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 or in any stretch of untouched nature, remains for me the high point of all I have ever lived through.

A soft, good-natured stillness lies upon veld grass and green young wheat, barely visible as it stirs lightly under the peaceful touch of the wind along its slender little spines. The saturation of creation with the Creator's perfect plan, in which everything lives together in utter submission and contentment, bubbles over in every bird-cry that calls and in every instinct of every living thing's longing for life. A quiet harmony sweeps down high out of the vault of heaven with arms full of soft grey-white clouds, down to the red dusty road that winds wistfully smaller and further away towards destinations brimming with longings.

The human being is fragile, and his heart frailer still. Because long before old age breaks his body, tragedy breaks his heart. And on the fields of the heart it is wise to farm organically. Everything that has been pasted on, thickened up, or chased into place does not thrive here.

If nature is a mirror of our lives, then some people are like an open stretch of veld where all your senses and your exhausted spirit recover and make contact again with the eternity that is locked up inside us. Time's borders grow wings.

Other lives are divided up into little plots, with regular rows and furrows, and the whole rhythm of where and what and when is measurable and predictable. Many hidden joys wait here to be discovered — provided you make the time to stand still, or deliberately go for a walk when the smell of damp earth and moss fiercely overwhelms your will to stay indoors.

Some gardens are gardens, but that is more a technical description than an aesthetic experience. There has just been too much shaping with the pruning shears, and the electronic irrigation makes it all deathly serious and perfect. Such a garden will live even if no one loves it — the power just must not go off.

If you walk through a garden like that, you come out the same as you went in. But go and walk a little through a cheerful, exuberant garden. Or, best of all, go and walk any footpath out into the veld or up towards the mountains. When our daily way of life and our routines have become suffocating, and our humanity struggles, stooped over, because we are hopelessly biting off too big a mouthful in every conceivable area, go and find a place where for a long time you can just stare alone at the veld that stretches on and on before you, forever. For one reason or another, unnecessary burdens simply fall away of their own accord and the balance is restored. The heart of our problem is, actually, our heart looking for a resting place.

Groete Amanda Kreitzer