"Forest solitude"
What does it sound like in the forest? A gentle background noise, the swaying of the treetops in the wind. The buzzing of wild bees collecting their honey in the tops of the spruces, in blossoming bushes and in the blossoms of solitary flowers. Now and again, perhaps the crackling of dry wood or dry leaves as the velvet-pawed fox or the fleet-footed deer tread the ground. But above all: the voices of the birds. Their song can be heard from all sides. What are they trying to tell us in the solitude of the forest?
"Forest solitude" is a key concept of German Romanticism. Ludwig Tieck coined the word in a poem in his fairy tale Der blonde Eckbert from 1796:
"Forest solitude,
Which delights me,
Tomorrow like today
In eternal time,
O how I rejoice
Forest solitude."
Simple and artful at the same time, the poem leads us from the outside to the inside, from the solitude of the forest via the associated joy in the here and now to the cancellation of time in an experience of resting eternity. From there, the path of consciousness leads back to the outside in a mirror-image unfolding. Joseph von Eichendorff also loved the word. He took it up and enriched it with a subjective perspective. Robert Schumann set the poem In der Fremde to music in his Eichendorff-Liederkreis opus 39.
"From the home behind the lightning red
That's where the clouds come from,
But his father and mother are long dead,
Nobody knows me there any more.
How soon, oh how soon the quiet time will come,
I rest there too and above me
rustles the beautiful forest solitude.
And nobody knows me here anymore."
In his setting, Schumann creates a dark, wistful mood. The key of F sharp minor stands for mental shivers and abysses, for lonely spinning, for the uncanny and the premonition of death. The up and down piano accompaniment in broken chords sounds as if the lonely singer is accompanying himself on his harp. The melody speaks of resignation and quiet acceptance. It moves in narrow intervals. Only the rising fourth to the words "How soon, oh how soon" seems to open up a path into the open, and the voice soars into higher registers. But the hope is not for the departure into a new life, but for the longing for death, the "quiet time", which is reached with the sixth, the interval of longing. The words "da ruhe ich auch" ("I rest there too") are accompanied by the summit note e and thus the key of A major, the upper third of the home key of F sharp, which is turned into a bright third. Such mediant relationships are typical of Romantic music; they signify the evasion into a parallel world. The melody and bass part already descend again during the repetition. The "beautiful forest solitude" is heard in B minor, the subdominant of the home key, which is soon reached again. The end is intertwined with the beginning.
Schumann called his song cycle based on poems by Joseph von Eichendorff "my most romantic" in a letter to Clara Wieck dated 22 May 1840). Romantic melancholy is evoked in this song. What is home? It is lost. Where are father and mother? They are dead. Where am I? In a foreign country. Where am I going? To death. What comes afterwards? The "quiet time". Where do I find it? In the "solitude of the forest". The Romantics liked to imagine death as an eternal, silent contemplation of nature, as becoming one with the primordial ground of being. The "beautiful solitude of the forest" is the initial impulse for the "cemetery forest" of today.
"What does this grey mean?"
But the forest sometimes also shows us its sinister flipside. We experience this in Zwielicht, also from the Eichendorff song cycle by Robert Schumann. In the middle of the forest, the evening suddenly falls upon us. The light, which just a moment ago was shining kindly but refracted through the branches, suddenly takes on a threatening dark colour. We see the world in twilight.
"Twilight wants to spread its wings / The trees stir eerily." So begins the poem. The night descends like a great dark bird. The twilight awakens the spirits of "de-dualisation": there is a threat of discord, doubt and ambiguity. Watch out! The deer you love is being murdered by lurking hunters; the friend you feel connected to is plotting betrayal. Therefore: "Do not trust him at this hour!" The parting of the light also means "parting": will the night take what is dearest to us? "What perishes wearily today will be reborn tomorrow. Many things are lost in the night".
But who is it that is spreading its wings here and covering the world with strife, doubt and division? Is it really just a natural phenomenon? No, the event has a cosmic dimension. I maintain that it is Lucifer, literally: the "light bearer", the fallen angel, the apostate. Lucifer was closest to God. But he rebelled against his omnipotence. Lucifer is the rebel who sows primordial discord, who splits the world in apostasy from God and brings evil into the world in the twilight of dawn.
Hence the urgent admonition of the last verse: "Beware, stay awake and alert!" People have feared sleep since time immemorial. Its dangers are defencelessness and loss of control, including slipping into the unconscious, in which we are at the mercy of Lucifer, the whisperer. When we sleep, we are at the mercy of nightmares and night terrors, as Johann Heinrich Füssli's painting The Nightmare vividly shows us. Lucifer, the devil with the glowing eyes, plays his evil game. Insanity, madness and loss threaten. All this is reflected in the threatening mood of the poem Zwielicht.
Robert Schumann clearly understood the Luciferian dimension of the poem. For in his setting, structural significance is given to a very special interval that has always been regarded as an expression of discord: the tritone. As a "diabolus in musica", it is an expressive symbol for lamentation and sin, for straying from the right path and, of course, for the devil. The tritone spans three whole tones. It splits the octave exactly in the centre, at the most vulnerable point, as it were. It symbolically cuts it into two pieces. The notes designated by a tritone are the furthest apart in the circle of fifths. Example: c-f sharp or (as in twilight) g-c sharp. As the tritone can be interpreted as an augmented fourth or diminished fifth depending on the context, it is indeed an ambiguous and therefore highly dodgy interval. It sounds dissonant and seems extremely unstable. Thus the tritone in Schumann's Zwielicht can be understood as the tonal symbol of Lucifer, who sinks to earth with his wings spread and unleashes the destructive forces of doubt, discord and lies.
The piano part begins with a wandering, seemingly unstable lineament that first turns downwards, then upwards again. Perhaps these are the thin threads of sunlight in the forest, the cobwebs of Indian summer, but certainly also the lowering and raising of Lucifer's wings, which, according to pictorial tradition, are shaped like the jagged wings of the bat. Then a second voice splits off - symbolising the "de-twoing" in the sense of twilight.
The interval of the tritone characterises this entire song. It dominates both vertically and horizontally: as the simultaneous sounding of c sharp and g or g and c sharp and as an interval leap from g to c sharp or vice versa, in both the piano and singing voice. Each verse repeats this model with specific variations. Like a spider that draws its threads ever tighter over its prey until it suffocates, these lines move across and around each other. In the third verse, when we hear about the treacherously war-minded friend, the web seems particularly dense. Here, the two-part texture expands into a polyphonically interwoven three-part texture of baroque proportions, almost like a Bach invention, in a narrow register interspersed with chromatic turns.
Only the last verse brings a full chordal movement that leads to a resolute cadence: "Beware, be awake and vigorous!" Schumann has turned the "bleib" of Eichendorff's poem into a "sei". Not succumbing to discord requires a perpetual state of mindfulness and sharpness of awareness.
"Woe! The wild army!"
We hike further through the forest, along unknown paths, through thickets and into the undergrowth. The journey back in time takes us to the dark Bohemian forests of the years after the Thirty Years' War. This is where Carl Maria von Weber's Der Freischütz is set. However, this dark time is merely a metaphor for the era after the Napoleonic Wars of Liberation, which only brought disappointment to the Romantic generation. Since its premiere on 18 June 1821, exactly six years to the day after the Battle of Waterloo, the opera has been regarded as a national romantic forest shrine.
Without further ado, let's leap straight into the forest tableau of the overture! Here we encounter the forest in all its romantic ambiguity.
Firstly, there is the mysterious initial sound, which begins questioningly and, in its dynamic increase from pianissimo to forte, in the uncertain leap across the octave to the double dominant ninth, unexpectedly opens the gateway to the other world. For the forest, as everyone knows, is a place of initiation. Anyone who enters the forest must be prepared for anything. Trials, aberrations, dangers, adventures. We enter an unknown realm where demons live, but also the ghosts of our own unconscious. The gentle line of the violins leads downwards again, into the familiar, but the call into the distance sounds a second time.
And then, after a fermata, that unmistakable, ascending and descending forest weave begins, and we are right in the middle of it. It is actually just a simple accompaniment figure in C major that suggests calm and order and spreads a carpet of soft moss under the feet of the following horn melody.
The horn is, of course, the forest instrument par excellence. Hunting horns are the sounding signet of the forest. Hunters use the horn signals to communicate across a wide area. What is pleasure and joy to them means death and horror to the animals of the forest. When a person hears the hunting horns from a distance, they seduce him into the unknown. Here they spread as a "beautiful melody", radiating peace and security. But appearances are deceptive: after the end of the friendly melody on the dominant, drumbeats, trembling tremolos and unstable, wandering melodies call everything into question and confront us with an unknown horror. As if in a picture puzzle, the scenery changes and a threatening perspective suddenly presents itself.
And then chaos breaks loose. Limping accents and diminished seventh chords force us to look into the abyss of horror. The "uncanny", said Carl Maria von Weber, forms "the main character of the opera". This passage is later repeated bar for bar in Max's aria:
"But I am ensnared by dark forces!
Despair grips me, mockery tortures me!
O does not a ray penetrate these nights?
Does fate rule blindly? Does no God live?"
Doubt that leads to despair: The Luciferian, more sensed than known in Eichendorff and Schumann as a cosmic dark bird, is sharply outlined here as a threatening fate, as the absence of the living God. Its sound symbol is the diminished seventh chord, the most horrific dissonance of the time. The horror also has a name in this opera: Samiel, the "black hunter, an emissary of the prince of hell Lucifer. The huntsman Kaspar, who witnessed the horrors of the Thirty Years' War as a Landsknecht, has fallen for him. Samiel is, in modern terms, the personified dark shadow of a society traumatised by war and violence. In order to prolong his life, he has to deliver more and more innocent souls to the devil.
He uses free bullets to seduce his mate Max into committing sacrilegious acts. In order to marry the hereditary forester's daughter, he has to fire a successful test shot on the day of his wedding. No wonder he is tormented by fear of failure. Free bullets are supposed to help him make a safe shot. But there is a dangerous twist: "Hit six, monkey seven." The seventh bullet belongs to the devil, and he has his sights set on Agathe, the innocent, pure bride. Her cantilena of love and hope is also intoned in this overture, because "the whole thing closes joyfully".
But we'll skip that at this point and climb straight down into the dark abyss of the Wolfsschlucht gorge. "Dreadful forest gorge", "black wood", rocks and a waterfall all around, the pale full moon, two thunderstorms coming at each other from different directions, a tree shattered by lightning, shimmering green with rot (Lucifer = Phosphorus). An owl with "fiery wheeling eyes" from which the flames of hell beat. Unlucky ravens, "forest birds" and invisible spirits, commanded by the prince of hell Samiel - these are reflections of psychic states of consciousness, as we have seen in Füssli's painting.
The beginning and end of the scene are in F sharp minor, the key of the uncanny. In Wolfsschlucht, as in Zwielicht, the tritone as "diabolus in musica" also has a structurally defining function, particularly with regard to the overriding key disposition. The middle section of the Wolf's Glen scene, which is framed by the two F sharp minor sections, sounds in the tritone interval of C minor. This middle section in turn contains episodes in A minor and E flat major, which in turn are in the tritone interval.
If we combine the sequence of keys into a single chord, we get f sharp-a-c-E flat-f sharp. This is the same diminished chord that characterises the Luciferian black hunter Samiel in the overture, in Max's aria and in numerous other places. This results in a highly conspicuous interweaving of tritone sections - a doom from which the protagonists cannot free themselves by their own efforts. A higher, transcendent power is needed to break the spell. Only the hermit's word of power in the finale of the third act is able to overcome the stranglehold of the destructive spirit world with a new, daring tritone leap from F sharp to C ("but now still raise your eyes / to the one who was the shelter of innocence") and finally to transport them into the jubilant C major of a God-pleasing final apotheosis.
But there is still a long way to go. The agitated string tremolos at the beginning of the Wolfsschluchtszene are underpinned by the sound of the low clarinets and trombones, the instruments of hell, death and the Last Judgement - think of the last trombone of the Dies irae. The poetic insignia of Gothic Romanticism in the words of the ghostly chorus, declaimed like a litany on a single note and interrupted by the shrill "Uhui!" of the owls, made the blood run cold in the veins of contemporaries. Black romanticism, as in Charles Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil, gives the libretto its stark colour contrasts:
"Milk of the moon fell on the cabbage,
Cobweb is covered in blood,
Before the evening dawns again
Is she dead, the tender bride!"
A satanic mass is celebrated here. The apparition of Samiel, summoned by Kaspar at midnight in a magical-alchemical process of incantation, is musically designed as the epiphany of a dark power: with a tritone shift from F sharp minor to C minor, with powerfully increasing tremolos and the Samiel chord - until the devil stands before us in the flesh and the horror of the numinous shudders through us.
What seems so startlingly romantic to us when we hear the seven free balls being poured can, on closer inspection, be seen as a simple, constantly increasing series of variations based on the Baroque model. After each moulded ball, a different compositional idea emerges like a genie from a bottle: fluttering forest birds, a boar rushing past, a storm cascade, sparking wheels, the Wild Army with the sound of horns, whinnying, dogs barking and a ghostly choir. During the Rough Nights between Christmas and New Year, but also during stormy weather fronts, the fallen Germanic gods roam noisily across the sky to herald wars and disasters. After the 6th ball, Max's motif of despair is heard, and after the seventh, the incarnate Samiel appears, but the chime of the bell at one brings the haunting to a sudden halt.
Bird as prophet
We have reached the lowest and most dangerous point of our expedition and are making our way back up to the light in high spirits. In broad daylight, albeit in the subdued light and in the midst of the silence of a remote forest solitude, a very special, marvellous experience awaits us. The seventh piece from Robert Schumann's Forest Scenes for piano opus 82, composed in January 1849, is called Bird as prophet.
What does the mysterious bird want to tell us? It speaks to us, but in strange arabesques that we don't understand. Dissonant sounds alternate with perfect melodiousness. We also encounter the tritone again, as well as the major seventh and the diminished octave. But the sharp intervals here are highly attractive and fascinating. The bird's song moves in the high treble range; no bass foundation lends it an earthy quality. Rhythmic stretches and shifts deprive us of a sense of metre and thus also of a sense of time. The ornamentally winding arabesques spring from silence, and they release us into silence again as soon as the bird has finished a section of its verses. In the short pauses, the silence becomes almost painfully palpable. This bird breathes before it starts again, but we listen almost breathlessly.
Oh, if only we knew what its message means for us! We listen and listen... and then, just as the bird has started a new verse, we think we understand something. Suddenly: a song. A chorale perhaps, but in any case something familiar, something human.
And now everything suddenly seems clear. The singing is in the moderate middle range of a human voice, in a typical choral setting, with harmonically supportive accompaniment. The small intervals and catchy rhythms imitate the spoken language. There is even a solid bass foundation, an expression of security and
Security. This song sounds comforting and full of promise. It is in G major, the key of praise to God, the rural idyll, the certainty of faith. Here we are very close to God!
After five bars, the chorale is shifted in an abrupt harmonic shift from G major to E flat major and lifted into a higher register, as if it wanted to soar into higher spheres. We listen in surprise - but it is precisely at this moment that the chorale breaks off and the bird once again begins its lonely, incomprehensible, mesmerising song.
The book of nature seemed enigmatic to the Romantics, but in enlightened moments it reveals its meaning. Here we witness such an epiphany. However, the listener does not succeed in keeping his consciousness at this level for long. And so the chorale breaks off; the consciousness darkens again and we hear the bird's song once more as an enigmatic, incomprehensible natural sound.
Schumann wanted to give this enchanting piece a motto: "Hüte dich, sei wach und munter". The last two verses of the poem Zwielicht, which he had composed almost two decades earlier, are also a miniature of cosmic significance. If we guard our consciousness, if we remain awake, relaxed and clear-minded in the here and now, then the voices of nature reveal their divine origin and we hear the language of God as an understandable message of the happiness of existence.
"Thank you, dear little bird, for your advice!"
We walk a few steps further into the depths of the unfathomable forest and take a break under a lime tree on a small plateau on a sunny morning. In the background, we can see some jagged rocks and the entrance to a cave through the green foliage of the trees, but that needn't worry us now. In the bright light of the morning, we meet a young man. He grew up wild in the forest; he never knew his father and mother, they died before he really saw the light of day. His foster father taught him how to forge, and the animals of the forest were his playmates. Now he is supposed to learn to be afraid, something he has never managed to do, because he is one with the forest, so what should he be afraid of? His foster father doesn't want anything good for him, but he doesn't know that yet. Here he is to fight a dragon, which will roll out of the cave around midday to quench its thirst at the nearby spring.
But there is still time until then, so he falls into "silent contemplation" and asks about his origins. "What do you think my father looked like?" The answer is clear: "Ha! Certainly, like myself!". But he is moved by something else. "He leans back deeper and looks up through the treetops. Deep silence. - Forest weaving."
"Forest weaving" - Richard Wagner coined the term. Eight years after Robert Schumann, the former Dresden revolutionary once again dreams of a bird as the prophet of a happy future in the solitude of his exile in Zurich: in Siegfried, the penultimate work in the tetralogy The Ring of the Nibelung. For the ignorant boy, who does not know fear, the solitude of the forest offers an opportunity to reflect on the fundamental questions of human existence: Where do I come from? Where am I going? What is the meaning of life? The forest is a space of realisation and initiation on the threshold of adulthood.
The air passes gently through the branches of the lime tree, and it exudes its delicate fragrance. It is a motherly scent, because his mother was called "Sieglinde", almost like the tree. And then the question comes to him that he has to ask himself and to which he knows no answer: "But - what did my mother look like? I can't even imagine!" But the music knows. The friendly forest weaving unfolds in a delicate up and down of horizontally unfolding semiquaver figures in the soloistic, muted strings in the low and middle registers over a supporting base of horn and bass clarinet, which continue to play the horizontal note e. The result is a delicate, tense sound. This results in a delicate, spun sound. An expressive, sad melody in the clarinet is woven into this. The listener will recognise it from Die Walküre; it is Sieglinde's motif. It seems to speak from the soul of the tree to the son, who longs for her, the unknown. The most beautiful thing he has ever seen in the forest were the "brightly shimmering eyes" of a delicate deer. He imagines his mother to be similar - "only much more beautiful!"
The music of the forest and the intuitions of the contemplative boy alternate, and a tender dialogue develops between man and the nature in which he is embedded. This nature is young and beautiful, and it is feminine. The orchestra reveals this to us after the words "my mother - a human woman!"
The diffuse forest weaving expands into large chords stretching across the sound space, over which a delicate violin melody is laid - a quote from the praise of "Weibes Wonne und Wert" from Rheingold. The magna mater who creates and sustains life is the eternal mother, presented as a young woman, a lover and a nurturer, as she has been worshipped in all cultures since time immemorial - first as Freia and Holda, later in the image of the Virgin Mary. From her sound, the song of a bird in flute and clarinet is casually released. It is the voice of the Great Mother speaking to him, which he cannot yet understand. Let us listen
are now listening with him:
An ancient initiation rite, of which almost all ancient cultures speak, states that the young man must prove his identity through a determined, usually bloody deed. The dragon is effortlessly slain. After tasting the dragon's blood and making the life force of his victim his own, Siegfried, now grown up, also understands the language of the bird. Unlike Schumann, he sings the same melody, but with intelligible words underneath.
Siegfried follows the wise advice of the woodland bird three times: he takes the ring and helmet from Fafner's Cave, he sees through the lying intentions of his foster father Mime, who seeks his life, and he finally follows the little bird out of the forest onto the fiery rock to awaken the sleeping Brünnhilde. He is lost to the sheltering bosom of his mother's forest. grown out of it. You can hear this immediately in the urgent, passionately moving music. The boy who asks for his father and mother has become a man who wants to be a woman.
"Here in the holy forest!"
One last forest image remains for us at the end: Richard Wagner's Parsifal, the "farewell to the world". It leads us into a sacred grove where we encounter God. At the end of his life, Richard Wagner was increasingly ecologically moved, as we would say today. The end of military armament and the protection of animals were close to his heart. In his last work, he fused his search for the divine, which was fuelled by doubt and longing, into a synthesis of Christian mysticism and Buddhist thought, projected onto the Celtic legend of the Holy Grail. This was his response to the crisis of religion, which he sought to redefine. "...seeing the truth, no longer the appearance of things, is what makes God...", Wagner once said to his wife Cosima.
Wagner's religion of compassion, which he sets out in Parsifal and in the accompanying late writings, encompasses man and nature in equal measure, for both spring from the same root: the "will to exist", which the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer set out as the primordial basis of the world in his major work The World as Will and Representation (1819). Egoism, violence and the destruction of nature are the driving forces behind this will. Wagner's vision is to overcome them in order to reconcile nature, man and God in a non-violent, responsible life. In this respect, the work is very topical today.
Two of the six pictures in Wagner's last music drama are set in the forest - in that mysterious region of unspoilt nature whose rocky crevices, invisible from the outside, conceal a temple within. This temple in turn preserves the chalice in which Joseph of Arimathea collected the blood of Christ on the cross. With the institution of Holy Communion - "Receive my body, receive my blood for the sake of our love" - Christ once established the religion of compassion as the utopia of a new, peaceful society. The Knights of the Grail follow him as best they can. But this involves renouncing their instincts, and this is where they fail. "Knowing through compassion" is how Parsifal, the "pure fool", finally becomes a follower of Christ, going through a painful process of self-realisation and proving himself.
The Grail Forest is a protected space. Humans and nature live together peacefully here. In this it resembles the restored, sinless Garden of Eden and is a symbol of the earth renewed by Christ, where lambs graze alongside lions and the animals have nothing to fear from man. But Parsifal, who is transported to the Grail Forest as if by chance, knows nothing of this. He kills a wild swan, childishly proud of his skill. The old guardian of the Grail, Gurnemanz, drastically reproaches him for his "unheard-of work" of murder and opens his eyes to the beauty of nature and the fragility of the life he has carelessly destroyed.
Wagner weaves a rich web of leitmotifs throughout the work that communicate his philosophy to us. "Des Haines Tiere nahten dir nicht zahm?" is a variation on the theme of faith and refers to the ethos of non-violence to which the knights have committed themselves. As soon as the "faithful swan" is mentioned, the musical perspective shifts from the naïve to the darkly sentimental. The flapping of the swan's wings as it soars over the lake reminds Wagner of the mournful swan chords from Lohengrin. The rich harp figurations that are added refer to the symbolism of this bird as a bearer of light, purity and spiritual transformation.
The swan symbolises the human soul, which soars longingly towards God. The dove, on the other hand, which descends from the heights of transcendence at the end of the stage consecration festival, is a sign of the new covenant and symbolises the Holy Spirit in Christian symbolism. The wild swan in the Grail Forest thus prefigures the holy dove of the final scene in the temple. His death is ultimately the prerequisite for the renewal of the mystery of the Grail, to which Parsifal is called.
As Gurnemanz shows the archer the suffering and death of the beautiful and blameless animal, Parsifal has a decisive experience: he learns to see the world from the perspective of his victim. This leads to an expansion of his consciousness from the ego to the self, from egoism to compassion. The future redeemer has learnt his first lesson. He breaks his bow. This inner transformation is signalled by chromatically descending, painfully expressive turns of phrase. This motivic fragment forms the conclusion of the so-called "Saviour's lament". According to the composer, this significant theme symbolises Jesus himself, "the lament of loving compassion" and the "divine suffering of Golgotha". Christ suffers in every suffering creature. The "Saviour's lament" is the musical centre of the Parsifal conception.
Only after severe trials and a long odyssey is Parsifal allowed to return to the Grail Forest, now completely transformed by the experience of universal compassion. It is on a Good Friday, and the rebirth of nature now of all days is an incomprehensible mystery for Parsifal: "O woe, the highest day of pain! I think what lives and lives again should only mourn, ah! and weep!" But Gurnemanz answers him simply: "You see, that is not so." Halm Blume on the meadow, says Gurnemanz, cannot see the crucified man, but he can see the "redeemed man", who behaves very differently towards nature than usual: the fact that he "spares it with a gentle step", that he does not destroy it, but respects and lovingly perceives it, is an expression of the Grail utopia, as we have already encountered in the protection of animals. Nature thus experiences its "day of innocence" in a double mediation: Christ suffers for man, man in turn passes on this compassion to nature, which in turn flourishes. This is how reconciliation works!
In the Easter liturgy, it is said that the earth, outshone by the "splendour from on high", sings the praises of the Creator. In early Christian tradition, this was linked with the ancient symbolism of death and rebirth, with telluric fertility rites. An exsultet scroll from Bari Cathedral depicts a female figure wearing a wreath of leaves and flowers on her head; her robe is strewn with lilies. In her hands she holds two tree trunks from which young branches are sprouting. She is surrounded by animals looking up at her or grazing peacefully. This message comes to us from the magic of Good Friday.
At a time when the forest is being destroyed by climate change due to the ruthless exploitation of the earth's resources, when biodiversity is being destroyed without a second thought, when we are taking more from the earth than it can give us, we should once again consciously reflect on this message. 
