I am in Waabs, Schleswig Holstein, about one and a half hours north of Hamburg, in my brothers new house.
The new house is really a very old house, thatched roof and all, sitting right smack next to a rolling wheat field, ancient oak trees residing on the little bank that nestles the end of the property, bright yellow canola flower fields glowing through more rows of majestic oaks a bit further in the distance. The Baltic Sea is but five minutes away on the other side. Quite the place to live.
My sister in law is a beekeeper among other things. She has 8 hives and intends to expand to 20 or more in the next years, now that she has the land to welcome them.
On Saturday we were invited to a fellow beekeepers home for "Maibowle", a traditional beverage of champagne and white wine enriched with the luscious aroma of sweet woodruff, which must have been picked just before flowering, wilted for a day, and then steeped in the wine for 12 hours.
The father, who is not only the beekeeper, but also the stay at home dad, and takes care of their three children who attend the local Waldorf School while his wife does the working, is also the main cook in the family. Native to the Black Forest area in southern Germany, he has brought with him a love for French cooking, and thus we were served warm buttery, crispy, cheese and chives cookies, alongside the cocktails, and a pizza-dough-like thin bread with onion and smoked ham sprinkled on top, completed by more exquisite German breads of different s grains. This accompanied platters of fragrant cheeses, and culminated in a homemade creme brulee their daughter had prepared for all of us.
They had invited another four of their friends and as the evening unfolded the conversations became more interesting.
After we had wandered through the topic of teenage drinking, which unbeknownst to me has apparently grown rampant in Germany, and reached the 13 to 14 year olds who now engage in something called "coma drinking", we landed on the related subject of disillusionment, loss of hope and future, and the expected environmental collapse of our planet.
The picture of course is very grim, the evidence and prognosis do seem pretty inevitable, and at our table all of this naturally funneled into an accusation of the people in power who hadn't done anything to turn it around. Why are they so blind, so short sighted, so egotistical?... which is most often accompanied, even if not outspoken, by a deep sense of helplessness. There is simply nothing that can turn this around, now that capitalism is reigning the planet, there is not even an alternative left, and the human greed in the end will have eradicated all human life.
At some point I noticed that something inside of me spoke up against this line of argumentation, against this way of thinking. Quietly at first and without a coherent counter-argument. Not knowing what my counter argument was, I just kept my mouth shut for a while. But I thought of what I just had been through. Thought of my conviction that anything "negative" only looks that way, but doesn't hold up if you start looking for something that is there for you, hidden at first, most of the time, but surprising and so immensely enriching when you find it. If this was true, wasn't it true always, for everybody and on any scale? I thought so. Personal as this belief was, it felt too fragile and insubstantial to voice in this circle of total strangers. But there was something I should be able to say, no?
Our planet "Gaia" herself jumped into my awareness, and I offered the view of her as a living organism, one that is perfectly capable to maintain her life force, as one that has an overwhelming amount of wellbeing in her capacity and as one who goes through periods of rebalancing and cleansing, much like the human body is capable of as well.
This window I had opened, was quickly shut again by the response that: Oh yes, or planet would certainly survive, but the human species would certainly not. The proponent was a teacher at the local public school, he had also been the one who had reported to us the alarming news of teenage drinking.
In this way we meandered through more territory, tossing a couple more balls back and forth. Dinosaurs had certainly gone extinct, hadn't they? They had been much too specialized. Yes, but look at the overall evolution of life. It's always become more complex. Hasn't life always expanded, and shouldn't we expect that this expansion will continue in some form? How can we think that the consciousness that has expanded in this way will cut itself off, rather than expand further?
Form there I hopped onto the evolutionary jumps, the theory that evolution does not always run along gradual developments but makes sudden and creative jumps. From water to the land... from the land to the air. Another participant offered the term of the creative gene that had been discovered in evolution... yes that was exactly what I meant. And who knows maybe we'll evolve very suddenly into a species that can breathe CO2?
It is hard not to get pulled into the realm of evidence, proofs, arguments and counterarguments... it was only at the very end that I was able to put into words more closely what I really wanted to say:
Yes, we can look at all the depressing data and conclude we'll go down the drain, but mustn't we look for something else? Even if we ourselves don't know of a different economical way to live as a society, even if we don't see a new model emerging somewhere, what we must hold up is the hope, and even the conviction that it... that we will go on. Because only out of this conviction and this consciousness will the very ideas and discoveries be born that we quite desperately need. Only in dreaming it up will we participate in this process, only in not giving into a fatalism, only by not fighting against what is, only by looking for the better ways, the new solutions, the possibilities, by holding love and life in our hearts will we be able to contribute something to it. That's personally what I want to do. Contribute something.
And at that point the hosts came back in from the kitchen with their daughter and served us the creme brulee.
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No wonder that teenagers are drinking... They are doing the same as their parents, who are drinking because they are desillusioned with the way their life became. Because they are not on their path anymore.
ReplyDeleteAnd nobody around seems to see it, to catch their despair.
Is it because they became so good actors and are able to hide it?
Is it because we are so selfish and cowardly, that we ignore it?
The most important is not to convince or to force anybody to have the same point of view, but to make the others think, to open their mind. Especially with our relatives because there is always a good reason why we know each other in this life. It is our moral duty, at least as a spiritual human being.
The main thing is the way we say it, the words we use to touch the others in their heart and soul.