Requiem

This has been a long week, woven with really high highs, and really low lows. I think I’ll talk about the highs and call it a day.

The weather has been as consistently wonderful lately as it was terrible when we first got here. This morning there’s a change in the weather, and I’m looking out into a solid grey dawn, the light too dim still for the shades of grey which usually mark the New Zealand sky in rainy weather.

The first real high point of the week was going to see the Durufle Requiem sung by the Bachoir on Tuesday night. Michael and I met after his plane landed (he’d been in Rotorua for a couple of days on a work trip), and we struggled to find a bite to eat in the early-shuttering downtown area where we worked and where the concert was held. So we were laughing and still slightly hungry when we walked into the little St. Mary of the Angels at 8 pm Tuesday night. I had ordered the tickets on line from a ticket place, fearing they’d sell out. This shows my total cultural incompetence—we were the only people who had ordered our tickets on line. Most of the 100 or so people there bought their tickets at the door, although some were clearly friends with some of the choir members.

The church is Catholic, so the choir loft was in the back. This meant that an audience member could sit in the pews and look at the empty altar, or could sit backwards (in a handful of chairs set up for that purpose or at the altar rail) and peer way up into the choir loft. I mostly sat forwards, and was amazed at the difference in just hearing the concert and not seeing it.

The Durufle moved me deeply. It is a piece of music I associate with my dad and Jamie, and it is a piece of music I’ve sung in a single transcendent concert many years ago—with several choirs and a guest conductor who brought us together to have the same voice. It is a difficult piece of music, and one I knew so deeply because I rehearsed it so so much. And it is a piece of music I have come to love but did not love at first—it is often discordant and has many different tones. So I have history with Mr Durufle.

Sitting in that church in Wellington, a lovely little church (everything in Wellington is scaled down) with high sloping ceiling and stained-glass windows, I wondered about what forces had moved me here. I thought about singing this piece with my father and Jamie and our Georgia friends in the huge Sacred Heart cultural center—a seriously magnificent vaulting space. I could almost see the bridge built—through me—from one church to the other. And, at the same time, I was moved that I couldn’t hear my father’s voice, shouldn’t be searching for it. I was struck by the clarity and beauty of the voices—all people I didn’t know—and by a tiny looseness in diction and tone and timing that Jamie would never have allowed. I realised (again) what a spectacular director she is, the way she pulls the very best out of each of us. I realised how amazing it is that in a little city like Augusta there would be such talent, and remembered that the city of Wellington is virtually the same size as Augusta. It was a powerful lesson in the transcending quality of music and also in how far away I am from the things I’ve known before. I wept through much of the piece, and heard the sniffles of others weeping along. We were connected through the music, and I was far from home. Both things were true.

I had a similar experience watching the assembly at Naomi and Aidan’s school yesterday. Naomi found out on Thursday night that she would be one of two students MCing the bi-weekly assembly. So Friday morning I joined the 200 students in the school and about 20 parents, to watch Naomi introduce the activities of the short assembly. I felt incredibly connected to this place and these students watching my daughter up at the front of the room, welcomed and a part of the group. And then we all stood to sing the New Zealand national anthem, and there was Naomi, words behind her on the screen at the front of the room, looking totally awkward and out of place with a song she didn’t know. We are a part of this place, and we are not.

Over the course of the assembly, Aidan showed his self-portrait to the school (along with his whole class), and Naomi won one of the two monthly awards for her class. Her teacher said that she had an excellent positive attitude, and that she was so fast at everything that you don’t worry about Naomi keeping up with the crowd—you worry about keeping up with her. My eyes filled with tears and I watched these two happy kids, completely at ease in a new home so far from their old one. Belonging and also not.

One of the regrets from this difficult week was that I had no camera, but I’ll take a picture of Naomi’s certificate (and Aidan’s self-portrait, when it comes home) and let you see those. Tonight we’re off to a rugby game with J and P and Rob. And soon soon, you’ll be reading letters from me on the other side of the Pacific. It’s an amazing ride.

Moonset

Now I’m past Porirua on the train home Monday afternoon. Slanting fall evening light through the flax plants around Porirua Harbour, sailboat masts at tall attention, prickly in the sky with the soft hills beyond. My favourite St. John Christmas carol is at full blast on the i-pod (I love shuffle). So far on this ride I’ve been working on the powerpoint deck for a seminar, but now the ride is too pretty to look down, so touch typing is the way to go from here. I am anxious about my trip to the US, anxious about the teaching I’ll do, about some of the meetings I’ll have—and most anxious about how it’ll feel to be back in the motherland. This anxiety (perhaps) is giving me the longest and most miserable headache I’ve had since moving here, but today it has been better than the last several days.

Michael and I went out on a date on Saturday night. We do that more often here than we did in DC—there are more babysitters and we have more free time than we had before. We generally go out to dinner and then for a walk on the beach. In some ways, this pattern shows a lack of creativity; in other ways, it shows the astonishing wonder of a life living at the beach. (For those of you who are worried about the lack of creativity, we’re going to a choral concert tomorrow night—the Durufle Requiem.) Now that the time has changed, we couldn’t go out to see the sunset on the beach after dinner as we always did before, so we picked our way up Raumati beach in the dark and marvelled at the stars and the sliver of the waxing moon.

We sat on the chilly sand, looked at the increasingly-familiar southern sky, and talked about the impossible odds that had led us to living on a beach in New Zealand. There isn’t a day that I’m not amazed about that. Wonder how long that wonder will last. Michael and I talked about love, about friendship, and parenthood, and family across the sea and what it meant to be starting from scratch in a new land. And as we talked, the moon grew larger and redder as it slipped down into the hills of Kapiti. We talked until it was a shark’s fin crescent over the island, and then watched it turn into a smudge and then a dot and finally disappear into a vague halo of light in the distance. We sighed with delight, realising that for both of us it was our first moonset so many decades into our lives, vowing that we would honour the setting moon in our heads the way we hold the rising and setting sun. And then, chilly, we got in the minivan and headed home.

Turning up from Beach Road onto The Parade in Paekakariki, I gasped at the sight over the sea. The crescent moon, big and orange now, was there, setting towards the ocean. Our first moonset was not to be our last—even for the single evening—it would seem. Michael and I pulled over, marvelled at the difference in angle that would make the moon set low over the sea and not high over the island, and settled to watch the moon set one more time that night. Somehow the odds of the double moonset were quite like the odds of our living here in New Zealand in the first place—precious and magical and also with a logic and reality of its own. There is a logic of nature that it’s easy to forget in a city, a patterning of wind and rain and sun and rising and setting. It’s not my logic, but it comforts me and holds me somehow, and lets me let go of my anxieties and sadnesses.

And now this train is moving past shags on the rocks and gulls sweeping over the still sea. The tiny curve of Paekakariki is brightly illuminated in the early-setting sun. This is home, the home I come to after a day in Wellington. And next week, I’ll get on an airplane and fly high above the waves and gulls and go to another home. There’s a logic there, too, only I don’t yet understand it.

(The pictures today are still from the weekend. M and G's dog Brinco meeting Perry for the first time, and our Sunday afternoon walk on the beach and up the hill by our house.)

Naomi

Naomi got her ears pierced yesterday. She had had them pierced in August as a birthday present, and that time was marked by the kind of drama only Naomi can muster. We were all on our way to a party—about 10 of us—and we stopped quickly at the mall because she couldn’t be happy for another second without her ears pierced (and I had promised). She was on again off again up and down on the tall chair. NoIdon’twanttodoit. Yesyesyes I do want to do it. No. Yes. For 45 minutes. Finally, the woman at the free-piercing place got impatient and just pierced one ear just as Naomi was getting down, having decided again that she wouldn’t get them pierced at all. Naomi looked at her with shock and rage. “OUCH. THAT HURT!” she roared just as another woman came up on the other side and pierced the other ear. Righteous indignation—and pain and rage and fear—poured from Naomi and she screamed and screamed. I had to remove her from the store as we wandered from place to place, trying to find something that would distract her. Then, eight weeks later, she decided to try sleeping for a single night without her earrings in, and in the morning, the holes had healed through. I felt sick with misery about it, remembered the horror of getting them, and the weeks of cleaning and turning and worrying about how they’d heal. And now, just at the time when she could take out her earrings and put in other ones, just as people were giving her earrings for presents, the holes were gone gone gone.

So the deal has been that she just needs to say the word, and she can get them pierced again. And last week, she said the word. We walked through the Porirua mall to find a place, and no one would do it last Sunday, so, tearfully, Naomi decided that we’d do it this week on a Saturday, and that her friend J would come along and get her ears pierced too. So it was, on Saturday morning, I found myself with two nervous girls sitting in the Chemist shop (that’s where you get your ears pierced in NZ) and feeling my own heart racing to keep speed with the girls.

Naomi is older now, and she was with a friend, and so there was no scene. The gentle NZ young women who did the piercing didn’t have to trick or cajole. They just counted to three as Naomi’s eyes welled up with tears and she trembled in my arms. And then “ouch ouch ouch that hurt” from Naomi and then it was over. New earrings sparkle in ears, she looks 3 years older than she looked before, and I feel the heaviness and lightness of her growing.

Naomi has outgrown all of her winter clothes. We’ve unpacked them all from the container; she has scattered them all over the room and then gathered them all up, tried them all on, and made piles of the ones that don’t fit. Which is most of them. She’s grown almost an inch in the 3 months we’ve been here, more than two inches since June when we last marked her height on the stick we use (because we’ve never been anywhere long enough to use a doorframe. We had to buy her all new clothes last weekend, and we had to find just the right things for her willowy lovely body. Her friends are starting to wear bras. On hot days she really needs deodorant. She seems to be growing up.

I look at her, this child who was my tiny baby not so long ago, and I marvel at the changes in her. We walk on the beach most nights (alas, not now that daylight savings has come to our autumn), and we hold hands and talk together—about horses, about the universe, about why some people hurt other people. I find her genuinely interesting—not in the oh-my-child-is-interesting-because-she-is-my-child way, but in the way I find friends interesting. She is smart and curious and funny and wonderful. Then she baits her brother and kicks him and then falls down, screaming, a pre-emptive crying strike designed to out-cry him. Sometimes it must work, but I’ve been catching her at it much more often.

Naomi was a sunshiny, defiant little child. She threw tantrums, teased other children, was often in the timeout chair in the office when I picked her up from preschool. Now she is an ebullient, lovely thing, laughing with her friends in her tree house, dancing along the beach, talking about what she should name the horse she hopes she’ll eventually have. She is responsible, brushes her hair until it shines, takes (mostly) good care of her things. She is (mostly) honest. She has become the slightly priggish elder sister who speaks in superior voices about how she’s NEVER been in trouble at this school, whereas Aidan is not quite a stranger to trouble. She has somehow forgotten those long hours in the timeout chair at a school on the other side of the world.

As I am going through all these changes inside me, wondering who I am and why I was born and what I’m meant to do with my time on this planet, Naomi is doing the same in her own way. She’s beginning to get crushes on boys (although never admitting that, even to me) and making sense of complex emotions which sometimes overtake her—jealousy, anger, hurt. She walks barefoot around the village and talks about how tough her feet are getting.

Along with those toughening feet, she has a tougher spirit—she can face bigger adversity with equanimity. And her defiance has mellowed to something that is closer to determination and spunk (when she was on the ground screaming as a 3-year-old, I prayed that determination and spunk were just around the corner). Twice she’s gone to the park alone; twice she and Aidan have walked to school alone as I waited by the door nervously. Both times, it seems to have been the doing of it that matters, because once she has accomplished this feat twice, she is no longer interested. It is not her interest to get away from me right now—as it will be in the future—right now it is just her hope to be able to exercise her independence.

And so she does cartwheels in Memorial Hall, rides her bike barefoot around the lawn, cuddles up with me and says, “So what shall we converse about now?” She lives in the moment and lives for the future, constantly asking her friends where they’ll go to high school or university. Each night in bed we turn out the lights and cuddle in the darkness of her room, and I ask her about 5 things she’s grateful about, and every night, that cuddling time makes it to the top 5. When I’m feeling busy and like bedtime is taking forever, and she tells me that one of the very best parts of her day is there in the dark, the two of us cuddled in her bed, I think forward to a day when she won’t want me there at all. And I live in the moment too.

Those moments as she was getting her ears pierced were much like life—endless and instant. I looked up into her terrified, strong face and loved her as hard as I possibly could. Tried to send my love to her, not to protect her from the pain which was coming, but to join my love with her pain in some way. When I told her that, cuddled last night, she told me that she had felt all my love coming towards her and that’s why it had been easier this time. The five things for which she was grateful last night: getting her ears pierced, having a whole piece of naan to herself at lunch, watching a movie with Aidan and Rob as Michael and I went out on a date, going for a long walk on the beach, and cuddling with me. I look at her, look at her list, think of my life, and I can hardly contain my gratitude.

(Pictures today: Naomi and me at the zoo just after we moved to DC in 2002. Everything else is from yesterday.)

Swirls

I know it’s been a while since I wrote something substantive here, and hope I've been distracting you with pictures of puppies and children. This has been a writing week for me, a week of writing essays about teacher research at NZCER and working like mad to get the book proposal and sample chapters done on the leadership book. Keith and I are working to get the full proposal package to the man we hope will be our editor by the end of the week (I meet with him when I’m in the US in two weeks) and so we’re having to write and rewrite and edit and figure out what we’re going to say (not always in that order). So there’s been tons of writing for me, but you haven’t seen it.

So, quickly, a graceless update for those of you who are really curious. Walking down from school yesterday I felt a stab of longing for Oyster and for the teachers and families I loved there, especially those who were my students at GMU—C and E, most especially. And I wondered if they ever looked at the blog and what they’d make of it and whether they’d ever come to visit. And when I got home and logged on, there was a blog comment from the two of them which made me wonder about the way the universe works. If you’re still reading you two, yes, the kids have grown astonishingly big. They’re working on their Spanish each week with a lovely Mexican teacher who comes and sings songs and reads books with them. They are happy and growing and wonderful. And please please do come and visit us!

Today, Michael and I walked along the beach—as we always do in the morning—and the storm from last week still seems to be messing with what comes up on the beach. For a week the sea was so high that our morning walks had to be to Campbell park (which is no real hardship) to throw balls to Perry in the sunrise across the soccer fields. Now the beach has returned, and it’s changing more than usual. At first there was the ordinary post-storm assortment of sticks and shells and weird human detritus (a belt, a shoe, a cooler bag). Yesterday, it was scrubbed clean of everything and the wide beach was just dark grey sugar sand. This morning there are sticks again, little ones, and, at the foot of our street, dozens and dozens of magnificent little swirled shells in party colors. Some of them still had their occupants inside, soft and yet somehow irritable when we picked them up to turn them over. Those go back in the sea. But dozens of others were too beautiful to let the sea take back, so Michael and I ignored the beautiful light coming over the hills, ignored the glassy sea, and looked at our feet at the shells. I felt like Naomi in a candy store. I have been wanting a good shell day so that I could find shells to bring to the US when I’m there, to give a piece of New Zealand to the people I visit. And I found my dreams answered, washed up on the shore at the foot of our street.

Ok, back to book writing. I hope that spring is coming where you are. Here we’ve had a return to summer, although the change in clocks means that we don’t get our post-dinner sunset walk—the sun sets during dinner. Other than that one inconvenience, and the astonishingly busy April which is coming, life is a swirl of shells and sand.

Puppies and children

The seasons are changing here and our clocks have changed, as yours have, and our times are now less convenient than they were before. Your weather warms up and emails talk about the flowers blooming, and ours gets colder and shop windows are filled with boots and sweaters. Those of you in the north are somehow farther away than you have been, for reasons I don’t fully understand. Would this be homesickness or just jealousy that your weather is warming up while our tiny summer is ending?

Our friend Rob got here Saturday morning, and will stay with us for at least a month and maybe longer. Rob is our oldest friend, knew us while we were in college, was in our wedding. There is something remarkable about having our past here with us in some way. We tell stories about what we thought our lives would be like when we were 21, remember when we took things both way more and also way less seriously. We have a shared shorthand that is utterly familiar here in this foreign land. As we’ve hung pictures on the wall and seen our parents and our kids as babies all looking at us again, we are finding our history even as we face our life here with everything new all around us.

Here, to bring good cheer to one and all, are pictures of children and puppies. There isn’t anything better than that, no matter what the season, no matter what the hemisphere, and no matter how far away the children and puppies happen to be.

Accent check

Patsy's comments make me laugh! I'm still working on the whole house decision. It turns out there's quite a crack in the foundation, so there's an engineers report to get. As per my mother's request, here are some straight out videos of the family, often with affected kiwi accents. (Mom says that I shouldn't let the scenery get in the way of the children.) Because of this, these might be extraoridinarily uninteresting for those of you not blood relatives, so watch at your own peril (Nancy, you can watch with Dad and Jamie on a Wednesday night...).


The news here from me is that the summer seems to have (at least briefly) returned. I switched the summer quilt to a winter one and then back again, trying to go with the weather and failing. Our dear friend Rob is coming to stay with us tomorrow (he's on a plane across the Pacific right now), and I'm starting to worry about my trip to the US in a couple of weeks. Fuller reports coming: tomorrow is the first day of soccer for the kids. Any other requests for things you'd like to see or hear about?

Gale force

Summer blew away today, just as I got an email from Dad saying that spring has arrived in Augusta. The gale that blew our summer away must have deposited it on the other side of the world. Here's a little video of a blowy cold rainy day, a day when the wind pulls the door out of your hand and everyone goes in and out of the house laughing because of the sheer energy of it. I'm wrapped in a blanked ("rugged up" as they say here) with chilly hands. Soon there'll be blogs bemoaning the fact that New Zealanders don't believe in central heating. But for today, enjoy the wind--I certainly have.

And, while we're talking about forces that blow through you, here are pictures of the children with Trish and Keith's brand new puppy, Sancho. I think that puppy (and his brother, who belongs to M and G) has blown through quite a few hearts already...

Paekakariki perfect

I’m beginning this blog on the train home, Michael still in a meeting in Wellington. The sea was rough this morning and it has been a grey and blustery day in town, which tells me nothing about the weather the kids experienced at home. The Porirua harbour, which I’m passing now, is rumpled but not choppy. The clouds are more white than grey here, big cotton candy pillows. Sometimes there are breaks in the clouds—impossible to see from the ground except for the light streaming down to the sea or hills. The hills hold and shape the weather, so that as I move north from town, the clouds are captured and held back, giving me weather that trends to sunny rather than stormy. In Wellington, from my office window high on the 11^th floor (this is a high building for Wellington standards), I watched the rain move in horizontal sheets, the wind roaring through the rain in the same waves it runs through the grasses.

I love Wellington. It’s a spirited and cosmopolitan city, a city that was washed in hot water and got concentrated into a thickly-knit, almost impossibly small size. The streets are teeming with people and coffee shops and cafes, with music and art and lovely little buildings. I am struck by the generosity of the city, by the fact, for example, that nearly every building has a deep awning so that as I walk through the city in the rain, I hardly get wet at all. This is important because it is too windy a city for umbrellas. I saw hundreds and hundreds of people as I walked down the hill in the rain this afternoon and only about a dozen umbrellas.

On this train home, though, I look forward to leaving behind the lovely city and moving towards the little village where we happen to live. Michael and I came to Paekakariki almost by mistake. Trish and Keith lived here, and we didn’t know how to figure out where else to live, knew we wanted to at least try life in a little beach town rather than a city, and so we sort of happened into it. This is not the way I tend to make these decisions [Big blue pukekos just out the window just then, glorious creatures that make me laugh out loud.] I tend to research and study and plan; I’m not a person who just happens to move to this or that place. And I worried that I would thus find I had made a terrible mistake. I waited on pins and needles for the first couple of weeks we were here (and the last several months in DC). Now, though, as I pass through the other quaint villages up the coast on the train, I become more and more certain that Paekakariki is the village for us.

It is not a fancy place, no chic village by the sea. It’s filled with beach cottages that were thrown together to be a roof and walls to sleep or spend unfortunate rainy days in while on holiday. And now it’s a magical place. As I walked home with the family of one of Aidan’s friends last week, I asked the mom about why she had come to Paekakariki and why she stayed there. She laughed, explaining that she was British, and that she had found that Paekakariki was like “A wee English country village in the 1950s.” Laughing, I told her we often tell people we’ve moved to the 1950s. Only, we decided together, much more diverse and liberal than anyplace got in the 1950s—anywhere. Here, there are houses that cost $180,000 and houses that cost a million. Here the ramshackle houses look curious, all popping their heads up with dormers and additions to look at the sea. And the people seem unusually curious, too. The children of lesbian musicians play with the children of house builders and the children of scientists. And at salsa night in the village, they all dance on the same postage-stamp sized dance floor.

Some of the charm certainly is that it is a tiny place. I think about the parking lot at the Vienna metro station—thousands and thousands of cars, and if you didn’t get there before 7am, all the spaces were taken. The Paekakariki train station holds about 100 cars, and I haven’t seen it ever full. Most of the people who take the train walk home; the village isn’t that big. So in the mornings you’ll see people in all sorts of outfits—students in uniforms, men carrying briefcases, surfers with dreadlocks and pants seven sizes too big—all meandering (or sometimes rushing) to catch the train to town.

Some of the charm, though, is that it’s a broad place. There’s class diversity here, job diversity, racial diversity. There is a higher than expected population of PhDs and of full-time artists. The two tiny town halls and the school gym offer something to do every day: yoga one day, tai chi another, salsa lessons another, and drumming or felting or painting lessons at other times. The café serves fantastic coffee; the veggie shop sells organic everything, and the dairy (=small general store) has a better selection of Indian ingredients than nearly any supermarket in Augusta GA. Karla at the brand new salon cut my hair brilliantly and then charged roughly half what my DC stylist charged—to cut my hair plus Naomi’s. The other retail venues in town are split evenly—two bookstores and two art galleries.

Off the train this evening, the sky now clear, I walked along the high path of the beach at a raging full tide. Dozens of surfers bobbed like black water birds in the rough sea. The stiff wind blew clouds of mist off of each wave crest. I passed two old women walking their dogs—one a puppy and one an ancient, tottering 16 year old. We stopped and chatted about the dogs while the puppy slobbered all over me and the old one looked haughty and disinterested. I came home to Naomi and Aidan playing in the yard, Perry frisky after a rainy morning without a run and a day alone in the house. I walked into a house cleaned today by the spectacular R, who managed to make things look almost neat even though the odds (and the piles) were stacked so high against her. I’m sure this isn’t a perfect village, sure that there are things I won’t like about living here. So far, though, other than take-out food, this village has everything I’ve wanted. I suppose I’ll trade the occasional effortless dinner for life in a diverse and funky village with the ease and safety of the fictional 1950s. There probably wasn’t much good takeout then, either.

(The pictures are the best ones I could find of the whole village. The high high one is taken from the scenic overlook on Paekakariki Hill Road, and the other one is from the house on the hill we're thinking about buying...)

Music to my ears

This week I took the train to town alone, and felt finally ready to go on automatic pilot and walk from the train station to my office with my i-pod playing. I put the earbuds in my ears and stepped out of the station, and two things happened: I was blasted by full-on, chillier than expected Wellington wind, and I heard the St. John Choir singing “What wondrous love is this” close in my ears. As I moved along with the thick crowd heading up the hill, I heard the blended voices of people I love—my father, my Augusta friends. I saw Jamie’s arms powering the choir, could almost see the look on her face as the tenors started smooth like honey and built to a rich chocolate crescendo. I wondered whether this was the first time the St. John Choir had sung in anyone’s ears in Wellington.

Having those voices with me as I walked up the hill to Willis Street somehow changed my whole sense of the place. Now it was my father walking beside me, Jamie conducting, familiar faces all around. I crossed one city street and then another and then another, finally realising that I hadn’t been killed crossing any of them, even though I’d just been going on reflex. My reflex is now to look right first and then left. That’s what I do automatically after just three months in this country where people drive on the wrong side of the road.

And somehow the combination of St. John in my ears and Wellington in my eyes made me both happy and homesick at the same time. Homesick comes in these weird waves and I never know what will set it off—an email from my dad, a shop window advertising both the coming of Easter and the coming of fall, the ring on a phone when I call the US. Music, which I’ve now begun to listen to outside my house, close in my ears as I move through the landscape, brings up a whole different set of associations. There are songs I associate with wandering around Sydney that make me miss Australia. There are songs I associate with particular seasons which make me feel quite strongly the other-side-of-the-world-ness of my experience here. And of course there are songs I associate with walking across the Calvert Street bridge in DC, or Harvard Yard in Cambridge. Tonight on the train trip home, music from Wicked shuffles up. I'm back at the first time I heard a song from Wicked—in an IET faculty meeting on a hot August day. I hear Naomi practising and practising in the living room at Belmont Road. I can almost feel the wet of a cold Manhattan fall night when Michael and I saw it on Broadway while Trish and Keith watched the kids in DC.

Music brings me closer to the things I’ve left behind, and also magnifies the differences between what I have here and what I had there. I’ll walk through a hardware store and hear Air Supply singing songs I sang in middle school; I’ll walk down the street and hear the Dixie Chicks bemoaning the current US policy situation blaring from a coffee shop. I’m home and away at the same time, and I feel my dual nature. And I’m also aware that now my music is filled with these images, that when I hear James Taylor or the Indigo Girls, located so firmly in US culture, they also describe some of my NZ experience, also touch on these hills, this sea, this sky. The familiar and the strange mixing together, the familiar becoming strange, the strange becoming familiar. The train ride each Wellington day is imbued with my music; tonight a mournful Mary Chapen Carpenter is singing “10,000 miles” as I catch my first sight of Kapiti, mysteriously draped in cloud in an otherwise blue sky. “Fare thee well/ My own true love / Farewell for a while / I’m going away /But I’ll be back / Though I go 10,000 miles…” Beautiful and bittersweet, like so many things for me on this side of the world.

Sore

Sunday night now, and we're back from a walk up the beach to meet Trish and Keith's new butterball of a puppy, who had the children moaning in delight. I'm sitting in the study, the desk cleared off just enough for this little laptop, papers and knick-knacks on every surface, boxes pushing close at the back of my chair. Things are, believe it or not, vastly improved.

Michael and I have been working all weekend to unpack, to put away, to return furniture to the lovely people who leant it to us in the first place. We tumble into our beautiful new bed after midnight each night, sore and exhausted, and we fall asleep either pondering the ache of muscles we didn't know we had or fretting over the mountains of work yet to come. But then we wake up in the morning, walk the dog along the early morning beach, and feel like everything is possible after all.

We're about 80% unpacked, I think, with most of the unpacked stuff put away and a skim coat of homeless items cluttering every surface. Normally neat Naomi's room is in the worst shape by far, but then she's had the most fun this weekend--a sleepover and then a playdate and then to the beach with a friend on Saturday, and then horseback riding all day today. No wonder her room looks so terrible.

While Michael and our spectacular friend P returned all the furniture today (in part because he's a Brit and drives on the right side of the road and thus is less nervous about the truck) and Naomi combed manes, Aidan and I stayed and unpacked all day at home. We worked in Aidan’s room a long time, me doing what he called “helping him,” which basically meant I did the putting-things-away part, and he did the playing-with-toys-he-hasn’t-seen-in-three-months part. I knew that this might make me really grumpy (why am I doing all the work in that room, too, when I also do all the work in the rest of the house), but I loved it. I had a perch from which to observe Aidan in his thinking and playing; I could hear him interact with the action figures, narrate the lego structure he was inventing. And from time to time, I would try to show him about organization (“So every time you’re done with playing with the ball, it goes in this bin marked ‘sports.’”) and he would get thrilled about it and start piling things in bins and then decide that these two action figures couldn’t be so close to each other in the bin because they were enemies and they needed some friends to be with them and where were those friends or maybe they should just try being on this boat—and then he was off again, playing while I worked.

It is mostly a joy to see our things. As the minimal furniture and kitchen equipment moved out and the hundreds of boxes moved in, I became excruciatingly aware of how much stuff we have accumulated. I think of us as people who aren’t that acquisitive, but my sore shoulders and back will tell you otherwise. And each of these precious things holds a memory or helps bake a cake or is so soft and cuddly to wear. It’s horrifying that I have so much, and, in some ways, lovely to have it.

The pictures today are of the house in various states of disarray. And, if you need soothing the way we need soothing after looking at so much chaos, there's a dawn picture of Perry on the beach this morning. And tonight, walking back from cuddling the astonishingly-glorious new puppy, we walked hand in hand down the star-lit beach, four of us looking at the sky, each of us interacting with it in our own way. Aidan wanted to know what would happen if you poured a glass of water on a star (would it go out? what if it were in a really big glass and was ice cold?), Naomi trying to grasp the concept of a light year, and me just holding their hands and basking in the wonder of it all: me, on a perfect starry night on a beach in New Zealand.

Boxed out

We have reached the over-saturation point, that moment when the house gets so full it starts spewing American coins and sheets and dishes out on to the lawn. We are drowning in boxes. We have discovered that this is a tiny, postage stamp of a house. We are wishing the container had done a few more rounds of the globe so that we could have added on to the house in the meantime. Tonight we were all so grouchy that everyone sat on the mattress on the floor in my bedroom (new bed arrives Saturday) and yelled at each other.

I think/hope that tonight is the lowest point.

And, before you feel sorry for us, let me say that the sun has been shining like mad, that the breeze moves through this postage stamp cottage so beautifully, that the almost-full moon (our third) woke me up last night convinced that it was daytime. And that tonight we went to our first salsa lessons in the little memorial hall with matai wood floors and windows that open to the sea. And that just before bed I finally found the box with Aidan's pjs AND our old pillows--nirvana!

The best part has been unpacking the pictures. Floods of memories in each bubble-wrapped package. The worst part has been unpacking the crap we never should have packed in the first place, thinking about the carbon load of the toaster oven I thought we'd thrown out before we left. The strangest item: two iced cupcakes, now so deeply spotted with black mould that Aidan thought they were chocolate chips. I remember being sad when those were packed; they were such good cupcakes. The thing I was happiest to see: the kitchen aid, which I used today to make oatmeal honey bread. The biggest frustration: the labelling the movers used on the boxes. We have dozens of boxes marked "ornaments" which tends to mean books, and dozens more marked "books" which can be a compilation of things from books to toilet paper. I shudder to think what is in the boxes they marked "misc".

The pictures tonight are all from yesterday when I felt cheerful enough to take pictures. Today the progress has been too slow and I've been too grumpy (the picture of me smiling really dates things). Tomorrow will be better, I'm sure, because the pile, while huge, is shrinking.

I hope that wherever you happen to be, there is quiet and serenity, and not a single box in sight.

Pictures from yesterday

Hello all. I'm a weary and somewhat sore woman, but the house is coming together. A day of unpacking and unpacking and unpacking. Sometimes boxes lead to, "Oh! I've missed this SO much!" and sometimes to "We brought THIS all the way around the world?!" But we ate at our own table, sitting on our own chairs, and it's lovely to be surrounded by things we love. We've found that the house seems to have gotten significantly smaller in these last 30 hours, and while putting away the boxes is a help, it doesn't fix the whole issue. Perhaps the only bad news is that almost nothing has broken so far--which means that we keep having to put the things away into closets that don't exist here. That's a challenge.

Still, to sit at our table and drink local New Zealand wine from the Swedish water glasses Dad and Jamie gave us for our wedding--it's hard to imagine that it gets much better than that.

Pictures: Michael sweeping up after our friends cleared out the house; the full moving truck; the filling house; the empty moving truck. Tomorrow: pics from a much improved house.

Quick update

For those of you who check the blog regularly (like Dad and Robyn and Patsy), here's the quick update from the end of the moving day. While there's still more to complain about our hated moving company, things seem to have arrived in quite good shape. We have rooms piled with boxes that aren't mouldy or vermin-filled or crushed flat. The kids are asleep on their own beds for the first time in three months. I'm typing from my own desk, sitting in my own chair, in a room filled with my own books (still boxed up, but here at last). There will be pictures to follow tomorrow, but for those of you who awake hours before it's day here, you should just know that all is well in a box-filled cottage by the sea.

Moving day. Again.

This might be the slowest move in modern history. Three months ago exactly, there was packing up at our house, which was, itself, at the end of a long stream of moving activities which culminated in the closing of a container and the boarding of an airplane. It’s hard to believe, from this perch on the 7:48 train, looking out over rocky shore and pounding waves, with sunrise-apricot clouds over stormy grey sea, that three months ago I lived in a city, and the sea was something I saw on holidays.

Last night was a magical example of why we moved. Michael and I caught a slightly early train home because we were needing to cook dinner for a crowd. P and J were coming over with two “English chums” (P and J are English) in NZ for holiday. Michael and I hoofed it down Willis Street, Michael cracking jokes about the futility of my speed for a train we’d never catch. And then, breathless, we caught our train (but not early enough to snag seats for the first leg) and talked about our days while we moved out of the city, past the harbour with the mountains in the background, through the long tunnels, and then past the hills and the farmland (yesterday noticed that some of the farmed animals are deer—always a surprise) and to the coast. We walked up Sand Track from the train, and then down to the beach to walk along the sand to our street. I took off sandals and splashed in the Tasman, watched children playing in the surf, and looked for shells in the block we spent on the sand. Then up to relieve the babysitter and cook dinner for the crew. Dinner was on the front deck, talking with activists and environmentalists from the UK (P and J included). We like P and J more each time we see them (which is often) and loved the stories of their friends, the tales from England and from travelling through the South Island.

When we had finished our cookies and tea in the near-dark, Keith showed up for the Little Move (leg number three in the four part moving process). The Brits all stayed to help as we moved every bit of borrowed furniture into the garage, for transport in stages back to the rightful owners. Keith had come Sunday and measured and planned, and he packed the garage efficiently so that it could be joined by all the mass of stuff coming today. And we moved borrowed furniture with new friends and visitors, and we laughed and turned our little house into an empty shell again, the small bits of newly purchased furniture scattered vaguely through rooms.

And now I’m off to work, leaving Michael at home to coordinate the move, to decide where rugs get unrolled, to have the first thrill of seeing the furniture arrive (now that I’ve typed this sentence, I’m sorely tempted to get off at Porirua and go back home again!). I’ll wait anxiously at work and finally head home to see what’s been done, and then spend the rest of the week unpacking.

We’re nervous about how things are going to go with this move, worried about whether our furniture will have made it through the voyage safely, concerned that everything will look terrible in this little cottage, that things will be broken and that our miserable moving company will be as bad about insurance as they were about every other piece of the process (train full now, everyone from Plimmerton standing). And we also spend a whole lot less time worrying than we ever have before, so this fretting feeling is uncommon for us here.

This weekend, we have fallen even more deeply in love with our live here in this village. On Friday, I stayed home and wrote during the day, and then headed to pick up the kids from school. Naomi brought a friend home, and we all went into the village centre (about 15 minute walk, Aidan speed). Aidan got his hair cut at the newly-opened village salon, and we walked home on the sand, the girls hoisting their bikes down the steps and over the rocks onto the beach, Aidan and I being airplanes in the wind. We played with a tennis ball one of the girls found in the rocks, and the girls splashed through the shallows, spraying themselves from head to toe with little bits of sand. I realised, running along the beach making zooming noises with Aidan, that I had travelled all the way to New Zealand to learn to be a 6 year-old. Dinner was going to be late, and I didn’t care. Naomi and her friend were filthy and I didn’t care. The house was a mess and—guess what—I didn’t care. I just wanted to play with the children on the long grey beach in the hot sun.

Saturday we went into Wellington (and took the videos in the previous blog). We wondered what it would be like to have the option of living either in a lovely clean, safe city OR living 40 minutes outside of it on the ocean in the US. We couldn’t even imagine. Sunday we did errands and then went to the beach. I napped on the sand while Aidan built sand castles (really, whole sand cities) and Naomi and Michael boogie-boarded. Then, after Michael and I swam together, home to shower and change and head to St. Peter’s Hall, the tiny little hall in town, Trish and Keith had told us about a small and spectacular salsa band playing that night. There were lessons beforehand for those of us who know nothing and then the band began. The children raced on and off the dance floor, in and out of the building. The music was spectacular—really talented Cuban and Kiwi musicians. There were couples our age and 40 years older, straight couples, lesbian couples, good dancers and bad. We danced for a couple of hours and then came home through the cool night to watch the moon, bright enough to block out part of the Milky Way.

And now I’m here at work, my view of the hill and the harbour, the window open to the hot sun and city noises, and my day stretching ahead of me (the container has arrived and is being unpacked as I type—there’ll be pictures on this blog tonight). I miss my family and my friends at home so deeply that I feel it in my toes, a deep, aching longing. And life here is so beautiful and filled with so many joys that it’s hard to believe I actually get to live it each day. Another day in paradise.

Bungee jumping and more!

Today we went into Wellington, where we had a spectacular time. It's the most lovely little city, sparkling harbour, bustling people; it's busy and full and scaled beautifully, and everywhere you look you see water and hills and other magnificent things. Here are pictures: one of a magical walk we took last weekend with Paul--up the beach to some tidal pools where the rocks were really nurseries for mussels and other shelled creatures. There's a moonrise from last night--our third (almost) full moon in New Zealand. The moon always makes me think of moving here, and here's the last moon without our things in the house! Then there's a picture of Naomi and Aidan at Wellington Harbour today and, with luck, a video of Aidan and Naomi jumping where you don't even have to turn the screen!

Coffeehouses of challenge and support: the leader as barista

I was thinking at work this week about what it takes to bring my full self to this job. I’m reading educational research articles—interesting and useful articles which are helping me see new perspectives, clarify my old perspectives, etc. And I keep nodding off. In my quiet office in this quiet floor, with only the door which leads to the toilets making much noise, I am heavy-lidded and dozy.

I do my best reading in a coffee shop, where I can nestle in with a lovely flat white decaf (ah, the NZ coffee is nearly as beautiful as the scenery) and the energy of the noise around me keeps me focused and awake simultaneously. That’s a good combination.

I wonder what it is about my context that keeps me present or not to my reading. It’s not like the coffee is caffeinated and I’m getting a jolt from it. It’s not like the articles get more interesting as they ride in my bag to the shop. And yet I’m more interested in them, can focus better, learn more. The context changes my interaction with the material.

Not every coffee shop will do, though, and I haven’t found the perfect place yet (although I have one that I’m feeling pretty good about). Too much music or conversation and the paper in front of me becomes unintelligible, and I focus on my headache or the tete-a-tete of the couple sitting next to me.

Today I’ve been thinking about the leadership balance beam, the coffee shop organisation. When we’re too comfortable, we fall asleep. We do our jobs in a daze, mind elsewhere, learning little and not particularly noticing the lack of learning. Sometimes this is called “comfortable”, sometimes this is called “boring”; it’s all a matter of how you see it, really. Too much discomfort and again, we can’t focus. In the coffee shop this is “noise” but there are lots of noises in our organisational lives that would lead to the same outcomes. With too much noise, there’s no space for learning.

And, just to add insult to injury, different coffee shops work for different people. My friend Paul doesn’t like any noise around him while he’s reading; Michael listens to music at all times. If we think of leaders as contributing to organisational culture the way baristas contribute to coffeehouses, how do they get the mix right for everyone? And what about the fact that most leaders don’t even think much about the culture they’re trying to create? They’re just worried about the way the organisation works and hoping to make it work better. But without the right blend of challenge and support, people are unlikely to get into a state that’s anything like flow. How could I, as a researcher, writer, leadership developer, help leaders see this piece of their job? How do leaders come to understand their influence on culture?

Organisations are both more than the sum of their parts and also somehow less. In our Kenning South meetings over the weekend, we talked about organisational structure, leadership, what systems we want to put in place to help us think better together. And we worried about which systems would actually get in the way, break down our practice, inhibit our thinking. In an organisation 50 years old like NZCER, those old systems are harder to break out of—harder, even, to even see. And in a really old organisation, like Harvard, for example, how do you ever make change happen.

Coffee shops are quick-moving and responsive to the clients. This music doesn’t work so we change the CD, this cake doesn’t sell so we bring in chocolate biscuits. People like coffee stronger or hotter or with caramel, so those things get changed, too. In organisations, do people really know what they want? For people who spend lots of their time alone with a computer, like me, what is it that the organisation can add to my understanding? How is it that we can think bigger things together than we think alone? And how does a leader create the culture to do this without being so market responsive that there’s no real leadership at all.

I’m puzzling over what I want to be in this next phase in my life, which work most interests me, and how I might get into that work. Somehow there’s an answer to this in a coffee shop near me.