"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
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 
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 
1 comment:
I've wondered around looking for a home, a place or a people where and with whom I can belong. I have felt alien and alienated from that which is left behind. Is this my home? Or that? Or that over there? The certainty of one day brings forth the ambivalence that belongs to it. But ambivalence can be as breathtaking as sunset - neither day nor night. Sunset arrests our own breath and breathes into us the life and certainty of it's return at dawn. Aidan (in his beautiful accent) speaks the words of the divine: "Show them the dark side"... so they can cultivate faith. So when I try to locate 'home' I find it within (on the good days!) in my center as a world citizen. There's at once a drawing in and an expansion. New questions can arise in that space. "Am I here long enough for others to risk attachment? If it's a short stay, is it best not to risk attachment (with a horse for example). How to decide? Could the answer lay in the act of 'responding' which bears a fluidity that 'decisions' do not. Decisions are necessary for a responsible life and therefore have their place. But responsiveness has more to do with life itself. Both response and decision have their place. We can still respond while awaiting a decision. Then perhaps our decisions take on more of the impermanence and freedom of responses.
All of you are young enough to swim in the ebbs and flow of certainty. There is so much time to correct your balance. Are we ever too old for this? From the shores of New Zealand we can grow compassion for America's fear. From the place of world citizenship we can see through the self-persuasion of New Zealand's curricula. I know of an English family who were appalled to find in their New Zealand garden a Maori child swinging in their own child's swing. The child was shooed away and scolded for her trespass of property and boundary. On hearing this story, I felt for this child whose innocence sought only to honour the purpose and invitation of the swing and whose instinct took no account of ownership of mother earth or the things forged from her womb.
I guess that to be truely alive we must transcend artifical boundaries; to trust in the light in the dark, the losses in the gains, the potential sadness in attachment to a horse, the loneliness in the absence of the beloved. To eschew one is to deny the other it's potential, forcing upon it a false mask that smothers its fullness.
At the same time as we afford life, people and things their fullness they become free. And we become free to choose the parts we connect to. The other parts are not denied, but left for someone else to connect to. What I'm saying here is that the 'between places' are where home is; where the 'scattering' invites us to stretch outwards in connecting the pieces rather than gathering them in to a small but defined space. It's in the teeter-totter of the between spaces that we are most alive and life giving; where each moment invites us simply to breathe and respond. It's in these spaces that moments of friend-ship from a stranger in the market or on the train are as full and complete in their part-ness as the life-long friend whose love transcends time and place.
In elite centers of thought, world citizenship is a mindset to which many aspire. Yet mankind's history attests to the brutal scattering of its peoples and for many of these, world citizenship has been their only refuge and source of peace.
My thoughts here are incomplete, but as lengthy (and scattered) as this 'blog comment' has turned out to be, it is not intended as an assay... just a response.
And I do not tire of your images of sunsets.
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