The recoil of the axe passes through my arms and makes my body tremble. „Pahhh!!!“ escapes the air from my lungs – with a sound full of exhaustion, disbelief, pleading and bitterness, despair. All the energy I had put into this one blow was in vain and was led through the wood, over the chopping block to the earth. The rest I got uncontrolled as a shock wave over the axe blade and the handle thrown back into my body.
The wood is intact. The axe blade has not penetrated an inch. All the strength put into it in vain. It was perhaps the fiftieth log today. There was not much strength left anyway. Now even that little has been wasted in vain.
Two thoughts come to me: 1. „Enough for today. Tomorrow I’ll take the chainsaw to it.“ 2. „What madness. In the old days, people didn’t have a chainsaw to conveniently fall back on, like me, when the ‚WorkOut‘ with the firewood gets to be too much. What madness. Before then, they still had to cut the trees by hand; saw by hand; transport them home by hand. All with the available energy of their bodies. What madness! Those who have to live like this know a lot about lost paradises. He knows a lot about punishment and rejection by God. And he knows that he himself carries the guilt for it, the human being, that he must give himself up up to the total exhaustion to be able to eke out his survival outside of the garden of Eden. He knows about Adam. And of Eve. And he also knows about Cain and Abel. Not like the robin, which in its smallness and delicacy accomplishes the feat every year to survive the seasons without any aid. Without firewood, without agriculture, without dwellings that allow us, for a high price, the climate of our paradise. The robin belongs here. It is in its paradise. Creation takes care of it like a mother. – We should not be here. Why man never realized his mistake and went back to where he could be nourished by mother earth without agony? – – He no longer knew where to go. He no longer knew the way back. Back to the lost paradise…. The tribes in the primeval forests of this planet show us the way today. To transform this way of the primeval times into an existence in the 21st century, that is our task. “