Without the familiarity of all the things in my life that have sometimes been gathered together out of sentiment over the years, sometimes through the love of today that surrounds me and creates a simple but intimate kind of emotional safe-keeping, I would again and again have had to flee, disarmed and stripped, before my own being-alone. The refreshment I draw from everything I so love to store up in my heart and in my house brings me consolation in times when distance, or death, or necessity singles me out for a session of aloneness. Fortunately our senses are always, without our telling them to, busy anchoring everything they take in and undergo into our memories, where over time it becomes an exhibition of joy and of sorrow. As long as the fingers of my feelings can stroke over memories of moments — no matter how fleeting — where eye contact turned into heart contact, I feel settled, content, more than inwardly grateful, and even privileged and spoilt. All trifles that happen on invisible levels, but great in the say they have when they determine the weather forecast and the colour of the firmament inside our emotional landscape.

We live fleetingly. For that reason we may not live shallowly. Shallow roots are a curse for relationships. Especially your relationship with yourself. Do you possess your own heart? When was the last time you looked your own heart deep in the eyes, embraced it and danced with it in your own arms until the two of you began to laugh breathlessly about all the unimportant phobias and the unquestioned hang-ups? Or simply because it is lovely to be alive. To be able to see, to hear, to smell, to experience, to feel — joy and pain. Ecstasy and dismay, right in the middle of their full impact. And about the comfortable naturalness of your relationship with God inside your relationship with yourself.

A cup without contents has nothing, after all, to pour out.

If there were a nursery where we could buy gratitude and understanding, we could talk the owner into kicking off 2010 with a huge sale of these two commodities. Or: buy patience and get compassion free. Just think what a wonderful year 2010 is going to be if we can all store up a sturdy supply of these virtues in the arsenal of our personalities for the day of reckoning. Sorry, love is all sold out for Valentine's Day!

Against the gravity of weeds there is no instant solution. Do not water the field on which it grows. Especially not the tongue on which the most weeds flourish so lushly.

The abandon with which summer unselfconsciously ladles its lust for life lavishly and passionately in large measure into everyone whose heart-tables are laid for a feast is a lesson to us. Summer's value lies in what it is willing to share — its warmth, its new shoots, its fruits, its abundance of sun and the cheerful song of birds and of frogs working their morning and evening shifts in good spirits. Our value does not lie locked up in how much we have, but in how much we are willing to give. It is a subtraction, not an addition. Subtract what you are willing to give of yourself and to give away, and you determine the content of your spiritual estate and the sum total of your estate as a human being. That is what makes summer a rich season. And millionaires of everyone whose sum is a negative answer.

Groete Amanda Kreitzer