The lovely morning
Welcome, beautiful morning, which now awakens me from sleep to a new day’s activities, and on which I step once more into God’s beautiful world.
When I go for a walk with our dog Pudding in a moment and am able to enjoy the beautiful natural world all around me, my heart, too, is wide open and I become more attuned to myself, my worries and troubles, but also to everything I see and hear today.
Out in nature, I find my true self and, as a result, manage time and again to engage deeply with my inner self.
Simply standing there, listening to the birds in the bushes, the pheasant or the larch trees in the air. The sun spreads its light and life everywhere, and its rays warm my body with their gentle warmth, which does me just as much good as the refreshing coolness of the early morning, which will soon give way to the increasing heat of the day.
This morning, the green meadows and fields appear even more vividly before my eyes than usual, as they are drenched in morning dew and revitalised anew by the morning sun.
Every flower that has now opened simply beams at me, playing with its myriad colours and wafting its sweet scent my way. It is also a joy to see so many trees standing in all their splendour. How lovely to see that Pudding, too, can take delight in nature and his surroundings, running round the meadow at full speed, stopping to sniff, running on, and coming back to me to be stroked at length. In these moments, I can forget all my worries and troubles, big and small, and often find myself thinking that everything is, after all, part of a greater cosmic plan, in which I am allowed to occupy a small, humble place and in which I can simply be happy with my life. I feel humbled before the Creator, who has given me the ability to feel and enjoy all of this. This requires neither a lot of money nor any other material possessions; simply being in the moment is enough.
“When I am in nature, I become part of it,” Father Anselm Grün once said. There is nothing more to add to that, for it is as simple as it is true.
I hope that we become aware that we bear a great responsibility for our environment, and that we act accordingly. Each of us in our own way, doing what we can, to ensure that humanity continues to have a bright future – so that it isn’t already 26 degrees in the area where I live by 7 o’clock in the morning, and so that during the day we no longer have to wonder what to do to protect ourselves from the heat caused in part by climate change, if indeed that is even possible. Through my extensive travels, I have seen many people who are unable to do just that – who do not have a home with air-conditioned rooms. On the contrary, they were fleeing the climatic upheavals in their home countries. Hundreds of them were washed up dead in the Gulf of Aden on their way to what they hoped would be a better life.
Through my art, I want to help highlight the beauty in the small, often overlooked aspects of nature, and in doing so raise awareness of the bigger picture. There is only one environment in which we all live, and for which we ALL bear responsibility.