From around 1996, for a quarter of a century, Amanda Kreitzer was the editor of Val du Charron, a monthly newspaper for Wellington and the Wagon-makers Valley. Every issue opened with an editorial under the title Heil die Leser. This page gathers her editorials together — a chronicle of seasons, grace, and the valley at the foot of Groenberg and the Hawekwa.
Editorials
- February 2019 · The pleasure with which nature gives herself over to the embrace of the seasons reaches poetic heights in the summer.
- December 2018 · We lament and bewail the fragility of our existence every time we stand before the mirror or before an open grave.
- October 2018 · What is this fragile reality we call LIFE?
- September 2018 · Time pours its share into our bloodstream in small doses, second by second, so that its immediate effect on the greater whole of our life is lost on us.
- August 2018 · Our relationship with time is a troublesome umbilical cord that feeds our lives full of haste — because there is never enough time in any da…
- July 2018 · How do you find answers when silence builds up in front of a heart that has been struck mute?
- June 2018 · A soft caring is barely tangible, as part of the weather-change full of mercy that reaches out towards our senses and the dry earth.
- May 2018 · The altar on which unfulfilled longings wait for the Hand that kindles the fire is also the place where the chemistry of yearnings crystalli…
- April 2018 · Days and seasons move on unperturbed — impermeable against the onslaught of modernity, which tries to seduce everything in its path with spe…
- March 2018 · How do you rise up again beneath the ash-heap of decisions — good and bad — that have, over years, shaped their own dough, and slice by slic…
- February 2018 · The human psyche is a storehouse for so very much during a single lifetime.
- December 2017 · 2017 soon takes its final bow. The old is replaced with the new.
- October 2017 · The days grow longer in a scent-drenched warmth that settles heavily under your nose.
- September 2017 · The soft nuances of expectation that slumber, sometimes hesitate, just out of earshot of our own perception make use of an intuition that se…
- August 2017 · The soft-sweet safe-keeping that lingers inside the uneven drip-fall of a Cape mist-rain establishes a reassurance that binds everything wit…
- June 2017 · Ordered values that always had a fixed point of return to turn back to whenever a detour had been taken in the wrong direction now appear to be a thing of the past.
- May 2017 · The unrest in our thoughts that leads to division in our hearts is the place where shortages are born and where they rise up out of the barren earth of discontent.
- April 2017 · The software of every human emotion has a code.
- March 2017 · The precision with which we are supposed to be able to exercise control over every thought-impulse — which is responsible for the chain reac…
- February 2017 · The rhythmic repetition of life's cycle-intervals grinds on in circles, round and round through our day, until deep grooves, like shallo…
- June 2013 · Cool purity, arranged in shadings of white, had caught itself inside an ever-changing mass of cloud, bubbling and floundering and spitting across the contours of the Hawekwas.
- April 2013 · The dignified calm of a cloudless sunset forms its own bond of tenderness with your spirit — a wordless conversation that warns against unrest and against haste.
- March 2013 · Beauty was, by a firm decision, already consolidated during the first six days of creation in the heaping-up and the falling-into-place of r…
- February 2013 · One day after the next unfolds lovelier than the one before.
- December 2012 · The weightlessness you experience when you find yourself in water is the same weightlessness your spirit experiences as long as you find you…
- November 2012 · There is almost nothing that is not refined under the onslaught of pressure and of time.
- October 2012 · The winter has slackened its grip so that the birds begin, earlier and earlier, to strike up their gratitude in the form of a home-made sett…
- September 2012 · The other evening a winter day was sent home with one of the loveliest finishes imaginable — golden pinks that had worked themselves loose o…
- August 2012 · Stillness has a voice. A vocabulary and a conversation to conduct.
- July 2012 · Fleeting days stack up into weeks that turn into months, and they are busy running downhill into a year that is bent on winning its own race.
- May 2012 · The law of gravity duplicates itself on a wide scale in every sphere of life — spiritual and physical — in the form of limitations, in natural borders and in man-made borders.
- April 2012 · The self-absorption of our many man-made forms of security — locked up in a warm bed each evening, food from the shops, electricity in our w…
- March 2012 · Inside the small circle of every heart there is a cosmos.
- February 2012 · The planning that went into the silhouettes of the mountains around Wellington alone had to combine such a fine-tuned sensibility with artis…
- June 2011 · If you place the sum-total of who and what you are on the scale of the now and of the eternal, then tissue and veins are meaningless when it…
- May 2011 · People who chew too little and swallow too quickly do not enjoy the taste of their food.
- November 2010 · Sometimes it happens that you become a dialect of yourself.
- July 2010 · When life grabs you by your heart and not by your shoulders, your tongue grows still and your eyes lose their expression for a while, because the hurt places a lid on your senses.
- June 2010 · Autumn winds have blown a dusty homesickness open into classical longing.
- May 2010 · If we could market love, how would we package it so that the careless do not break it, cold hearts never open it, and materialists do not de…
- February 2010 · Without the familiarity of all the things in my life that have sometimes been gathered together out of sentiment over the years, sometimes t…
- December 2009 · When dusk swallows up the day and digests it into a faded blue-purple, all those who are victims of the struggle to survive become one with …
- November 2009 · The function of our hearts reaches a good deal further than pumping blood and gathering oxygen to still the hunger of trillions of little cells.
- October 2009 · Certainly not the greatest, but the most important mistake we make is that of granting visas too easily, letting others travel through our t…
- September 2009 · When the night grows so quiet that it hums softly in your veins, your deepest secrets drift to the surface without a sound and lay your own …
- August 2009 · Love that has grown sweet and found its way to every sense lies warm in your heart, bright in your eyes, and tender in your voice.
- July 2009 · Sometimes longing comes up like a storm. Sometimes it comes down like a downpour.
- June 2009 · The more softly the rain falls, the more deeply it soaks in.
- May 2009 · The blind-stampede trampling of your feelings by any kind of carelessness or indifference is a mistreatment on a level where pain tortures you without quite killing you.
- April 2009 · Love that keeps on being postponed eventually loses all its shyness, as the momentum of stored-up longing stokes its own whirlpool, pressing…
- March 2009 · When longing anchors you inside the pouring outpour of its own cloudburst, your heart whimpers itself out through your eyes.
- November 2008 · Every human being's real story begins here.
- November 2006 · The last little remnants of 2006 are only just, here and there, taking hold in the day-planners of our fragmented lives, where bits of our o…
- October 2006 · The blue vault that gracefully and wide reaches out to gather infinity from its farthest corners and, on every memorable spring day, comes t…
- September 2006 · The wind's agitation of the weather, when it gathers sheets of rain into its cupped hand and flings them like a wet slap into your face …
- December 2005 · Sunny days piled high with busyness have become the norm in this last little stretch of the year.
- August 2005 · The perfect undisturbable quiet that surrounds you and takes you into its possession, when you are alone and far from people out in the veld…
- June 2005 · Falling rain, with its unrelenting patter and its own rhythm and tune of harder, softer, quicker and tenderer and more inward, has a charm t…
- May 2005 · The autumn of 2005 is busy giving birth to the loveliest winter, alternating her sunny, windless days with unpredictable ones full of cold g…
- April 2005 · The promise of rain is held out before us like a lure each time the clouds come to fill the valley in soft grey layers.
- March 2005 · Sometimes sitting, sometimes standing on thin crooked little legs, Wellington's vineyards are subjected daily to a chastisement that begins, at first, as refreshment.
- January 2005 · Just as nature submits herself in quiet acquiescence to the seasons, so it befits the human being to bow to the circumstances ordained over him.