One day after the next unfolds lovelier than the one before. Summer's extravagance lies like a lover's kiss on mountain, blue sky and vineyard; her warmth of love, full of emotional energy, blows speed into summer lungs to drive growth in every direction in an exuberant tangle of stalks and leaves. Pregnant harvests in the process of ripening in the promise of sweet, grain-water-sweet fruit multiply eye-alongside and stem-alongside — nature's instinct under higher command, faithful to the instructions within seed, bearing fruit — the one tenfold and another sixty or a hundredfold; a spiritual law and example for higher beings like us who struggle to grasp our own nature. We, who so love to complicate the intrigues of the inner rooms with dogma and policy, do not realise that it would be easier if we first cleaned and beautified the cup on the inside before we tried to do it on the outside.

What makes a village and a community ugly is not necessarily the presence of weeds, of rubbish, of street-dwellers or of Chinese shops, but rather the absence of good taste and of good feelings. Good taste is an inclination and a gift, but good feelings do not discriminate and ask no qualifications. They are within reach of any disposition. If you train yourself to think long enough and often enough, with full feeling, about anything pleasant, then quality feelings will become your companions and will colour in your life-source.

Unhappy feelings lead to apathy and, if they ignite further, to a contagious, critical and attacking spirit, which, by the time it has become a habit to complain rather than to appreciate, has already sabotaged the personality and turned it into a hardened, full-blown cynic. Besides breaking your momentum, it puts a brake on your relationship with your own heart. What you think is dangerous, because what you think over and over is what you come to believe. Exactly like the habits we do over and over. What we believe and do bears no relation to the truth. The truth in practice differs from the truth in theory, because we make it subject to perception and therefore subjective.

People who have no faith in the potential of their town or their country experience this unbelief as a reality and as a truth. They talk and they live it into truth. But this is dangerous, because what you speak and live grows more all the time, and what you ignore grows less all the time. Your firm belief in any bad opinion will become your truth and really manifest itself — it is by far better to have unbelief in these things. A person does not arrive at light while analysing the dark; nor can you move forward as long as you hammer on what is. Only a passionate relationship with what is not will unlock the energy of the moment and take you forward. What is behind is history. Yesterday, even this morning and just now, is history. We cannot work with the same energy we worked with to give shape to the problem, when we are negotiating solutions.

If we want to establish anything beautiful at all in our community, we must first create credibility for our motives. Honest sincerity will have to establish transparency and place the starting blocks in the right spot. Enthusiasm and speed mean nothing if you start off in the wrong place. Life's built-in referee, without blowing a whistle, will penalise hidden agendas and egoism.

Our town has 10 000 reputations, but only one character. Our gossiping about our town holds it fast to a perception and a bad reputation from which it cannot escape. Let us lift the label. Let us begin to think differently — about ourselves, about each other, and about our town. Let us help the town to be rid of its own personal history and the stigma written over it by our own pronouncements. The moment we think differently, we will speak differently, and in the end we will feel differently. And it is the feeling that is important. It is the feeling that shifts the paradigm enough that the needle at last swings round. It is then that prayers are answered, that high contrasts begin to soften, that momentum kicks in, and that harmony finds enough little grooves to sync into. Then we do not sing because we are happy, but we are happy because we sing.

Groete Amanda Kreitzer