Beauty was, by a firm decision, already consolidated during the first six days of creation in the heaping-up and the falling-into-place of rock and sand around the Wamakersvallei; beauty that draws from gradations sometimes too lush for your heart to interpret what your eyes see; beauty that feeds from little streams that, like arms, lift themselves up towards the mountains to gather in the water that loosens itself out of the bosom of the Hawekwas and wean its fields. Little streams that, like messengers, run down the mountain to bless the trophy-winner below with fertility and with green, carrying a heavenly summons to establish love and beauty; beauty shaped and drawn out of the raw material that everyone called to this place has received as an inheritance and as a destiny. This untouched, unworried beauty, which calmly and with dignity, under the balm of mercies given from above, had counted down the centuries until she would one day be claimed, had her stillness brutally broken with the first Free-Burgher's swing of the axe to make space for a foundation and a field.

We, as carers who inherited her from those first axe-men, raise structures and infrastructures on her earth and on her spiritual earth. Too hurried for stocktaking, we do not count the losses that pile up and manifest around us as ugliness (to deal our eyes and our hearts a good thrashing). The lack of a clear, strong, yet sensitive interpretation of our heavenly commission often hijacks our mandate. Shepherdless and courseless, we graze wrong, and we fail to recognise a wolf in sheep's clothing. Accusations pile up in reproaches that, like old wine, grow dark and bitter.

All we have to work with is soil, seed and seasons. If seed represents the opportunities in our life, then it is no use blaming everything we have to work with for the absence of love and beauty. What is around us simply reflects what is inside us; because what is outside us can only work with what we give it to work with. Opportunity shies away from need, because it operates on an opposite emotional frequency, but opportunity is drawn to ability and to faith. We overestimate the event and underestimate the procedure. How does it happen that you take in a failed harvest in your heart or in your town? You did not plant when planting time had come, or water, or pull out the weeds. In your heart and in your world of thoughts you farm organically, and therefore wrong dispositions have to be pulled out one by one.

If it is true (and it is) that the human being is as he reckons in his heart, then, if we want opposite results, we will have to begin there — at the making of a better personal philosophy. Do not wish for better soil, for other seasons, for a better economy. If one day you have your own planet, you can arrange it differently over there: spring all year round. Do not wish for other seed, but for better thoughts, for a cleaner heart. Work harder on yourself than on your work. Watch carefully who you become in your chase after what you want to achieve! A person's heart needs a great deal of attention. To neglect your heart is to ask for spiritual trouble. Park your thoughts under the shady cool of the trees planted by the steady stream of Psalm 1 and let the parking meter run. Think only thoughts that make your heart feel good, and that link the emotional spaces in your being to good feelings without roadblocks. The moment you turn your face to the sun, all the shadows fall away behind you.

Amanda Kreitzer