The dignified calm of a cloudless sunset forms its own bond of tenderness with your spirit — a wordless conversation that warns against unrest and against haste. A being-together between human and nature, full of promise and of fragrant nutritional value. Sorely needed crumbs for the post-modern person who gets up every morning to tread out, from the beginning, the same gin-traps in the same groove — set by his watch and his day-planner, and by everything and everyone he does not like.

Hurriedness creates a tension that secretes fear into our lives in micro-doses; subtly it undermines the foundation and the pillars on which the structures of our lives come to rest. In the end, this continual addition extinguishes the fire in our heart, so that later we hardly feel the sweet welling-up of our own humanity bubble up spontaneously and spill over. Too hurried and too busy, we do not allow ourselves to feel the full weight of our heart when it comes to lean against our spirit in search of a moment of meaning.

To live close to your heart is an art that has to be learned, after we have unlearned it. The more you manage it, the more little connections you form with yourself, connections that bind you again to your own origin and to your most blessed calling and mood. These little connections, when they make contact, form a live wire heavenwards that neutralises and reverses the dynamic of restlessness. Then you begin to rendezvous with who you really are — before work, before children, and before the impact of marriage and of society alienated you from yourself. Because the duality of our earthly existence wears its own groove along the trodden route between who we are meant to be and who we have over time become. Every time we manage to move nearer to the radius within which available feelings like long-suffering, goodness and friendliness swarm, we experience how the high contrast between feeling very good and feeling very bad lies only a thought apart. Just one thought back, or one thought forward, takes you away from the pull of negativity.

Away from your heart's interpretation of life, love and context disappear. Because without heart, everyone becomes a potential enemy and life one great competition. Only sustained moments of the heart, strung together one after another, bring hope near our life-arena again. And hope is the kindling wood that allows the large logs in our heart to take flame again — warmth that lets faith and love flourish.

To allow yourself to rendezvous with the transparent moments of your own heart is to find grace in your own eyes. A grace that lets you be rid of the labels around your neck and the medals on your chest (which you placed there yourself). Our earthly little flame burns briefly and fragilely, no matter how brightly sometimes. Worms are not choosy, so why should we complicate life, when death — the final leveller — does not allow us to answer back or grant us the luxury of a last pronouncement. In simplicity of heart lies the secret of everlasting joy. It is a disposition, but also a choice — many times every day and countless times over a grateful lifetime.

Groete Amanda Kreitzer