Stillness has a voice. A vocabulary and a conversation to conduct. Especially the stillness after twilight, just before the dark folds its blue calm around your senses to close up the cracks caused by the noisy day. A stillness that leaves you soft and defenceless before the all-encompassing way in which nature draws herself back into her own core. A moment she uses to fine-comb her heart for any lovelessness that may somewhere have worked itself loose.

Or the sweet stillness of the melancholy night-just-before-dawn, when she softly rustles her lament against your ears while her spirit leans calmly against you. Hidden in moments as composed as death, she then enters the sleeping world to announce the earnestness of her truth — a message of wholesomeness that blesses the dark. Blesses it because, under the onslaught of its merciful covering, it renews everything for tired bodies and overloaded senses. Faced with a silence that cherishes and strokes there where argument has chafed until the skin was raw. The soundlessness of her accent audible to everyone who can bear her presence. Her revelations reserved for those who feel at home within the breadth of her outstretched thought. Her heavy-sweet wisdoms digestible mouthful by mouthful. So her whisperings come to embrace your own conversation, and she steps in as mediator between you and yourself, with counsel gathered up on journeys from the back of the globe and carried along over many seasons. The imprint of her inner awareness on your spirit fills in and fills up everywhere gaps in deficiencies disturb the balance in your emotions.

Stillness is an instrument. God's instrument, which administers the anaesthetic that prepares us for His operating table. It sterilises our own noise and busyness, which so love to form opinions and to pass judgement. It holds the ego's mouth closed and tries to persuade us to be rid of this bully that complicates everything and constantly tries to push God out of our existence.

Stillness is for many the only little grains of simplicity in their day and in their feelings. The stillness that out of desperation whispers us awake, at our wits' end, in the deepest night — not to get up, but to listen. Because she knows: The gentle outlasts the strong. The obscure outlasts the obvious.

Groete Amanda Kreitzer