An Omen – Germany’s Creeping Decline

Part 1: Confusion

We often let ourselves drift through life or are driven by it. We feel no pressure in doing so, because spiritual thinking and action guide us. We know that the journey is the destination. The path to the destination is rarely straight and seems to be strewn with more potholes and pitfalls than straight paths. Nevertheless, we do not fall or stumble, because the muddy pothole sharpens our next step. Signs, symbols, and intuition guide us forward – we do not doubt the path …

In 2022, we were confronted with an event that had to be discussed in a spiritual context.

We were surprised by the initial verbal assessments of the event, because there were doubts in the air regarding the interpretations of the event. Today, about four years after the event, we know that spiritual signs are not ‘fantasies’, but clearly defined signs of orientation on the spiritual path.

Late April 2022. We were on a tour of the legendary Odenwald forest in Hesse, looking for something special. When we stopped at a coffee shop, we used a cell phone to search for nearby attractions—and found what we were looking for. Near Beerfelden, the software showed us the “Rotes Wasser” Moorland in the district of Olfen ⁽¹⁾. And because Moorland always conjures up something gloomy in words and thoughts and conjures up images of possible Moor bodies in the imagination, we decided to visit the mysterious moor.

When we arrived at our destination, we parked our vehicles at the entrance to the village on the hard shoulder of a one-way street that was to be the road to the Moor.

Humid weather enveloped us. Scattered piles of snow pushed together and piled up at the side of the road were evidence that there must have been heavy snowfall not too long ago.

Despite the uninviting weather, we set off in high spirits and full of excitement on our tour of the Moor, which, viewed from below, traced an almost balloon-shaped hiking trail from our parking spots.

The path to the Moor, via the aforementioned one-way street, was exhaustingly steep in places, but these were only short sections, so we were able to admire the few houses lining the street and the natural surroundings—there was nothing to indicate that we were approaching a Moorland area, not even a sign!

What began to irritate us in the first few meters of the footpath to the moor was that in some places along the roadside and in front gardens there were freshly sawn tree trunks and branches with break points visible on the tree parts.

At the point where the paved road ended and turned into a gravel path, we asked a villager for directions because we no longer knew where to go. After giving us a scrutinizing look, the elderly gentleman explained the way to the moor with precision: “Go straight ahead to the end of the (visible) pasture, then keep sharply to the right – you can’t miss the moor, but be prepared for surprises.” In a subordinate clause, he expressed his regret that “there were no signs pointing to the Moor, which is why some people never made it there.”

The path behind the pasture became very slippery and uneven. We had to carefully navigate around puddles of water that had collected in ruts carved into the ground by heavy vehicles; broken tree branches and small logs blocked the path, which we had to laboriously climb over or go around.

Finally, after a few hundred more strenuous meters, we could see a kind of clearing in the distance, which, at first glance, must have been part of the Moor—and we were right!

With a strange sense of anticipation, we reached the sign standing at the edge of a long wooden path leading across the Moor, which prescribed rules of conduct in this inconspicuous moorland in short sentences, which we couldn’t help but grin at.

But what we saw after our initial exploration of the area shocked us, and we immediately realized why we had been led to this place: a huge cluster of birch trees flanking the moorland had been broken, uprooted, their trunks bent as if a monstrous storm had knocked them to the ground. The sight was shocking, even today, when we look back at the photos that depict this ghostly scene: birch trees uprooted – death! Other birch trees had branches as thick as arms broken off their trunks; hundreds of other birch trees were still standing, but deeply bent: the tops of the trees touched the wet Moorland floor, overgrown with dead reeds, in a wide arc touching the ground; a posture that meant a slow death: if the inner wood fibers that carry the sap are torn, the tree is no longer supplied with enough nutrients and can no longer stand upright – it is doomed to die.

As we made our way back to the parking lot, each of us still haunted by the frightening images of the birch forest in our minds and hearts, we realized that the actual reason for our visit to the Moor, the Moor itself, had completely disappeared from our eyes and senses. We concluded that it should be our task to examine this event in the moor in detail, i.e., to find out the spiritual meaning of what had happened in the Moor, because, from a spiritual point of view, the birch tree stands for becoming and dying!

⁽¹⁾ Olfen is a small municipality in Germany, in the state of Hesse (Hessen).

End of Part 1 – Part 2

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