About us _ 3rd Chapter

For the  1st chapter, click here   /// Here the German version

For the 2nd chapter, click here.  /// Here the German version and 3rd Chapter

She glides out into the winter landscape. The autumnal barrenness, with its patches of snow, now lies behind her. The trees unfold in a breathtaking mixture of colors, revealing the different life stages of their leaves. The surroundings are silent — as white and still as the snow itself. Her steps accompany her wish to be alone. Her soul shows her the way, sensing every movement of her body, every breath. The world feels empty, and yet she belongs to it. She inhales cold, silence, presence, joy.

She yodels and speaks to the Hoher Dock, that majestic mountain she has crossed twice before — at more than 3,500 meters, through nothing but barren, demanding rock terrain.

After about an hour and a half, she enters the rising, winding forest road that nestles beneath snow and icy traces. Sunlight and shadow alternate — the very principle of life seems present here. She looks forward to resting at the hut above, even considers spending the night there. But the 135-year-old hut is locked, as everything is locked here in winter.

So — no shelter, no warmth, only the end of a path, and before her a hard reality: the white, uneven, and extremely steep mountain ridge rising into the sky, the cold, and the silence.

Because she is on a journey of self-reflection, she recognizes herself in the landscape of her life: blocked, almost locked away, left out in the cold, abandoned. The state of her last three years mirrors itself in this moment — a condition between endurance and awakening, between stillness and the quiet conviction that one day the great door will open again. Not hope, but conviction!

On the same path back down, following her own footprints in the snow, she begins to see the parallel to the year 2021. 

Everything she once believed she had found and felt — closeness, warmth, love, and everything that belongs to a healthy, human relationship — had been shown to her as possible, offered to her, only to be withdrawn again very soon after.

Nothing is more painful than to have one’s basic human needs met through a game of attraction — only to be left afterward sitting in darkness.

To offer colors and to withdraw them turning everything into black&white ...

If only we would read more about human stories — if we would truly want to understand what our behavior inflicts upon others … if we would be willing to meet ourselves, to reflect … perhaps we would see things differently.

Everything had seemed transparent, reachable, within grasp — and yet distance and silence were used strategically and manipulatively, and the doors closed to her.

Life had offered signs, promises, hope — and yet she remained alone, because the other simply turned his back. She acknowledged it but ignored the consequences. She did not yet know that she was already standing before an endlessly thick, tall, abrupt, icy, deaf, white, emotionless wall.

In the following three years, she tried — in vain and to exhaustion — to climb that wall.

But a wall remains still. For there is no soul there, no emotion, no reciprocity. Only a dense barrier about which nothing can truly be said. Absolute emptiness.

In winter it becomes impassable — no path leads through, no shortcut exists.

One can only stand still, see the boundary, and accept that some paths cannot be walked; that nature, life, and reality impose their limits.

And when it comes to human relationships: it takes two to build one — but only one to destroy it.

The silence around her forces her to listen inwardly — to her own thoughts, her own presence. In this solitude, it becomes clear how much the outer world — and one’s own life — can only truly be experienced through inner awareness.

In such moments it also becomes clear why reading is more than entertainment.

Yes — people who do not read live differently.

And I do not mean the Sunday newspaper or the advertising flyers that fill our mailboxes.

Their thinking stands still — just as it does in those who never learn anything new; their brains begin to shrink.

Even the act of adapting to others — to people, situations, places, food, habits — is perceived as a threat and therefore rejected, often with aggression.

Whoever reads profound literature — the kind that challenges, even overwhelms — gains the capacity to tolerate ambivalence, contradiction, and strangeness in thought: capacities often absent in superficial engagement.

Reading creates inner spaces; it allows reflection beyond the surface, beyond immediate impressions.

To be continued …