Fish out of Water.

On land I feel like a fish out of water. Not in my natural habitat anymore. It’s so different to be back on land and in a big city. So much concrete. I could hug every tree. 

In Berlin every single city tree is numbered and cataloged. It must be a mighty business to take care of all these trees. What a strange concept, like the one of bringing plants home from a trip. It’s not allowed anymore, but for centuries, explorers and colonialists brought back plants to catalog them and to bask in their exoticness. It was decided then that all plants needed a new name, a western name, no matter where they came from. With the last name describing the closest family and the first name was often a variation the collecting traveller or descriptive of the plants most striking feature, or both. Plants were owned, suddenly. Indigenous people around the globe thought of plants as part of them, part of the world around them, as a gift of the earth for healing, nutrition and delight.

The numbered city trees feel colonialized too. Stripped of their nature and naturalness. Often pruned and shaped to resemble walls or corners, once a year or more often, because a tree wants to grow back into the shape of their genetic code. It will rebel by nature’s design.

On the water I feel like wild tree and in the city like a numbered tree. We did this to ourselves, by humans to humans, we stripped ourselves of our nature. By design by humans this time. The church did away with our pursuit of natural pleasures. We were stripped off our desires so that we would function, subserviently, practically enslaved. The Europeans enslaved every man, woman and child, tribes, countries, plants and animals they could and put them in cages, apartments, cities, gardens, terrariums and zoos. We are the zoo keepers and the inmates. Very grotesque to think that the Europeans would be considered (or better considered themselves) the ones who are more civilized than Indigenous nations! Obviously colonialization is the total opposite of a civil endeavor and the colonialized are traumatized to this day. The world is still in the claws of colonialism and has barely healed the destruction it caused.

What I feel like and what I see in the city are patches of nature in a sea of cement. I miss the sea where I exist in the midst of nature. Living simply on land in the country side hopefully will bring back the freedom I feel on the boat. Being surrounded by nature every minute of the day is humbling and relaxing, exhausting und uplifting. It is the state we lived in for thousand of years before we discovered we could dominate nature and our natural instincts. 

A visionary painting of earthly pleasures depicting harmony between humans and also animals by H. Bosch, inspired an exhibition at the Gropius Bau in Berlin this summer. Garden of earthly delights. It reads like a pre-christian account of freedom and unity or maybe it is a bold, utopic vision we have yet to reach. Many plants were part of the art installations and they gave it life, a kind of zen. Like a pocket park in a city, they softened the building, a stone shrine to art. The plants won.

Luckily citizens of cities are finding ways to bring some nature into the city and disguise the concrete. Green walls, planters, gardens, green roofs, parks and street trees make it bearable. The heat of the summer makes me flee to parks and under trees, as they cool the air around them 7C. Best is to be in a park right after sunset when the trees release oxygen. It’s an O₂ bath.

Difficult to acclimate to living in the city, where most people have lost the connection, the knowledge our species once had. They don’t understand me. But yet I feel everyone is seeking this knowledge and is longing for the connection with nature, like a lost limb. Or better like the phantom pain in lost limb. We have fooled ourselves into believing that power is better than knowledge and conquering is better than connection. Power and conquering versus knowledge and connection. Oh how much we’ve lost.

And we believe, taught by most religions, the story that Eve seduced Adam to taste the fruit of knowledge. But actually, it was the the fruit of power and it was so sweet that Adam and Eve left the garden of Eden for it. Millennia old wisdom and knowledge were swept aside and subjected to short-sighted hunger for power and riches.

Time to look for a place of solice for me: the garden. With a well and a little smart planning, even the most arid and urban landscapes can house gardens. They used to be walled with a gate and like entering paradise, one had to be allowed in. Like Tiergarten, a fenced-in forest so that a king had a chance at the hunt. No matter, it is a glorious park smack in the middle of Berlin.

Or at the Floating University, where on the wetland of a run-off basin of the former Tempelhof Airport, a cluster of temporary structures was built from scaffolding and plywood connected by jetties and piers. I loved hanging out there this summer, for Climate Care Week and Designathon Berlin, sipping my morning coffee on a pontoon lounge floating on green algae feeling a slight breeze over the water. My kind of utopia of earthly delights.