When the poet picks his little words and puts them in order, selects them in the midst of a world which may be destroyed tomorrow, he does the same as the anemone, primrose, and other little flowers that grow now in the meadows. In the midst of a world which tomorrow may be covered with poisonous gas, they carefully unfold their small leaves and chalices with five, four, or seven petals, either smooth or jagged, everything arranged with precision and as beautiful as possible.
It was the beginning of spring. The budding green rolled across graceful hills like a thin, luminous wave. The trees cast off their winter shapes, brown structures with sharp contours. They began to blend into the young play of leaves and join the colors of the landscape as an infinite, flowing wave of living green.
One should not read books with such thoughts and questions as you do. When you look at a flower or smell it, you do not immediately tear it apart, analyze it, and place it under a microscope in order to find out why it has to look like that and smell like that. You rather let the flower speak to you and take it in with its colors and shapes, its fragrance, its whole being in its stillness and mysterious presence. You are enriched by this experience with the flower to the degree you are capable of serene adoration. You could cultivate the same attitude toward the books of poets as you do with flowers.
Everything is waiting, preparing itself; everything dreams and germinates in a subtle, gently urging fever of becoming—the sprout yearns for the sun, the cloud longs to rain on the field, the young grass strives up to the winds. Every year, I lie in anxious wait, full of impatience and longing, as if a magic moment would reveal to me the miracle of new birth, as if it had to happen that once, just for one hour, I could co-experience and understand in a revelation the power and the beauty of how life laughingly jumps out of the earth and opens its young, big eyes toward light.
Each year this wonder occurs for me with all its music and fragrances, loved and adored by me—and yet not understood; it has happened again, and I did not see it coming. I did not notice the breaking open of the hull of the germ, nor the first quivering tender bud in the light. Suddenly flowers stand everywhere, trees shine with their glowing leaves or display their white, sparkling blossoms, and birds throw themselves joyfully in elegant curves through the warmth of the blue sky. The marvel happened although I did not see it. Forests draw their contours across the landscapes, distant peaks are calling, and it is time to get boots and backpack ready, fishing rod and oars, and to embrace with the joy of all the senses this new year which seems to become each time more beautiful than ever before, and which seems to step up its pace each year. How long, how inexhaustibly long spring used to be when I was a boy!
In joyful expectation of spring I sow my little garden with beans and lettuce, mignonettes and cress. I fertilize them with the remains of last year’s plants and think back to previous generations and also think of generations to come. Like everyone else, I accept this well-ordered cycle as a natural and intrinsically beautiful sequence. Only at times it occurs to me, while I sow and harvest, how strange it is that of all creatures on this planet, we humans are dissatisfied with these cycles. We are unhappy with the eternal presence of all life but insist on claiming a uniquely personal, individual immortality.
A great majority of us spend our lives in a dulled state, without joy or love. We miss the experience of real joy, the exuberance of an elevated life, an understanding of life as a delightful affair, as a celebration. This is why the Renaissance appears so attractive to us. The most dangerous enemy of joy is the overemphasis on the momentary urgency, the driven sense of constant haste, as if it were the most important foundation of our life experience.… “As much as possible and as fast as possible” is our current motto. As a result, we are having more and more fun and less and less joy.… Moderate pleasures are twice as much pleasure: and don’t overlook the small pleasures of life.
The man who picks a flower for the first time in order to have it near him during his work has made progress in receiving the joys of life.… I advise everyone who suffers from lack of time and is frustrated to focus on experiencing every day as many little joys as possible and to reserve the more intense, exciting pleasures for holidays and special moments. The small joys, the little pleasures, are given to us for our daily regeneration, our daily renewal, and relief from stress.
It is well known that I had the desire to write a larger work in order to bring modern man closer to the generous, silent life of nature and to love it. I wanted to teach people to listen to the heartbeat of the earth and to participate in the wholeness of life and not to forget in the midst of their urgent desires, their individual destiny—that we are not gods and created by ourselves, but children and part of the earth and the cosmos as a whole.
I wanted to remind us that not only the songs of the poets and our dreams during the night, but also rivers, oceans, drifting clouds, and storms are symbols that carry the great yearning which spreads its wings between heaven and earth, and whose goal is the absolute certainty about the inalienable right to exist and to the immortality of all living beings.
The innermost core of each living being knows this light of eternal belonging, is a child of God, and rests without fear in the safe embrace of everlasting life. But everything that is bad, sick, and rotten that we carry in us contradicts this and believes in death. I also wanted to teach people to find through a brotherly love for nature, new sources of joy and new sources of life’s streaming energies.
I wanted to preach the art of contemplation, the art of wandering, and the art of enjoying life as an elation for what is. Through powerful, seductive words, I wanted to bring alive mountains, oceans, and green islands, and I wanted to force you to see this rich and vital life that blossoms and overflows each day outside your houses and cities.
I wanted to achieve this so you would feel ashamed to know more about foreign wars, fashion, gossip, literature, and art than about spring, which unfolds its vigorous energy outside your cities. I wanted to achieve this so that you feel ashamed to know more about these things than about the river which runs underneath your bridges and about the forests and the meadows through which your railways run. From my place of solitude and with many difficulties in my life, I wanted to tell you about a golden string of unforgettable joys I had found in this world, and I wanted you, who may be happier and less burdened, to discover this world with even greater joys.
I was able to add a new experience to the few I had made so far in finding my actual goal in life: the contemplation of strange-looking natural objects (like rotting tree roots, colorful lines in rocks, oil spills floating on water, cracks in glass). I realized that giving my full attention to these totally irrational, weird, strange forms created a feeling of congruence between my inner world and the creative force that produced these forms. We are tempted to see them as creations of our senses. The boundary between us and nature appears to waver and dissolve, and we enter an awareness in which we cannot distinguish anymore whether the images in our eyes have their origin in external impressions or in internal projections.
Nowhere is it easier than in this exercise to discover how much we are creators, how much our soul always participates in the continuous creation of the world. It is rather the same indivisible divinity which works through us and through nature. If the external world were destroyed, one of us would be capable of reconstructing it, because mountain and river, tree and leaf, root and flower, all creations in nature are already inner forms, originating in the soul whose essence is the eternal and whose spirit we do not know, but which often reveals itself in the power of love and the power to create.
There is nothing more magical and mysterious than the soul of a playing child, and nothing becomes stranger to us or more easily lost.
A part of the childhood that most people seem to lose completely is the striving for truth, the desire to give meaning to things, to search for their origin, and the longing for harmony and a consistent frame of reference. I suffered from uncountable questions for which nobody had answers. Slowly I realized the adults I consulted considered my questions as irrelevant and did not understand my worries. I noticed some pseudo-answers were given, with my soul searching into an increasingly fragile refuge of mythical stories.
How much more serious, sincere, and honorable the life of many people would be if they retained beyond their young years some of this open inquiry, this quest for finding the true name and meaning of things. What is a rainbow? Why does the wind howl? Why do the flowers in the meadows wilt, and why do they bloom again? Where does the rain and snow come from? Why are we rich and our neighbor … poor? Where does the sun go in the evening?
I could tell beautiful stories, speak about tender moments and sweet experiences of my childhood. I could talk about feeling protected by my father and mother, about the love of a child and the happy, playful days in a bright, loving, tender environment. But I am only interested in those steps I took in my life to find myself. All those peaceful days, those islands of happiness, all those little paradises whose magic I was allowed to become familiar with, I leave in the glory of the distant past, which I do not desire to re-enter. Therefore, I only speak about my boyhood in regard to my new experiences, about those forces which propelled me forward, which tore me away from the old. Then, impulses always came from a different world, always in the form of fear, compulsion, and bad conscience, were always revolutionary and threatened the peace of a childhood I had so comfortably become used to.
There came years when I had to discover for the first time that in me lived a primal urge that had to hide from the normal and proper world. As is the case for everyone, I felt the slowly rising sexual desire as an assault, an enemy, a destructive force, something foreign, something that burdened my dreams, created lust and fear. This great secret of puberty did not fit at all into the idyllic bliss of my childhood. I was not a child anymore. My feelings remained attached to the regular, the familiar, the proper way of being. I tried to deny this new, rising world, but at the same time I lived in dreams, in desires, in wishes of a hidden kind. My mind tried to build a bridge between these two worlds while the world of the child fell apart.
Like most parents, mine were not helpful in supporting my new, awakening desires. They simply avoided the subject. They invested great care in hopeless attempts to deny the new reality and provided comfort for me to stay in the child’s world, which became more and more unreal, sustained only by a series of lies. I do not know whether parents can do much at all in this situation, and I do not accuse mine. It was my task to achieve this transformation and to find my own way. Like most well-trained children, I was not very adept in achieving this goal.
Every person goes through this difficult stage. The average person meets here the point in life when the demands of one’s own destiny must confront the demands of society, when the path of one’s own development has to be defended in the hardest struggle. Many experience this death and rebirth of our destiny only this one time at the disintegration and breakdown of childhood, when everything we loved is about to leave us and suddenly we feel lonely and feel the hostile world ice-cold around us. Many people remain stuck in this abyss and spend their whole life in pain, in regret over an irreversibly lost past, which is the worst and most fatal illusion of all.