by Andreas Weber.
Lately, greetings are often farewells. Or at least filled with the foreboding that I will soon be forced to say goodbye.
I’m not necessarily talking about people I meet – although some meetings here are quickly followed by a parting, too. No, I am talking about the other luminous figures in whom aliveness gives itself away. I’m talking about the house martins that are breeding under the eaves again this summer, even though the heat has killed many chicks. Of the Red Underwing, a huge night butterfly that I have only seen twice in my life – the last time in the dust, the victim of a collision with a car.
Whenever I encounter one of those comrades from the abundance of the world, it is always like this: my heart leaps out of joy. Increasingly, however, I find myself wondering: Will I see this being again? Will I be given the gift of an encounter next summer? Increasingly, getting to know someone is already a mourning.
I’m not saying that all these creatures are threatened with extinction. Swallows are still almost commonplace birds. But they are in danger of disappearing where I am allowed to greet them. Another overheated summer, even fewer insects in the evening air, and the swallows I know will be gone – just as a smile fades from a face, leaving emptiness in its wake.
What disappears is the smile of life. And that breaks my heart.
The heart is the invisible organ with which we recognize love, say the Sufis, the organ with which love is given. Every wild poppy, every purple kard blossom, every blue butterfly swaying on it, is the heart – the place at which everything reveals itself as gift.
Reality is a gift, as precious and inexhaustible as one’s own breath. Anyone who does not receive this reality, who tramples it underfoot, who sacrifices it to practical constraints, is acting heartlessly.
I have begun to see the diminishing of life as a symptom of rampant heartlessness. The leaf-sucker that crushes everything with its shearing forces. The grass silage wrapped in foil, in which even what is not grass macerates into green fodder. The swallows’ nests knocked down out of a love of order.
We live in a heartless world, and it shows. Perhaps all anyone needs to live is for their heart to be filled with love. The only ethic we lack then is to allow our heart to do what it is capable of doing: giving life. Every swallow, every butterfly is the fulfillment of such a wish for life. That is why the encounter with it makes us happy.
The heart is not only the place where we know whether we are happy. It is our ecological compass – the only one we have and also the only one we need. It is the organ that tells us whether we are fulfilling our ecological function as human beings. Because, as the Syrian-American peace researcher Aziz Abdul Said once put it, this function is love.
