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 heart open to you again — its intentions, its longings and its melancholy. Everywhere you have lost touch with your own heart, the lost stillness of the night, which comes to lie outstretched in your soul, stitches you back up with emotion and with motive. While the world is asleep, the lights in the world inside you are switched on and a faint little lamp casts its glow over a landscape making its own peace with itself and with its circumstances. And with the people, or the non-people, whom circumstance has settled inside your inner landscape.

My personal economic collapse was thanks to my own conspiracy. The currency of property has simply moved so far out of reach of insensitive people that no one without enough character-capital can invest in me any more.

And squatter camps are out. The land has been revalued, and people who waste — my emotions, my time, my talents and my trustfulness — must all go and squat somewhere else. Those who do acquire a little piece of property may stay, but under strict conditions. No arrogant skyscrapers, and the foundations must be dug deep — wobbly scaffolds require too much drama, time and feeling to clear away when they collapse.

To farm inside my territory you may not overgraze. My earth has only so much carrying capacity, and I refuse to turn into a Karoo or a Namib. Land is valuable. And land with water and grazing is scarce in an economy of sensitive hearts. First go and see what prospective buyers or investors did on previous properties, before you sign a contract.

For anyone who enjoys an interesting alternation between dense thickets and sunny grassland or fragrant fynbos, there will be a place to catch one's breath somewhere. The careless, the greedy and the grabbers who only want to seize because it is an agenda and not a matter of the heart, and squatters who see my land as an easy option, are all going to get nothing but a leave-a-message answer, with no one ever calling back.

A bankruptcy auction of everyone who has fallen behind on their instalments in love and in sensitivity is never a bad idea. Empty promises without deeds send inflation shooting skywards. As soon as the trampled and eaten-out ground has recovered, its value rises again. And so my own conspiracy caused a total collapse of the economy in my own heart. A welcome recession for feelings that now have a chance to come to new fullness.

The landscape is now calm — a peaceful clean with lovely horizons and pauses full of refreshment and of promise.

Groete Amanda Kreitzer