One month and two days

Thursday, 11 January 2007

One month and two days since we got off the plane

I have been getting used to the idea that I live in New Zealand. I can say that sentence (“I live in New Zealand”) without a grimace now, and I can list dozens of differences, many of which surprise me, and many which delight me. I can walk around in my house in the dark and not particularly bump into things, and, on a clear night, I can look out my bedroom window and spot the Southern Cross. It’s gotten easy to pick out which stairs are the ones that lead to Ocean Road from the beach, and we have a stream that we walk to nearly every day where the kids have found hideouts and secret places in the hills. There is some amount of routine in the non-scheduled days of mine.

But today I was back to feeling astonished that we live in New Zealand. The kids and I went into Wellington on this sparkling—and warm—summer day. I got my hair cut, and maybe there’s something about that that changed me somehow. Sampson like, I watched my hair pool on the floor and wondered what on earth we were doing living in New Zealand (I wonder if Sampson also felt dismayed when he looked in the mirror and found his locks so diminished). And then we met up with Michael and had lunch together, and the kids and I went off to Te Papa, the national museum. They have a traveling exhibit there on Ancient Egypt which Aidan has been desperate to see (for reasons known only to him, although it may have something to do with the fact that Naomi hates hates hates mummies). We walked into the huge museum, which I’ve been in half a dozen times now, and we headed to the Egypt part, which is one of the only areas of the museum with an admission fee. And there I saw the merging of ancient and new cultures in a way that I found enormously moving. The signs were in English and Māori, and it somehow powerfully affected me to see this ancient Egyptian culture in the two languages.

I’ve seen mummies in museums in New York and Boston, but seeing them here in New Zealand felt quite different. This exhibit, because it’s in a museum that is very Māori-conscious, handles the fact that there are human remains in the exhibit differently than I’ve seen it elsewhere. The mummy herself was apart from the rest of the exhibit, in a room more like a tomb than a museum (but not dressed up to look old—just unadorned and somber). There was a tray at her head where people could leave offerings—and there were Pohutukawa flowers and fresh green leaves wilting in the tray. There must be some custom about taking off your shoes in the presence of death, so there were shoes neatly lined up outside. And, on the way out of the exhibit, there was a lovely basin of water and a sign inviting you to use the water for a ritual cleansing should you choose to do that. I don’t remember that at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

And because of the way the Māori were highlighted, I saw the Egyptian society differently too. And I saw my society in a new way. In the US, we have a strange underpinning of Christianity as a part of our lives, but we keep a veil up—almost all the time—between public spaces like museums and the expression of that Christianity. In museums, religion is an artifact of study. Here, there is so little religion that conversations about it seem utterly out of place. Yet somehow the Māori influence—in a practicing, belief-centred way—means that there are ceremonies that are foreign to me that still take place inside these spaces—in the blessing that opened Michael’s new building at the Department of Conservation, in the Pohutukawa blossoms next to the glass-enclosed mummy. These things remind me that I am very foreign here, that I am far away from the things I take for granted, and that the world is far larger than I will ever really understand—even in this tiny country in the middle of the sea.

And then the commute home on the train, past harbours with white sailboats and black swans, through suburbs climbing steep hills and plunging towards the sea. And we walked along the beach on the way home from the train, watching three women—two in clothes and one naked—plunge in and out of the evening ocean. Then inside to do a smidge of work until the light on the hills was too much to bear, and down to the sea again to watch the sunset. There’ll be a video of that tomorrow so that you can experience it with us.

I’ll attach a couple of pictures from the day. I love the one in front of the inscription of a fragment of poetry about New Zealand: “It’s true you can’t live here by chance, you have to do and to be, not simply watch or even describe. This is the city of action, the world headquarters of the verb.” I don’t know if all of that is true. All I know is that we do seem to have come here on purpose, and I am trying to describe and also “do and be.” Thanks for coming along.

(There’s also a picture of sweet Aidan, who had a mishap on Monday night with a soccer ball and a sidewalk. His face was the loser, but it’s healing beautifully.)