers and sisters. They became my family, not by blood but by bond.
