It was a hot summer day in Berlin. Thunderstorms happened every few days.

"It is a difficult question.” Barbara paused and thought for a moment.

“I do believe that us humans, through our rationality, can still save our planet, save creation. I believe in human reason – it is still there and not completely gone yet”, she chuckled. “Because I believe we can change the way we think. I believe in the power of nature and the power of creation. In fact, nature has been helping me tremendously when I was going through a rough time. It put me back on my feet. I used to spend a lot of time walking through nature. I believe we can use our human reason to preserve creation."

Barbara has a garden. "For ages, I’ve been trying to create a blue-yellow flower arrangement there. But it didn’t work out – at least not through my own hands. First, I tried with roses – but the roses that I thought were yellow turned out to be pink! Then, I tried a climbing plant, but again, the flowers turned out not to be yellow but orange. In the end, nature took matters in her own hands: I had been gathering seeds from Tempelhofer Feld, seeds of Echium vulgare and Oenothera and seeded them in different spots in my garden. However, the places I seeded them got not choosen by nature – the seeds moved, and arranged themselves so that I now have a yellow-blue flower arrangement! You cannot force nature”, she concluded and smiled. She proudly showed me a sunny photo of the blue Echium vulgare standing next to the yellow Oenothera flower in her garden.

Now that made me think! Barbara believes in human reason, and that through that reason, we could still save creation, save the planet. But when she tried to apply reason to create a specific flower arrangement, reason helped her indirectly and not directly – she collected seeds, not even with the intention anymore to create a specific flower arrangement after so many trials and errors. It was an interplay between human reason and nature’s will, and there seemed to have been a time-space delay between her intention and nature’s action. Maybe there was a similar relationship between her and nature, when nature helped her recover: She purposefully went out into nature, and nature took care of the rest…

Barbara’s smallest shows her feet walking through a field of Echium vulgare and Oenothera. This references her nourishing time in nature, as well as the relationship between reason and nature’s will: We cannot see the human’s head (the seat of reason), but nature carries the feet of the human body softly and happily.