Seeing

I’m beginning this entry on the 8:08 train from Paekakariki, an earlier train than I usually get because Michael is working at home today and taking the kids to school. This train is empty enough for me to have a window seat that looks out over the sea (which isn’t easy on the 8:48) so that’s where I am now, laptop on lap, climbing higher and higher above the sea, through tunnels that will take me past fields and harbours and into Wellington. I’m thinking, looking out at the water, about things we don’t usually see and what happens when we can see them.

I talk about this in a developmental way quite often; the subject-object shift is the most central shifts of Kegan’s theories of development—and of mine, too. I think about what it means to take something that was once hidden to you—the way it makes you think about your relationship to anger or blame or perfectionism—and take it out, examine it, look for the roots of it, and then make better decisions about that. Since we’ve moved here, I’ve made that move—or have made a beginning of that move—with my Americanism, with my urbanism. What does it mean to be me in these cases, what does it mean to be me knowing about the forces which shape me? How am I reshaped in the noticing of the shaping process?

There are other things, though, that I see here in New Zealand that have been invisible to me before, but these are things which aren’t about my psyche, but about my world. I see vowels in new ways, see how they can be reinterpreted, reshaped. I see the word “process” and it catches me each time --is it prah-ses (rhymes with bra-cess) or pro-ses (rhymes with mow-cess)? I see hills and trees and hundreds of greens that I’ve never seen before, so many greens as to be profligate. I see the weather move in and pass by in great slashes of fronts, in clouds that move so fast I get dizzy watching them. These are things I would perhaps have been able to see in the past, had I been paying attention. In New Zealand, though, there’s something to see that it’s enormously hard to see elsewhere. I see the wind.

You can always see hints of the wind, even in Washington DC. There are flags flying or lying limp, trees waving in the breeze, empty potato chip bags kiting across the street. That is seeing evidence of the wind, seeing what the wind does. Here, though, I actually see the wind, see the form of it, see it made manifest. I see the way it moves and changes across the sea. I watch the swath of mostly waveless sea, and I can see the wind currents move and change along the surface. I can watch the way the wind swirls by looking at the little wavelets, wind made solid, given dimension and form. I see the wind gust and change direction in the long grasses in the meadows, see the wind making waves on the land. Walking on the beach on a windy day, the sand swirls into near-solid sand channels, funnelling into busy roads with form of their own, whipping against my ankles in small stinging bites. And even when the wind is still, it's visible in its powerful traces. The pohutukawas on the dunes are moulded in the shape of the hill, constant wind shaping trunk and leaves into living statues, a coastline marked with monuments to the power of the wind.

If seeing parts of your own thinking or emoting that you haven’t seen before helps you become more developed, what is it that happens when you see parts of nature that were once invisible do to you? Do you become more naturally developed, more in love with the planet? Do you become more nuanced in your love for and appreciation of this powerful and fragile place? And what does it do to my children’s developing sense of themselves? I have a new understanding of the fierceness of nature, and a new fierceness in my wish to protect it. The wind here is cold and bitter and keeps me up at night with its moaning and rattling of windows. And it is magnificent and more beautiful than I ever knew air could be. It’s a new world, this windy Wellington. And I see it in new ways.

Containers of dreams

Remember these pictures? On December 4, almost three months ago, we closed the door on an ugly red container and watched it drive off, lumbering and huge, through crowded city streets. Other than the eight suitcases we had piled into our station wagon (first loading the kids into my mother’s car), everything we owned was shut into that container, boxed and bubblewrapped and sealed. We can hardly remember even what was in there.

The wretched moving company, whose name we curse, told us we’d be unwrapping the bubble wrap on January 29, and there was even a week when we believed that the container was sitting on the wharf, waiting to be cleared through customs. Really, as it turned out, it was sitting on a wharf in Singapore, waiting to be transferred to a ship that might take it in our general direction. Now another month has passed, and today we got the news that our things have actually arrived and have cleared customs and are waiting to be checked through the quarantine folks (the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry -- MAF). It turns out that that big red container has been brought to the moving company’s warehouse, where it will be totally unpacked and inspected by MAF (there’s a manifest so that MAF will know which boxes to open) and then repacked. And then DELIVERED to us. Somewhere about next Tuesday—one week from today.

I’m trying to make sense of how I feel about all of this. On the one hand, this is utterly exciting. Ah, how glorious to see our own things here, to have clothes to wear, dressers to put clothes in, rugs on the floors. We can see what this house really looks like once our things are in it. There are precious things I’ve been missing: the chiming clock we gave one another as a wedding present, the few pieces of my grandmother’s silver, our photo albums. There are also practical things I’ve been missing: our pots and pans, books and bookshelves, and oh, most of all, my kitchen aid.

AND it’s an awful lot of work to unpack things, to put things away. There are hours of unpacking and unwrapping dishes and trinkets, and finding places for them in the few cupboards and closets. And there is the work we didn’t do in the packing frenzy—decide which things won’t find places in this much smaller house, which things will never find a home here in cupboards or closets and need to be given away. The other work is a mindset issue: we’ve now left the settling-in rhythm. It doesn’t feel like we’ve just arrived; it feels like we live here. We see people we know on the beach, have friends over for dinner, know what is around the next bend on the train ride to town. We’re relatively settled here after three months, or at least more settled than I might have imagined. It somehow feels like the fuel I need to power the unpacking was used up in the nervous energy of the first several weeks here. Now my sights are set on thinking about my work at NZCER, writing the book, playing with the kids. How will I find the time and energy to slog through this next part?

But of course it's not really the physical effort of the work that gives me pause; it's the emotional effort. The prospect of the unpacking somehow connects me with other moments in time. It’s a direct line to the other transition points in my life, and I feel them crowding around me as I think about setting to work. I remember Aidan as a little baby pulling newspaper out of boxes at Belmont Road, I remember working not to be claustrophobic as I traded in the big back yard of Augusta for the tiny back porch in Cambridge, I remember wedging the bed into the minuscule bedroom of our first apartment in the year we were married. And it connects me into the future, to the unknown next time when I’ll find myself unpacking again. Will we next unpack at Barbara’s house on the hill? In some other country? In Bethesda? I feel the forwards and backwards tugs of time and feel all the unknowns swirling around me. Who knew I packed all those emotions in bubblewrap and sent them across the sea. Wonder whether they’ll make it through quarantine.

Trouble in the middle of the night

On the train to work, looking down over the rocky shore out to sea. We travel through these four little tunnels here which bring us higher and higher up the hill until we’re way high looking down. Today the sky is layered grays of clouds (who knew how many ways there were for clouds to be grey?) and mirrored in the rough and darker greys and whites of the sea. On these grey days, even the grasses on the hills take on a grey tint, blending with the sky and sea in an effortless pallet while the greens change not at all, and the sky and the sea change constantly. How does green do that?

Last night at 2 am, the village fire alarm went off, quickly followed by Naomi’s terrified cries. I, already awake because of the shrill alarm, raced in and held Naomi until she fell asleep again, feeling her quick heartbeat and my quick heartbeat slow down and get more and calm and sleepy. Coming back to bed, though, the adrenaline was not a help to my getting back to sleep, and I watched the dark ceiling (with only the faintest hint of the ghastly chandelier visible) and thought about how I couldn’t handle living in a town with a volunteer fire whistle. Here, that whistle means that there has been something awful. There’s been a crash on the road, or a fire in a house, or a medical emergency, and the alarms are being rung to gather the volunteers who will put out the fire or perform the CPR or cut accident victims from their cars. The alarm rings maybe twice a week, and this was the second time it’s woken me in the night (the first was for a school burning down—arson—in the next town).

When the whistle goes off, I brood. Someone’s life might be changing, some family may have just had a tragedy (and, of course, sometimes it’s just a false alarm and it’s only a handful of volunteer firefighters who are inconvenienced, who have left their dinners or their jobs to race to be of help to nothing much). At 2 am, I brood extra, and last night I thought about what a bad system that whistle was. Wouldn’t beepers be a better idea? What was I doing living in a little town like this anyway? Why would anyone want to do that? I missed the city, where you never thought about people’s personal tragedies, where all of that life and death happens behind closed doors, safely out of sight. And of course, even at 2 am I wasn’t quite sleepy enough not to recognize the fallacy of that.

It was another 2 am, in Washington DC, the day after we returned from our NZ visit in April, that we began to talk about moving to New Zealand. We were jetlagged and miserable, and had returned to a city more crowded and dirty than we remembered. Then, at 2 am, the sirens began to howl, and they howled a long, long time. And there were helicopters, flying low over our house, the search lights flashing into our bedroom window. And more sirens, and more helicopters, and Michael and I were awake for the 2 hours of the search, wondering what terrible mayhem had happened, wondering if a bomb had dropped or a plane had crashed or some other enormous global action had taken place. I figured if something like that had happened, one of my friends who was awake while I slept in DC would be calling me to check up.

We woke the next morning to find that there was a quick and violent crime spree, several cars hijacked, several people killed, in a series of attacks. The final hijacked car had been left in our neighborhood while one of the suspects fled, on foot, to the zoo. As far as I can tell, they never caught those guys.

At 2am here, I never wondered about a global incident. I never thought about a dirty bomb. I never wondered if my own life was in danger. Mostly, I felt sadness for whoever else was in pain and couldn’t sleep because of it. (Ah, now passing the Porirua bay with black swans and oyster catchers and several kinds of terns and gulls—and is that a loon with a white belly and neck and a black back? No internet on this train to look it up. Past the town the hills climb out of the bay, flecked golden with the late-summer flowering bushes—yarrow? I don’t even know why that word comes to mind.) I’ve been wondering, as I walked along the beach with Perry this morning, as I got the kids ready for school, what it is about a city and the scale of it that makes private tragedies fall away so that I could believe—even at 2am—that I never heard a siren in DC. It’s made me wonder about what it means to have such a big percentage of the world live in big cities—impersonal and removed from one another. I know that people know about this impersonality, know that people have been writing and thinking about this issue for a long time. But I haven’t fully experienced the difference until now, haven’t fully thought about what that difference means. I think about small schools, and how much better small schools are than big ones for kids—big ones are impersonal and it’s easier for kids to be beastly to one another, for kids to get lost and to wander off a healthy path without any adults ever really noticing. I’m beginning to understand how living in a big city—which I’ve done nearly all my life—changes what I’m able to do, how I think, and who I am in the world.

There will be no story in any newspaper about what happened at 2am in Paekakariki. It’s likely, though, that Naomi will come home from school and tell me about a fire in our town or the next, or about somebody who knows somebody who was rescued from an accident. This turns out to be the way news works in a little village where everyone wakes up when someone is in trouble in the middle of the night.

PS the pictures today are of my office in town--first the office, then the view out the window.

Come to the beach with us

Here is a looong video for those of you with broadband (not you, Nancy). You've had too many stills of sunset at the beach, but I thought I might offer you the chance to actually see the sun go down in this part of the world. It's a crowded Sunday night at the beach, as you'll see, and after this, we saw a pod of dolphins between Kapiti and our beach. And, lest you think this is utter paradise, you should know that now Aidan has lice--just a very very mild case (because I'm manic about checking every time a kid itches). So, everything is a little wilder here.

By the way, Aidan's accent seems to be there as a present for all of you; he doesn't usually talk like this (yet), and in lots of words it's more Brit (a la the Harry Potter tapes) than Kiwi.

The Big question

"When are you going to come back?" an email from a GMU colleague asks.
"Is your plan to still come home in two years?" a Kenning friend wonders.
"So have you come for good?" an NZCER Board member wants to know.
"Can you make a decision about how long we'll stay here in the next month or two so that I can get a horse?" Naomi pleads.

I don't know I don't know I don't know. And no.

Gerald the architect came over with potential plans for Ocean Road. Gerald is a lovely man and clearly a wonderful architect, and his plans sent us into a tizzy about how long we’re going to be here and what it all means to invest so much in this little cottage. At one point I leaned over to him and said, “Gerald, it all comes down to whether or not we’re going to make friends and settle in here or whether we’re going to pack up and head back. And when all that might happen. And I bet you can’t answer those questions.” And he couldn’t.

And then we went over to see a house which is not yet on the market but will be in the not-so-distant future. It’s a 1930s fabulous house high on a bluff over the sea but right in the center of town—the highest house in the village. If we had seen it 6 months ago, we’d have bought it straight away. If we knew we were staying in this village for 5 years, we’d buy it today and eat the loss that will come from selling this house after such a short stint. But we didn’t see it 6 months ago, and who knows how long we’ll stay here.

The original plan was for 18 months and then we’d see. We’re at 2.5 months now, and we still haven’t even gotten word about our furniture yet. And 18 months is a blink, an unlikely amount of time to live anywhere unless you’re on a brief assignment or you really hate it. And we don’t hate this life by any means. We have good days and we have bad days. Michael and I lie on our backs and look at the stars at night, and we wonder when we’ll feel at home looking into these unfamiliar stars. He’s feeling a bout of homesickness after passing a shop in Wellington with an aerial picture of New York in the window. New York—a city we’ve never lived in, would never live in—is familiar, is home in some central sense. And since I got the weird bout of homesickness after seeing the American flags on the Sevens US rugby team float, I understand that it’s little things that can tip homesickness right over.

But Michael and I also lie on our back deck at night and look at the stars and wonder how we’d ever live without this. We walk on the beach every morning and wonder how we can ever stop that. Do you get tired of walking on the beach? Does the sand in the sheets stop feeling fun (and exfoliating!) and start just being a pain? No, I’m guessing not. I’m guessing that the time we stay here is in direct proportion to the relationships we make here and the relationships we miss back home. With hearty doses of political questions and lifestyle issues.

The world is extraordinarily uncertain. Even if everything else were stable, I have growing children, changing interests, changing relationships. How do we ever make things stand still enough to make decisions about them? Or how to we make decisions about these things even inside the spinning? I don’t know.

So I sit at home and knead the bread and watch the sunrise and cuddle with the children and think, “I live in New Zealand.” And I’m loving writing the book Keith and I are writing together, and I’m loving the work I’m doing at NZCER, and most of all, I love swimming in the freezing sea, floating in my wetsuit. Perhaps for right now, that’s all there is to know, that’s all there is to understand. Perhaps it’s even enough.

The first picture today is from a morning walk. I figured you'd probably had it with sunset pictures, but this one is a sunrise picture. There is lots to be written about sunrise. The other pictures are from last night, when we took a field trip onto the roof of the garage to see whether it's worth building a second story onto it to get the views. You'll see the other house we were looking at to the left on the bluff over Naomi and Aidan's shoulders. And the other view is of the sea off the garage. Just so that you can see what sea we see...

Stay tuned for pictures and stories from Saturday's rugby match.

The commuter’s blues

I’m stopped right now on the hill just before the four short tunnels that will take us to Paekakariki on the tranzmetro 8pm train. It was a long day at work today with ultimately fantastic conversations at the meet-and-greet with the NZCER board after work, and I stayed longer than I thought I would (longer than the event was supposed to take). And then had to face the long trip home—the walk to the train station, the wait for the train (just missed the 7:30 and have the blisters on my feet to prove I tried to get it), and then the 40 minute train ride which will turn into nearly an hour by the time we wait for the goods train to make it through these 4 single-tracked tunnels.

And, I have to say, I don’t regret the commute at all. We’ve just pulled in the half light out of the sheltered green space in which we were waiting, and are now riding along the last bluff before the village, the jeweled lights of Muri scattered on the darkening hill behind me, the last remnants of the sunset past the South Island to the west, and Kapiti shrouded in grey mist to the north. I put my hand in my coat pocket to answer my cell phone and it comes out covered in sand. When I get off the train, I’ll slip off my sandals and walk up sandtrack—so quiet and still—and then walk home along the beach where the children and Michael will be waiting for me, probably chatting with the fishermen who tend to come out after dark.

This ride begins in beautiful Wellington. Tonight I walked along the harbour and watched Māori long canoes filled with men and women rhythmically rowing. Like crew only utterly different—oodles of people (20 in a boat?), sitting in pairs with short oars pushing in and out of the water in staccato strokes. In the distance, a container ship heaped with containers that don’t belong to me chugged out past the mountains and out to sea. I arrived at the train station breathless—to see the taillights of the 7:30 disappearing down the track. But I got on to the silent waiting 8pm train—two train cars long—and pulled out the laptop in the clear evening air. The train filled up slowly, with a wide variety of passengers—Maori and pakeha (this is a Maori word that means non-Maori—an interesting way to define the newer settlers), young and old, in suits and jeans. Finally, on with the conductors and the driver, and we were off. Past the rugby stadium, the shipyard with the stacks of containers (none of them mine). Then through two mountains in the lowpoint of the ride—dark, dank tunnels with horrible air. And then the stop-and-go trip up the coast. Past little green nooks with streams running past playgrounds. Past Porirua and the harbour there, with fishing boats chugging in the distance past black swans sticking their necks deep into blacky water. Between the hills and into green rolling farmland, sheep just visible in the twilight, only occasionally looking up with interest at the passing monster of a train. And then the first glimpses of ocean and the centring that comes from that, from seeing the familiar shapes and hills falling into the sea.

When I glanced at my watch at 7:15 in Wellington, I sighed for the long commute home, the time I wouldn’t have with the children, the late dinner that awaited me at the end of the journey. But watching the sea and then feeling the sand in my toes at the end of the journey somehow washes the time away. In Paekakariki, the commuter's blues come in shades from aqua to navy, from the sea and the sky. That’s not such a bad ride.

Dating

We are back from another first date. I thought we’d be done with these some time ago, as we’ve been, er, married for 15 years. But it turns out that after you meet your life partner, you have to continue this dating thing, only with a trickier set of matches to make. First there’s the couple date, where you as a couple go out with another couple and see whether everyone can be friends. It’s extraordinarily hard to find a good couple match. There are couple matches where really both of you like one of them, or (worse) one of you likes one of them. It’s passable if each of you likes a different one of them. It’s only in the glory days that both of you like both of them (and ah, I hope some of our dear matches from the US are reading now—you know who you are and we adore you).

But magnitudes of difficulty harder still is the family date. Everyone has to minimally get along (e.g., not hit, scratch, bite, or be enemies with) everyone, and as many people as possible have to like one another. This means kids’ ages, genders, and other tangible and intangibles have to be added to the complexity of the couple date before you find a really good match. In DC, we had some nice partial matches (where 3 in our family worked at a time), and really, that’s good enough. We’re in a new land, though, and we’re starting fresh.

Michael says I’m a dinner slut, which means I invite everyone to dinner, almost without judgment at all. I’m game to give any combination a try. And that means that we’ve had some really lovely dinners and met some people we like enormously. And when they get up and we finally pry our kids away from one another (in the best instance because they’re playing), and they shut the door, the debrief begins. Now it’s been a really long time since I’ve had a first date with an actual boy (Michael and I celebrated the 19th anniversary of our first date last week), so I don’t exactly remember the rush of the after-you-say-goodnight feelings. But here, there’s the door closing, and the talking talking talking about how it went. In the worst cases, there’s a mismatch between various members of the family where some of us want to invite them over again—and soon—and others of us would just as soon wait a long while.

Tonight was an excellent first family date. We’ll wait to talk about it, because we don’t know what their judgments were about us (“won’t that obnoxious American family ever leave??”). But it’s got me thinking about how hard it is to make deep friendships, and how good they are for our souls. When you’re young, you believe that finding the perfect mate is the only task before you. And for a little while, maybe you’re right. But the world is a big place, and people are complex and multifaceted, and they need a constellation of connections, not just a single star (and speaking of stars, M has just come in from the back porch, after looking at the enormous sky with these different stars and is breathless with the beauty). But what is it that makes a family friend work? And here, now that we’re cutting across history and geography and culture and (in a small extent) language—here in this tiny village across the world from all we’ve known before, it would seem so much harder.

So far, though, it hasn’t been so much harder. Like the family dates we took in DC, there are ones that feel better than others. But these are lovely people in this little village, in this little country. And because I don’t know any of them well yet, there is a wellspring of possibility. On the way to the train this morning, we stopped and had a chat to one friend candidate (here you “have a chat to” rather than chatting “with”). At the train station, we had a lovely conversation with someone else.. On the way home, we sat behind a third friend possibility. They seem to grow potential friends on the trees here in this village, along with the lemons and grapefruits, which are ripe and falling on the ground in some yards just now. How many of these little blossoms will turn into fruit, though? How many first dates do you have to have before you have a second. And with those who have come for several dinners (and a breakfast), when does it get to be the easy effortless friendship of the glorious Melissa Glen Haber (who, in addition to being a spectacular friend, is also a brilliant author: check her out)? Does it every get effortless here in this new context? This is the planting season. It’s not quite clear when or how the harvest comes. Sometimes it feels like hard hard work. But on a night with billions of stars, after having a yummy vegetarian barbeque looking at the sea on a very good first family date, the planting is all part of the fun.

ps The picture is from the bungy jumping in Taupo because of the vague thematic possible connections (of ups and downs, of risks taken, etc.). Mostly, I'm showing this to avoid another-magnificent-sunset-on-the-beach picture and because I haven't shown you this yet. This isn't us bungy jumping--it was painful for us to even watch. Can you find the tiny person in this picture, the crazy one who has just paid $NZ 100 for the chance to feel like she's about to die? Don't try this at home...

Nikau walk

Today was a spectacular Sunday. Cool with vivid blue sky and hot sun. We went to a couple of local craft places (still on the search for the right bed after we've given all of our bedroom stuff to our friend Gregg in DC). Then, given our mission to do something fun and active each weekend day, we went for a walk in a nikau reserve. Nikaus are palm trees, the only palms native to New Zealand (and I think Keith said they were the southernmost palms in the world, and I hope he'll correct me if I'm wrong--watch for comments). I couldn't get a still picture that captured the feeling of the New Zealand bush (=forest)--the way the light moves, the thick canopy of palms, the lovely lushness of it. So here's a video, and you can walk with us through just a little piece of NZ. This reserve is just off the main highway about 15 minutes from our house. Excuse the quick New England reference--I know it's cruel given that New England is deep under snow and cold right now. Enjoy.

Curiosity

I’ve gotten really curious about all kinds of things in the last week or two—about teacher training, about leadership development, about the New Zealand educational system. The thing I’m most curious about today, though, is why I haven’t been curious about these things in the past. Since last week, I’ve been reading books and articles on NZ education—some of which were published in the US and are thus hard to find here. This begs the question, why didn’t I do this before? It’s not like I haven’t known that I was coming to live in New Zealand. And it isn’t like I’ve been so flat out busy that I haven’t had the time. True, the couple of months before we left the US were among the most busy in my whole life, and I hardly had time to breathe. But these weeks since I’ve been here, I’ve had oodles of time. I never even thought about looking up things about New Zealand education (or, actually, reading a book about leadership). This is curious.

I had the most wonderful day at work yesterday. I met with the director, Robyn, and I got a project to do—a set of things to analyze and write a paper about. And then we had a meeting about the Teachers of Promise study (TOPS) . We sat and talked about potential research designs, research questions, methodologies. And I felt like I actually knew something about this, felt like there was something I might be able to contribute to this beautiful country, that maybe parts of me translated.

In the two weeks that I’ve been at work, I’ve felt parts of me come back to life, parts that have been sleeping in these last months. I find myself increasingly curious about so many things right now—how does this system work or that one? My screen at work is filled with a dozen open explorer windows as I puzzle my way through state curricula and international education sites. And I’m learning again—about all sorts of things. But why wasn’t I learning before? What happened to all my curiosity since I’ve been here? And what does it mean that it’s back now? What’s next? (Note all the questions…)

I feel almost as if I’ve been hibernating, locked inside a still, growing place. I don’t laugh so much here, don’t open my mouth without careful consideration. I’m contained, this careful American-self never quite sure about what happens next, always a little tentative. I stand around waiting for the kids to get out of school, smiling awkwardly at the other waiting parents who all chat casually in crisp Kiwi tones. I hold back in meetings, wondering what my place is here, how I can add to what’s going on. I’m more quiet, more slow. This isn’t unpleasant, but it is a kind of out-of body experience.

I’m curious about how the children seem to have escaped this fate. They tumble headlong into school, burst out of the classroom at the end of the day. Naomi is constantly bringing over first one girl and then another. I’m curious about what happens when I stop watching my life and start participating again, start experiencing life here as my own life rather than one I’m watching.

An update on the moving saga. You remember—all our belongings on a container? At first it was supposed to be here at the end of January, then it was on a ship moving from Spain to Singapore and supposed to be here at the beginning of March, and then—poof—it was back on the ship from Baltimore to Wellington which arrived on January 29^th. So we’ve been waiting for it to clear customs, craning our necks for a glimpse of the ugly red container as we passed the shipyard. Yesterday we called to find out when we might expect the customs process to be complete and, er, the container seemed not to have arrived after all. It seemed to be, er, transferring from a ship from Spain in Singapore. It’s expected to arrive the first week in March, sit in customs then, and finally arrive here mid-March. You can’t imagine the letter we wrote to the moving company. I’m curious about how they stay in business.

So, that’s life here, with me still wet from an evening swim in a rough sea with a fiercely grey sky warning of the coming southerly (southerlies = cold because they bring air from Antarctica). Yesterday we went down at sunset to a glassy sea, and I watched the sunset gleam on the water as I floated on my back and looked out over my purple toes. Yes, I know that for most of you it’s winter and you don’t need to hear beach stories. And I know that when you’re feeling really toasty, we’ll be lashed with wind and rain and mourn the fact that New Zealanders don’t heat their houses (when a picture flashed of Aidan in his room at Belmont rd, the other day, I thought, “oh, how dearly I miss radiators..”). But right now, it feels like a good place to begin to come alive again. I can ride the waves, wonder why the big ones form and which one is just right to boogy board into the shore. I can theorize about the winds and the wave currents and watch my theories unfold as I get pushed northward up the beach. I can wonder about which shells will be there tomorrow, and why the paua was waiting for me like a gift on the lowest stairs to the beach yesterday morning. There’s lots to be curious about if you live on a beach in New Zealand.

Quakingly beautiful

It is the afternoon of the first day of school, my first real quiet time in this house. And the quiet has been broken by my first real earthquake in this house—which gets the blood moving, although didn’t rattle the dishes at all. To see about this little (4.8) earthquake, you can click here (but this will be good only as long as it’s the latest quake—a day or two, probably). Now that the shaking has stopped (the house stopped shaking rather quickly—it took me significantly longer to stop shaking), and before I have to pick the kids up from school, I can sit here in the hammock chair on the front porch. From this most comfortable spot, I can look at the garden and hear the birds, and, over the hill of my neighbor’s house, I can catch a glimpse of the South Island. Of New Zealand (for those of you who, like me, have a hard time remembering where I live).

And even as I say that I have a hard time remembering, I have to remember that it’s getting easier and easier to feel like we live in New Zealand. Our vacation ended beautifully, the drive home somehow being more lovely than the drive there had been (when has that ever happened? But in this case there were a whole host of mountains to see from the other direction). We drove past lovely volcanoes with their snowy tops obscured by the clouds, then through a desert area where I kept expecting to see saguaro cacti among the scrub brush, and finally across rolling green farmland (I think there’s a blog yet to come about the integration of cows and sheep here). And then, as we neared familiar towns, we saw lovely mountains in the distance, and, to the west, the sea. Our first glimpse of Kapiti Island brought a surge of feeling—and it felt like home. Michael and I looked at each other, surprised. That’s Kapiti—so we must be home. And as we neared those lovely mountains, we realized that they were our hills, the hills I look at with such admiration each day. Turning into Paekakariki, we drove through the handful of shops and down to the beach, the sea packed with people (er, dozens of people, anyway) on a beautifully sunny Sunday afternoon. The sea, the steep green hills now flecked with yellow late-summer flowers, the ramshackle cottages along the beach front—all of this is every bit as beautiful as anyplace we’ve ever been. And we live here.

It is amazing to come home to someplace as beautiful as the place where you’ve been on holiday. Michael and I get up early and walk Perry on the beach each morning before the children wake up. We see the beach at high tide and low, with roaring waves that scare the dog and the gentle placid lapping that looks more lake-like than oceanic. We marvel at the color of the blue sky or at the hundreds of greys in the clouds. We laugh as Perry remembers how much he likes to go in the sea (which he seems to daily forget and then remember with puppy-like glee). (A tui—loud flying, lovely NZ bird —just flew past me to land in the pohutukawa tree which is nearly out of flower. There’s a tui in my pohutukawa. Go figure.) Naomi will come after dinner, with something of the nine-year-old frenzy, and interrupt the washing of dishes because, “The light is really perfect right now!” And then there is the scramble to rush out the door, tumble down to the beach—fleeces on, dog leash attached (momentarily, until we get to the beach), sandals on (ditto). And we sit and watch the sky turn pink and then orange and then fuchsia. If I turn away from the west to throw a ball (or look at the reddening of the clouds in the east), Aidan will call out to me in distress, “Mommy, you’re missing it!” I now have an idea of when Venus rises—and when it sets. I follow the tides. I think about the direction of the wind. I’ve never been so connected to the natural world in my life. It mellows me, slows and deepens my breathing, puts any number of things into perspective.

Now I’ll put on sandals and a light fleece (am in shorts and tank top tody—words I never thought I’d type here) and walk the 5 minutes uphill to school to check on the kids' first day. It may not have been their first day in school in NZ, but it’ll have been their first school earthquake…

Back from school—didn’t need the fleece at all. Aidan had a good day; he said the teacher was just as strict as reported, but just as nice, too. It’s a much better start to his year than the last couple of weeks of school in December. I’m relieved. I can’t give much of an update about Naomi because she, of course, is off at someone else’s house. She seemed cool and collected, though. While I was waiting for Aidan to get out of class, I talked to a new couple, newer than us, from South Africa. They’ve just moved here, and their seven-year-old daughter was having her first day of school ever (they start at 7 in SA). The mother talked about how hard the whole thing had been on the children, and how sad and difficult they had been. Then her daughter came out and burst into tears. I was expecting that kind of drama, and was never expecting what I got—two happy kids describing their first day of school as “great.” And now that the kids have begun school, this next phase of life begins. If only our furniture were here to enjoy all this beauty with us...

The pictures from today:
Michael, on the side of the road on the way home from Taupo, just ordinary beauty here.
The kids in their first-day-of-school picture, and one of Aidan walking up Ocean Road to school (it's a 5 minute walk, but a lovely one) with Kapiti in the distance
And sunset last night (sorry about yet another sunset picture but they really are all so different...)

More pictures from the weekend

Ok, we’re home now (home at 3 Ocean Road, not 1910 Belmont). We had the most astonishing drive back (we think more mountains were added while we were in Taupo). More about that tomorrow. In the meantime, here are the other pictures I wanted to post from our trip. You’ll see Aidan wearing his father’s hat (and, sadly, looking far better than Michael looks), and a lovely classic New Zealand fern. You'll also see the rapids I wrote about yesterday--two shots taken from the same place, 15 minutes apart. Amazing what a difference 15 minutes makes, eh?

Nobody lives here

It’s late and we’re totally wiped after a full day of tramping here and there in the Lake Taupo region. The most amazing thing we did was to pay $60 for the smelliest, ugliest walk I’ve ever taken—and it was totally worth it. We left New Zealand’s verdant hills and landed, somehow, in Mars—or at least a close replica of Mars called Waiotapu Thermal Wonderland (http://www.geyserland.co.nz/index.htm). The Taupo region is one of the most active thermal regions in the world, and there are things here I’ve never even imagined seeing before. We saw geysers and boiling mud and steaming waters with pools of bright yellow, orange, and green—all minerals leeching out of the rocks from water that is as hot as 300 degrees Celsius. And all of it was billowing steaming clouds of sulphur. We took dozens of pictures, most of them hideously ugly—barren earth with steaming sinkholes into which you can peer to find boiling mud. Yum. Sad for you that we couldn’t get the smell to show up over the internet, too.

For all of its ugliness, it was stunning, too. Magnificent, awesome—any word you can think of for forces well beyond your understanding. And somehow beautiful in it’s ugly way. It was easily like being in another planet, where you didn’t know whether the water was salty or fresh, whether it would cool you down or burn your hand off if you touched it. We saw birds landing on the steaming lake which bubbled at the edges, and we wondered whether they’d be cooked right in front of us. But they weren’t.

All that boiling, steaming, hissing water found its way to a stream and then to a waterfall which tumbled in an eerie whiteness and poured into a lake of actual emerald green. That deep green lake, surrounded by deeper green trees and with mountain peaks in the distance, was one of the most purely beautiful things I’ve ever seen. At the edges of the lake, the water sometimes steamed and boiled, and sometimes the trees were steaming, so you knew that this was still not your run-of-the-mill mountain scene. It was that combination, maybe, of trees and mountains and lake—such a classic beauty—with hints of steamy bubbling magic, that made the lake so extraordinary. I gulped it in, took too many pictures (none of which shows how beautiful it is but one of which is attached anyway) and hogged the viewing platform for longer than was strictly polite. Then we headed up through the native bush, away from the sulphery smell, and into clean green regular beauty. It quickly became impossible that we had seen what we had just seen—until we left the hill and climbed back down into the steaming plateau again and the earth changed from green and lush and life-filled to haunting and gaseous and boiling. Nobody could ever live here.

After we left Waiotapu behind, we found classic, stunning New Zealand beauty. Still, it was tinged, here in Taupo, with the unimaginable. We found the beautiful Aratiatia rapids—which have been harnessed by the power company here which uses NZ rivers to make NZ power (65% of North Island energy comes from these rivers, another 10% from the geothermal plants). When we got there at 3:50 through a lovely bush walk, the rapids were hardly rapid—just a small meandering stream bubbling through huge boulders. At 4:00, after three warning buzzers, the dam opened and the water poured out, and we watched the stream turn into a roaring rush, unlike anything I’ve ever seen before, the giant boulders disappearing under raging ice blue water. The pastoral green stream banks with the general soft grasses and young trees were suddenly underwater, the man-made liminal zone suddenly roaringly apparent. What are these grasses and trees that survive the dunking that comes at regularly scheduled intervals (for tourist enjoyment, I think)—and more commonly in the summer than the less touristy winter? What kind of life finds its way in this tumultuous life—life as difficult as the thermal pools, but this time manmade and thus unnatural in its unworldlyness.

If yesterday was about feeling our way to be at home here, today was about finding a world where it is hard to imagine anyone at home, visiting a place so far from anything we’d imagined that it was hard to get our heads around it. It was a place for deeply respecting nature—not only because it’s beautiful and you should be gentle with it—but because it is bigger than you are and it will rapidly kill you if you step wrong, into roaring rapids or boiling mud.

Tomorrow we go home. And we’ve been talking about how it feels to all of us as though we’re about to go home to Washington, to Belmont Road. Who ever goes home to Paekakariki? New Zealanders, we suppose. And for a time, that seems to be what we are. So home we go, to our little cottage by the sea where the beauty is constant, and totally different, than the beauty, here in Taupo, five hours north.

We live here

We’re on holiday. This is a funny thing to say these days, because in some ways life feels suspiciously like a holiday all the time when you live one house from the sea. But we’ve been meaning to take a long weekend somewhere interesting since we got here, and this is the last weekend before school starts. So we’ve gone to Taupo (we’re staying here: http://www.baycrest.co.nz/). We’ve driven the 5 hours north (although it took us 7 because we stopped and poked our way around some of the towns), away from the coast, into the centre of the north island. We passed through little towns that reminded us of places we’d seen before—in the south, in New England. Rural towns, although with a decidedly kiwi flavour. We drove beside gorges with white cliffs falling to rivers deep below, and through a scrubby desert-like area with sand and scrubby olive-coloured bushes. And, on the other side of the road, huge volcanic mountains, one snow covered even here at mid-summer. It is beautiful thing after more beautiful thing in this country. The scenery changes dramatically from hour to hour, and it is always stunning. When we drive through New Zealand we wonder about how many forms of beauty there are in the world (also how many different kinds of sheep and cows there might be).

This trip is rather different from the last time we meandered around this country. Then, in April, we were here for two weeks, and who knew when or if we’d ever come back. Each viewing was tinged with a kind of sadness, a wistful recollection that this beauty would be half way around the world from us in 8 days, in 5 days, in 48 hours. Now, it’s the beauty of our land (and the wistful missing goes in a different direction). Now we have just a tiny little getaway which feels too short, but Naomi keeps consoling all of us with, “It’s pretty close to home—we can come back here whenever we want.” Pretty close to home. That’s amazing.

Just as I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that we live in New Zealand when I’m sitting on our front deck or shopping in the grocery store in Paraparaumu, I have to come to terms with it as we drive through this strange and magnificent country. We live here. As I was shopping for warm clothes in Turangi (http://www.kiwiplanet.co.nz/turangi.htm), the saleswoman assumed I needed the wool because we were going back to winter soon. It actually took me a couple of beats to know what she was talking about. “No,” I told her without thinking, “we live here. It’s been such a cold summer.” And I realised that I didn’t say “we live here” with the kind of shock and awe, the rising inflection of a question (“we live here?!”) with which I usually say it. We live here. We know that we sound for all the world like North American tourists, come to stay in New Zealand for a couple of weeks on holiday before heading back home. But today—driving our New Zealand car, navigating on the wrong side of the road, putting together pieces of stories others had told us about the places we drove through, even shopping at our regular grocery store, only in another town—today it has felt like we’re off on a little holiday close to where we live.

This is not to say that we’re getting used to the beauty. It’s astonishing here at Lake Taupo (http://www.laketauponz.com/). We’re in awe of the sweeping mountains ringing the deep and sparkling lake, of the pumice stones and black sand that remind us that this is all the result of a volcanic explosion 25,000 years ago. We love the novelty of the hot springs, the taste of the thermal water on our lips, the soaring scale of the landscape here. It’s breathtaking. And, for right now, it’s near home, and we see familiar stores, read familiar signs, hear familiar accents. We have an ease about us that we didn’t have when we were tourists in April. After all, we live here.

Moonrise

Tonight is a full moon, the second we’ve had here in New Zealand. Three moons ago my mother dropped us off at Dulles Airport to begin the long journey to New Zealand. That was a bittersweet goodbye—the kids were cheerful and distracted by the airplane presents Grandma Catherine had brought them, and their easy love of her made me homesick before we ever left. I cried as she drove off—one of the most bleak moments of the trip. Just moments after she pulled away from the curb, my phone rang, and it was Mom, telling me to look out the window at the moonrise. We all looked out the wall of glass and saw the full moon rising over the airport. It was golden and enormous, and it filled me with the kind of peace that I only get from seeing something in the natural world. I knew that this journey would be ok, somehow. The people I loved would look up at the same moon (although at different times and from different angles) and we would be warmed by the same sun. We would be connected in important ways, the earth and the cycles somehow holding us together. And it’s true, those cycles do hold us together. When I see the moon rise over the hills here, full and bright enough to keep us awake at night, I think of it rising over the industrial park outside Dulles Virginia. I think of the love it would take for my mother to cheerfully drive us to the airport and then to call to point out a magnificent moon even as we were moving half way around the world. And I think of beauty and love that is stable throughout the world, even as it changes over time. So, this is just to ask you all to look out the window whenever your night happens to be, and know that the moon is beautiful tonight

Not knowing

How do you learn your way into something? How do you get a sense of the system, the politics, the picture before you? And what if you can’t see the picture itself?

I’m trying to understand New Zealand educational systems, and I’m doing it by reading working papers and reports and descriptions of things. Most of what I’m reading so far comes from various governmental departments. I don’t even have a sense of which governmental departments are responsible for which things yet—or even which departments even exist. It’s a system that is deceptively similar to the system I know, similar enough so that a paragraph of context at a bit of a research article would have me feeling like I knew what was going on. But a deeper layer in lets me know that I don’t actually know what’s going on, that my initial thoughts and assumptions about how things are connected and why are likely to be wrong.

I think, in fact, that that’s one of the most confusing things about relocating to a place like New Zealand. There are some things that are so profoundly familiar and it’s so easy to hang on to those things and believe that now I understand them. Then there are the pieces that seem to have a different name for things but ultimately the insides are the same. Togs are the same thing as a bathing-suit. Jandals are the same thing as flip-flops (which is less jarring than the Aussie word for flip-flops, “thongs”). But national curriculum or national standardised tests are not the same from place to place. Neither are “normal schools” I’ve just learnt. Here’s a useful lesson: Normal schools in the US are places where teachers are trained. They’ve now been absorbed by universities or renamed or whatever, and now they exist mostly in history (SUNY Geneseo was once a Normal School, etc.). Normal schools here are also used in teacher training and also a bit of an oldish term, except they still exist. Here’s where it’s interesting: these “normal schools” are totally different in this context than they are in the US. They are not actually teacher education schools, but rather (what we would call) K-12 schools where teachers do (or used to do) their practice teaching. This is something like what we would have called a “lab school” except those mostly don’t exist in the US at all any more, and the normal schools here aren’t so lab-like as they were supposed to be in the US (it may be that the lab schools in the US mostly weren’t as lab-like as they were supposed to be, either). This is a tangent, but it’s also an example of how it is to learn your way into a system that is both similar and different. Everything I’ve read that has mentioned “normal schools” I now know I didn’t actually understand. Geeze.

I think it’s probably true that my being outside the NZ system will be a benefit as my brain expands and I learn to question things in US education that once looked just like The Way Things Are. And it’s likely true that because I’m an outsider, I’ll be able to look in to this system and help people inside it question things they might not have seen. At the same time, right now I just feel so stupid all the time. I don’t know anything, really, in large part because I don’t know what I don’t know. The normal schools thing just came up in passing—not a question I would have asked. How many more things will I find that have the same name but with profoundly different meanings—or the same general meaning in a profoundly different context? So here, in my second week in this office (although only my 4th day, since I’m here so seldom), I’m not even beginning to learn about what I need to learn about. I’m sitting here on a windy and chilly day thinking about what it takes to learn about things I don’t know how to learn about.

Last night at the park, Naomi and I sat on the swings and talked. She’s nervous about going back to school next week, in part because there will be placement tests that will determine which level she’s in. In a school without clear grade level divisions (she’ll be in a class with kids a year older and a year younger as well as kids her age), this kind of what we would call “ability grouping” or “tracking” is the way they determine which teachers the kids have and in which groups they’re placed for a variety of subjects. Naomi has been worried about maths (which she now pronounces with the s on the end) and has been wanting to be given worksheets for practice work (right now she’s keen to learn algebra for reasons that escape me). Last night she confided that she didn’t actually know what the subject “literacy” meant. I explained and she got it: “ah, English and language arts.” And she seemed to think that she knew how to handle that. But then, thinking it over, she realised that she might be fine in maths and she might be fine in literacy, but she was in big trouble in social studies—because it’s a whole different social they’re studying. And we sat and realised we have no idea what things will be like for her in science—will that be more local or more general? How much science is local, and how much general? How do you go about learning about what you don’t know you don’t know?

Coming back to the office from lunch, I stopped by the library to get books about New Zealand education. With the load heavy in my hands, I left the building and found myself in the middle of a parade: the “sevens” have come to town. This, for those of you who don’t know (which I’m assuming is everyone), is a gathering of a certain kind of international rugby game, the kind that plays with seven on a side (as opposed to the other kind, which must play with a different number of people on a side). Today the international set of teams came to Wellington and marked their arrival with a parade. This parade snaked through the middle of the city, holding up traffic and generally making a mess of things as people stood by the sidelines and yelled. I saw the floats for Argentina, Papua New Guinea, and then for the US. For a reason I absolutely don’t understand, my eyes filled with tears at the sight of the US flag flying—even though the US flag and what it has come to stand for in the world generally depresses me. And I looked at the team of handsome men in the float, black and white, smiling and waving, and I thought, “Those are Americans!” This is absurd, since I live in a house full of north Americans, often visit with Trish and Marianne (who grew up in California), and Marianne’s WWOOFERs (http://www.wwoof.co.nz/staying) with her who are also often from the US. Generally there are more folks from the US than from NZ at our dinner table. But still, for some reason, the back-of-my-mind, gut reaction, was this longing to talk to the men in the float (it probably didn’t hurt that they were cute). I’ll have to figure out what that means somehow…

So, there’s lots to learn in the internal and the external landscape. So what else is new.