Autumn winds have blown a dusty homesickness open into classical longing. A longing that began with longing for myself. Because sometimes, just sometimes, it feels as though you are losing contact with the origins of your own being, and it feels as if your heart and its tenderness are outside of you rather than inside. In the search for your deepest and truest self, the vacuum in which your feelings end up is stripped of all familiar emotion. The fleetingness and fragility of everything then steers our thoughts. Stifling, the question after the meaning of it all becomes your most important, most burning wonder.

The wearing-down that searches out of hungry eyes for somewhere to slake its unsympathetic thirst unfolds brightly in your mind as examples of age, of illness, of decline — wrinkles, grey hair, cartilage-less limbs and bald heads in wheelchairs — parade past your mind's eye. Importance falls into disuse and uselessness before the overwhelming weight of damning evidence that the seriousness with which we cram our lives full of "musts have" and "musts do" must really be an amusement for an invisible audience that has, since always, watched the humankind's anxious scurrying.

As though born with a wristwatch and a ladder in hand, society takes it upon itself as a self-assigned task to teach the hands of the seekers after the utopia of success, from their earliest days, how to master a firm grip on the ladder, with instructions full of rewards for those who climb it fastest and highest. At the top there waits a pot of gold, success, recognition and, for some, heaven.

And so for a long time now we have worn our watches not around our wrists but around our hearts. Our relationships are shaped inside the harsh little hands of the seconds that hastily form our sentiments and deform our priorities. Worn out with running between appointments and demands that drive us with whip-strokes from the minute-hand towards the next falling blade, our lives crumble into thousands of pieces that try, in fragments, to find consolation in our souls. In the same measure that we allow the clock to live our lives for us, in the same measure we lose our compass. The compass that determines our course.

Contact with our deepest self and with its needs, and contact with nature, is the route back to the compass. Without taking heed of cellphones or of watches, every one of us has an appointment with our own heart. Liberated from the claws of time and busyness, during such a meeting with yourself you become original again. An appointment where stillness strips you to your essence. Where the timelessness of vistas full of mountains and of veld sends dust-cloud thoughts to settle on the bottom of your being in an outstretched dampness that climbs in through your eyes and sows your heart full of simplicity. Your compass becomes your sieve that skims off all the urgent robbers of meaningfulness and dries them out, so that new insight and new priorities blow them away.

Groete Amanda Kreitzer