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. The scent of winter, with its cool wet respite, drifts gently in on the thin little breeze off the sea, and oak leaves scurry everywhere in aimless patterns down to the ground.

A mood of expectancy comes to settle itself, shallow in your heart. If there is one law that never changes, it is that nothing ever stays the same. Things repeat themselves like the seasons that return each year — but change, everything changes. The human being included. You can call it growing, or growing wiser, but after a long drought in your soul you yourself begin shaking off dead leaves, to hasten the break of a new season inside you.

The human spirit is restless and always seeks new challenges, or, when the earth is scorched, new horizons. And the high point of contentment is when you notice the same stirring of growth in your fellow human being. Because the dimensions of the spirit are neither visible nor measurable, they are felt and perceived.

The seed that leads to life is sown unnoticed inside us, where the kindnesses of friends and of passers-by feed it and let it thrive. But you must know how to make yourself receptive to it. Seed is mostly words. Words you hear or read or think, which bury themselves in your spirit. The enemy sows his seed in the same way. And for this reason the possibility it holds, for life or for death, must never be underestimated.

But it is not a real dying — you walk around life instead of through it. That is what happens when you stagnate spiritually. Because to refuse to drop everything and lose yourself in a breathtaking sunset, or in a magnificent cloud-spectacle conjured above Groenberg and the Hawekwas, is to be dead while still living. To sit with your back to the mountains when you could just as easily have turned around betrays a spiritual short-sightedness. To look without pity at any old person is to be numb inside. If you never come into raptures over a song, over a to-the-bone conversation, over a well-struck phrase, over a moment of spontaneous connection, over a meaningful glance — or if you are always hopelessly hurried — then when it comes to the best things in life, you have already buried yourself long ago. And if you cannot rejoice at the good fortune that has befallen someone else, then it is dusk and stifling inside your soul.

Then it is time to call the season to a halt and to throw open the windows and doors of your heart with a cry for the rain to come. The rain of goodwill and inward deepening that embraces every day tenderly and cherishes lovely moments long after they have passed.

Groete Amanda Kreitzer