The other evening a winter day was sent home with one of the loveliest finishes imaginable — golden pinks that had worked themselves loose on the artist's palette were dribbling in soft blushes and splotches across the mass of cloud loitering over the Hawekwas. Pure-sweet, it could slide down against my eyes into my soul, where it stilled the deep hunger in the firmament of my heart. A moment that entrusted my day to my heart, and a sensation that fastened my heart forever to the moment — my heart and my moment. An experience inside the womb of all living things, one that made my feelings consciously real and accessible to myself. An important event. Because to live far from your own heart is to be dead while still alive. Because everything we give permission to, to alienate our heart from the instructions of its own blueprint, plunges us into this inhuman condition. Many a heart flails about blue in the face because there is too little spiritual oxygen for its emotional lungs. Such an unfit heart grows tired quickly and out of breath. It drops out and trips over the smallest obstacle.

But there is nothing that breaks a heart's momentum like words. The Bible warns us that a heart is satisfied from the abundance of the fruit of the mouth. A loveless heart is therefore a heart lacking instructions via the mouth to multiply love along the blueprint of its original DNA. Speaking ill and speaking negatively breaks your momentum and the momentum of the community. Your own heart's digestion is clogged, and someone else's ears have been misused. With our tongues we keep up a prison system with an infrastructure far beyond the reach of correctional services. We gladly lock people away with pronouncements and throw away the keys through being unyielding. We report each other to each other, and also to God. In this way we make Him an accomplice in this system of criticism, condemnation, the finding of guilt, and the imposition of penalties — which turns such people into prison warders. Because what has been locked up has to be guarded.

We can hardly wait in the evenings to watch the news on TV, where we are given more than enough reason to complain about the crime in the country, while the greatest plundering, of each other, is carried out by the elites of society. A heap of loose tongues behind bars ought tangibly to lead to greater spiritual prosperity. For negativity draws still more negativity. Proclaim crime and you get more of it, not less. Fault-finding is a character trait that pushes an already critical disposition further downhill, without brakes or seatbelts. People who fall into it make everything complicated with their repetitions of criticism from many angles — spiritual litter-strewers who sow unrest in thoughts and harvest discontent in feelings. A joyless existence, stripped of appreciation and of gratitude, and therefore with the minimum of spiritual shelter.

Graciousness is a soft concept that cracks the hardest reality open exactly along its seam. It falls open before you without splinters. A reality that stays whole even as it breaks. Delightfully uncomplicated! A freedom where hearts that arrive here associate in great breadth inside a microclimate, where love duplicates wherever there is a reflection of these soft feelings putting down roots. A reality that is true in heaven and that must be made true in Wellington, until the big picture swallows up the small one.

If you must give expression to prejudice and hatred and intolerance, do not speak it, but write it in the sands, near the water's edge. —Napoleon Hill

Groete Amanda Kreitzer