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 Wasser ist Leben   Water is life     Agua es vida     Lebenswasser     Eau de vie :)

And water can also sweep us away, trap, kill, and drown us. Like happened to 165 ­– the numbers still rising – people in Germany, Holland and Belgium, just a couple of days ago. “Climate Change” needs to be renamed: CLIMATE EMERGENCY. Now that catastrophes are hitting more and more the wealthy parts of the world, this might help to bring about the right mindset to meet the rapidly accumulating catastrophes worldwide. The earth needs no saving; she is rebalancing herself with the help of the atmosphere. We humans need a major reset, a humble and creative mindset. My sister and her husband are among those scientists who have been warning us for the past 40 years. In the end, it always comes down to the difficult fact that the affluent parts of the world need to consume less.

In the sixties, my inventive father started insulating our refrigerator and walls. He put hard-to-find solar panels on the roof for hot water – all around us thought he was nuts. We grew up in very frugal ways, including rationing of our food. But Mama and Papa made it fun for us three siblings. Adventure, experimentation, art – it did us good, kept us creative and awake.

All of our furniture, including lamps, were hand-built – our home looked quite different from a typical and still very conformist post-war German household. Being poor meant making the most out of everything, repair, recycle, refurbish, invent. I painted every boring hand-down, skirts, boots, jackets, and begged my mother to use colorful pattered fabric for the pants she sewed. On my way home from school being ridiculed, stoned and beaten by other kids, I fought back like a lioness. Not just to protect my brother or my own skin, but also to tell the world that different does not mean less. You have money for candy, comic books, and new shoes – we have riches you don’t know: music, art, poetry, Rilke, Balzac, Bach, Mozart. We were odd outsiders, neither bohemian, nor true working class. We were lonely, but “rich” in my child’s view.

Water was our main drink, sometimes with a tiny bit of sugar. We gobbled it down after the 5 miles hike up the hill from school. Wasser und Brot. Water and bread. How come we are not more concerned to protect and conserve water for our grand children?       

Wasser ist Leben.

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