One day, I suddenly felt a deep longing, even a pressing need, to be close to the earth. Thus, I decided to spend time gardening every day. For three full years, through-out spring, summer, autumn and winter, I worked in my garden, which I called Bi-Won (Korean for “secret garden”). On the heart-shaped sign that my predecessor had left on a rose arch, it still says “Dream Garden”. I left the sign in place. My secret garden is, after all, also a dream garden, because there I dream of the coming earth. For me, gardening was a form of silent meditation, a lingering in stillness. It made time linger and smell. The longer I kept working in the garden, the more respect I developed for the earth, for its enchanting beauty. I am now deeply convinced that the earth is a divine creation. The garden helped me gain this conviction, helped me gain this insight which for me has become a certainty, has taken on the character of evidence. Evidence originally meant seeing. I have seen it.

The time spent in the flourishing garden has made me devout again. I believe that the Garden of Eden has existed and will exist. I believe in God, the creator, in this player who always begins new games and thereby renews everything. Human beings, as his creation, are obliged to join in the play. Labour, or performance, destroys the game. It is a blind, blank, dumb doing.

Some of the lines in this book are prayers, confessions, even confessions of love to the earth and nature. There is no biological evolution. Everything is the result of a divine revolution. I have experienced it. Biology is ultimately a theology, a teaching of God.

The earth is not a dead, lifeless, mute being but an eloquent living being, a living organism.

Even a stone is alive. Cézanne, who was obsessed with Montagne Sainte-Victoire, knew about the secret and the particular liveliness and vigour of rocks. Laozi teaches:

“The world is a spiritual vessel and cannot be run.
One who runs it destroys it; one who seizes it loses it.”

As a spiritual vessel the world is fragile. We today are brutally exploiting it, running it into the ground and destroying it completely.

From the earth emanates the imperative to spare it [sie zu schonen], that is, to treat it well [sie schön zu behandeln]. Sparing [Schonen] is etymologically related to beauty [mit dem Schönen verwandt]. What is beautiful obliges us, even commands us, to spare it. What is beautiful must be treated carefully [schonend]. It is an urgent task, an obligation of humankind, to spare the earth because she is beautiful, even magnificent.

Sparing calls for praise. The following lines are hymns, hymns of praise to the earth. Like a beautiful song of the earth, this praise of the earth should ring out. For some, however, it should read like evil tidings, in the face of the major natural disasters that are visited upon us today. These disasters are the earth’s angry response to human recklessness and violence. We have lost all veneration for the earth. We no longer see or hear her.

Digitalisation intensifies the noise of communication. Not only does it destroy stillness but also the haptic, the material, scents, radiant colours, and most of all the heaviness of earth. “Human” is derived from humus, earth

14 June 2017
I have removed the dead willow from the garden. Almost fervently, I again cursed the evil rodent which killed the most beautiful tree, my beloved. It was a brutal murder.

17 June 2017
A fresh summer day. I do not like heat. The astilbes glow. The blossom of St John’s wort shines yellow. The flower beds have been cleared of weeds. Thus, they gain more of a shape.

19 June 2017
The Wannsee glistens deep blue in the summer night. The violet larkspur is tall, even towers above the roses. Presently, the nights are very short. And it never gets fully dark. Somewhere at the horizon, a glimmer of light always remains. These bright nights are beautiful. I have harvested the cherries. They taste sunny. The dark red strawberries taste delicious – as opposed to the strawberries you get in the shops.

The nocturnal opulence of blossoms is elating. Today, in the middle of summer, I took a hot bath with fragrant water lilies. For the first time, Sargent’s hydrangea, Hydrangea sargentiana, in German commonly called the “velvet hydrangea”, has flower buds. For two years, it was unwell. I cared lovingly for it. Now it reciprocates my love.

21 June 2017
Today was the first time that I have seen olive trees in bloom not in Italy but here in Berlin at an Italian restaurant in my neighbourhood. They bloom in Schöneberg, actually on the Schöneberg. They are planted in pots and stand in front of the restaurant. Outside, they would not survive the cold and rough Berlin winter. The olive blossoms are very small. They resemble the fertile blossoms of hydrangeas and, like them, they form an umbel. My pasta dish with mushrooms was delicious. And so were the light-green olives in the salad.

25 June 2017
Today I dressed the yellow plum tree in a net. I wanted to protect the delicious plums against the birds. Two years ago, they ate every single one of the grapes which I had wanted to watch slowly maturing. The birds were gluttonous, or just greedy for the grapes. But this year, the grapes remained strangely untouched. No birds were to be seen. This, in turn, also made me feel very sad and uneasy. Why don’t you come here, my birds, here you can get delicious grapes! This year, there are also only very few bees. I very much hope that the butterfly bush will soon bloom and attract beautiful butterflies again. It is metres high this year. The day lilies are thriving. Their yellow and red flowers shine. Yes, shining is the right verb for flowering day lilies. Roses do not shine. They require a different verb. Anemones and strawflowers shine. And roses? They also do not gleam because there is something hesitant about them. Roses are reserved. This is what makes for their magnificence. Roses rose. “To rose”, that is the right verb for them.

Rilke loved roses and angels. There are many roses in my garden. They gently let go of my eyes. And at the entrance to my garden, there are two statues of angels. They protect my rose garden. Rilke wrote many poems about roses:

Rose, oh pure contradiction, 
desire, to be no one’s sleep under so many lids.

Night made of roses, night made of many, many 
bright roses, bright night of roses,
sleep of a thousand eyelids of roses.
Bright sleep of roses, I am your sleeper

Bright sleeper of your scents; deep
sleeper of your cool intimacies.

And then, like this: that a feeling arises,
because blossom leaves stir blossom leaves?
And this: that one opens up like an eyelid,
and beneath lies eyelid after eyelid,
closed ones, as if, ten times asleep
they had to dampen down an inner power of vision.

At the moment, I love these lines on roses because I have difficulties sleeping and long for a deep but bright sleep, a rose sleep. I would love to sleep myself away into a no one, into something nameless. That would be a form of redemption. Today, we occupy ourselves only with our egos. Everyone wants to be someone, loud; everyone wants to be authentic, be different to others. Thus, everyone is like everyone else. I miss the nameless.

In his famous Letter on “Humanism”, Heidegger writes:

But if the human being is to find his way once again into the nearness of being he must first learn to exist in the nameless. In the same way he must recognize the seductions of the public realm as well as the impotence of the private. Before he speaks the human being must first let himself be claimed again by being, taking the risk that under this claim he will seldom have much to say.

We have a lot to say, a lot to communicate because we are someone. We have forgotten silence and how to keep silent. My garden is a place of silence. I make silence in my garden. I listen, like Hyperion.

My whole being stills and listens when the gentle ripple of the breeze plays about my breast. Often, lost in the immensity of blue, I look up into the aether and out into the hallowed sea, and it’s as if a kindred spirit opened its arms to me, as if the pain of isolation were dissolved in the life of the godhead. To be one with everything, that is the life of the godhead, that is the heaven of man.

Digitalisation intensifies the noise of communication. Not only does it destroy stillness but also the haptic, the material, scents, radiant colours, and most of all the heaviness of earth. “Human” is derived from humus, earth. The earth is our resonance space, it brings us happiness. When we leave the earth, happiness leaves us.

There is a close connection between the analogue and the haptic. The analogue world is graspable and visible. In the film on Vermeer, Girl with a Pearl Earring, there is a beautiful scene about the mixing of colours. The protagonist is enthusiastic about the beauty of matter. It is wonderful to see how paints are produced and sold, like spices in an exotic food shop. The blue crystal used in producing Vermeer blue, ultramarine, is divine. The colours used by Vermeer cannot be artificially created. They were made from stones. The stones were ground like spices. The ground materials also look just as edible as spices. Powders and pastes are mixed up. The texture of the material is also enigmatic. A pigment made of grapes is called “wine corrosive” [Weinätze]. Even the excrement of beetles is used to produce a colouring agent. One of the colours looks like olive oil but is made of bull’s urine. Colours are fragrant.

Digitalisation ultimately does away with reality as such. Or reality is de-realised and becomes a window within the digital. The time will soon come when our field of vision resembles a three-dimensional display. We move away from reality more and more. My garden, for me, is reality regained. .