The planning that went into the silhouettes of the mountains around Wellington alone had to combine such a fine-tuned sensibility with artistic feeling and mathematical symmetry, that a deep-rooted gratefulness is all that settles in me every time my eyes follow the contours of the Hawekwas without thinking about it. An uncomplicated planning that fell, unforced, into sand and stones and rocks, until height and depth first took their shape from a distance. Meaning comes to it when you become part of it. When more than just your eyes take it in — when it comes to lean against your spirit and plants its feet in your soul. Stillness is the tool that brings this about; simplicity of disposition the only qualification for being on the receiving end of such grandeur, packaged in natural beauty. A feast for any gaunt materialist or any technology junkie. Provided you find the untouched, jumbled-together presence of trees and earth and gravelly little stones and awkward little branches a pleasing thing.

The beauty of an untilled piece of earth is intrinsically more full of stamina and life — organic life that, unsterilised, breathes blood and movement — than a worked-over, prepared piece of ground that looks like a photocopy of the stereotypes on similar places elsewhere in the world.

Even in nature, the home-made and the authentic retain a rare charm and pull-power that is missing wherever the commercial stamp has already made its mark. The mass-produced human has taken the place of mass-produced nature.

Nothing escapes the deadly predictability of powers that clearly work beneath the surface and are set on profit at any cost. A conspiracy of humankind in dumb cooperation with nature, which has no say in how it is stripped. First stripped, and then harvested. A harvest without integrity, without soul, without individuality. The kernel manipulated into standing sterile in personality before its mirror and not recognising its own reflection.

We bow low before the new masters of science, of conscience and of prosperity. We give them our lives. We give them the lives of our children. We give them our land, our harvests, our livestock — our ownership. We want to give it. Our will was the very first thing given away.

Wild seed that sprouts fertilely anywhere and sows itself spontaneously again, without a middleman, is still found where a footpath is still an experience. Where animals graze after the scent, where the wind likes to play. Variety and difference do not stand mute here; they babble in intelligible dialects so that every ear understands and every mind finds something to nibble on.

Groete Amanda Kreitzer