It’s a crystalline day here. Something astonishing happens when the southerlies blow through. The wind howls and gets icy cold—was close to freezing last night, with snow on the far mountains of the South Island. But when the southerly blows through, the air has a kind of sparkle to it that a New England fa
ll day can only dream about. The air crackles with the freshness of Antarctica. Each of my cells feels more alive.
That’s a welcome treat because it has been an exhausting week—with two more ahead that make me need the sparkles in this air. The house we currently live in is on the market—for sale sign up in front (to see the website, click here ). House we intend to move into is in its coming apart phase. This is disorienting to be fixing one house so that it is utterly beautiful and can be sold and ruining the other so that it can be ours. Hmmm. (There are piles of good metaphors here heaped amidst the wallboard piled in the lounge.) We have just elected the first gay or lesbian mayor in New Zealand to our district. We have had our new friend JL come and go. And we have had news that our oldest friend Rob (who came and went) is coming back to us. We are counting down the days until his arrival in the second week of November.
But the piece I want to talk about isn’t friends or houses or work. It’s family. This has been a week where the importance of family is close at hand and the family itself has seemed very far away. Michael’s grandfather died this week. He was 95 and had been in the hospital ailing for many weeks, so his death was neither a surprise nor particularly tragic. He lived a good long life and now his body was too old to m
ake it anymore. Michael’s sister sat next to him as he took his last breath in his sleep, after an afternoon chatting with the granddaughter who loved him so much. May we all have a death so sweet. Still, it’s time to gather to mourn and celebrate the life of a good man, and we live on the other side of the world from that gathering. Michael and I went back and forth about whether he should go to the funeral, and ultimately a variety of factors made not going feel like the right decision. Our love for Charles Horowitz, 89 years older than Aidan James who has exactly his eyes, expands through all these miles.
So, for Poppy wherever he might be on the day before his funeral, an Aidan story.
At the Kapa Haka on Saturday, Aidan was a very small, very blonde audience member. He had a hard time seeing in the tangle of large adults. It was crowded and loud—with audience members occasionally breaking into fierce hakas of their own. At one point, we were in the middle of one, the teenagers around us yelling with bulging eyes and fluttering hands. By the time we had been there an hour, Aidan had had enough. He looked at me with tears in his eyes and insisted that we leave. I took his hand, leading him outside while the rest of our crowd stayed and watched the performance. Aidan and I threaded our way past proud parents and grandparents watching, past clumps of teenagers in school uniforms practicing, and out into the chilly afternoon. We crossed the street to sit in a rose garden and work it through.
I tried to get a sense of what was going on for him. He hated it. I wanted to know what he hated. Everything. I looked for what he wanted to happen next. He wanted us all to get into the car and go home (remember that we were there with JL from Chicago and MG and her daughter—all of whom were having quite a good time). He was firm. He hated it, wanted to go home, would never want anything else. I listened to what he
was saying, tried to draw out things I might find unlikable if I were Aidan. Did he find the yelling frightening? Yes. Did he feel strange with all the different language around us? Yes. Did he find the chords and tunes foreign and confusing? Yes. We talked about how people are often afraid of the unfamiliar, how really normal and fine that was. Then I tried to build a bridge to what he might like. Did he find the costumes beautiful? No. Did he find it glorious that there were little kids there who were singing and dancing so well? No. Did he appreciate the generations of people doing this through the ages and connecting to their ancestors (Ok, so this was a long shot)? No he did not. He hated it all, would never like it, could we leave right now?
So then I appealed to his sense of fairness. I didn’t want to leave, the others didn’t want to leave. How long would he stay to be a good member of the group? 20 seconds. I told him I wanted to stay an hour longer, maybe more. His 20 seconds didn’t seem to be meeting me far enough along. Ok, he budged--30 seconds.
What would it take for him to be ok in that space? Nothing. He’d never be ok. He couldn’t change his mind. So, because the poor thing has a mother with a doctorate in changes in minds, this point was not going to go without a challenge. In the rose garden, Aidan got an introduction to constructivism and the way we create our own reality (for which others have actually paid money, and of which he didn’t seem quite so appreciative). And we began to chip away at his resolve. We talked about the benefits of controlling your own reactions to things. He allowed that perhaps it would be better if he hated it less (although he didn’t see that as a possibility still). We slowly crafted a plan. His job was to look for things he liked in the room—we wouldn’t leave until he had found at least 10 things. And since I wanted to stay an hour and he wanted to go in 20 seconds, we agreed that 25 minutes would be a fair amount of time to stay. He didn’t like that he couldn’t see anything, but felt like a baby when I lifted him up. A ride on my back seemed like a less obtrusive perch. We made a deal and walked hand in hand from our rose garden back into the crowded auditorium.
As we walked in, he saw the folks on the stage, doing their thing. “I love their costumes, Mommy,” he told me smiling. “That’s one,” I said. We met up with the other group and I boosted him onto my back. “I love the way their faces are painted,” he told me. Two. I told him I loved the way the smallest children—younger than Aidan—were so into it with their faces and their bodies. He loved that too. Three. He squirmed off my back to get at a little pile of reeds that had fallen off of the costume of one of the kids. He held the reed in his hand and we whispered about how it was made and how cool it was. “I’m holding something that was just in the performance, something everyone here has seen!” he whispered excitedly. Four. He liked the facial expressions, the singing, the guitar playing. Ten minutes into our timed experiment, he turned to me and said, with delight, “Mommy, y
ou were right! I can love it here! We can stay the whole hour if you want!” (Of course, by that time everyone else was just about ready to go, so we stayed a few more minutes and we were out of there.) That night at dinner, as we went around the table to talk about things we were grateful for, Aidan said, “I’m grateful for the Kapa Haka, and that I learned how to change my mind.”
Tonight we walked to the new house with MG and her daughter (who is spending the night). We stood in the ruins of the kitchen and talked about hope and healing and building and growing. At dinner we lit the candles and sang the blessings and thought about Poppy and hope and healing and building and growing—and dying. We are clothed in blessings, bathed in the crystal air and the sun setting over the South Island. And as good as all of that is a little boy who has learnt to love a thing he was afraid of, and to change his mind.
***************
ll day can only dream about. The air crackles with the freshness of Antarctica. Each of my cells feels more alive.That’s a welcome treat because it has been an exhausting week—with two more ahead that make me need the sparkles in this air. The house we currently live in is on the market—for sale sign up in front (to see the website, click here ). House we intend to move into is in its coming apart phase. This is disorienting to be fixing one house so that it is utterly beautiful and can be sold and ruining the other so that it can be ours. Hmmm. (There are piles of good metaphors here heaped amidst the wallboard piled in the lounge.) We have just elected the first gay or lesbian mayor in New Zealand to our district. We have had our new friend JL come and go. And we have had news that our oldest friend Rob (who came and went) is coming back to us. We are counting down the days until his arrival in the second week of November.
But the piece I want to talk about isn’t friends or houses or work. It’s family. This has been a week where the importance of family is close at hand and the family itself has seemed very far away. Michael’s grandfather died this week. He was 95 and had been in the hospital ailing for many weeks, so his death was neither a surprise nor particularly tragic. He lived a good long life and now his body was too old to m
ake it anymore. Michael’s sister sat next to him as he took his last breath in his sleep, after an afternoon chatting with the granddaughter who loved him so much. May we all have a death so sweet. Still, it’s time to gather to mourn and celebrate the life of a good man, and we live on the other side of the world from that gathering. Michael and I went back and forth about whether he should go to the funeral, and ultimately a variety of factors made not going feel like the right decision. Our love for Charles Horowitz, 89 years older than Aidan James who has exactly his eyes, expands through all these miles.So, for Poppy wherever he might be on the day before his funeral, an Aidan story.
At the Kapa Haka on Saturday, Aidan was a very small, very blonde audience member. He had a hard time seeing in the tangle of large adults. It was crowded and loud—with audience members occasionally breaking into fierce hakas of their own. At one point, we were in the middle of one, the teenagers around us yelling with bulging eyes and fluttering hands. By the time we had been there an hour, Aidan had had enough. He looked at me with tears in his eyes and insisted that we leave. I took his hand, leading him outside while the rest of our crowd stayed and watched the performance. Aidan and I threaded our way past proud parents and grandparents watching, past clumps of teenagers in school uniforms practicing, and out into the chilly afternoon. We crossed the street to sit in a rose garden and work it through.
I tried to get a sense of what was going on for him. He hated it. I wanted to know what he hated. Everything. I looked for what he wanted to happen next. He wanted us all to get into the car and go home (remember that we were there with JL from Chicago and MG and her daughter—all of whom were having quite a good time). He was firm. He hated it, wanted to go home, would never want anything else. I listened to what he
was saying, tried to draw out things I might find unlikable if I were Aidan. Did he find the yelling frightening? Yes. Did he feel strange with all the different language around us? Yes. Did he find the chords and tunes foreign and confusing? Yes. We talked about how people are often afraid of the unfamiliar, how really normal and fine that was. Then I tried to build a bridge to what he might like. Did he find the costumes beautiful? No. Did he find it glorious that there were little kids there who were singing and dancing so well? No. Did he appreciate the generations of people doing this through the ages and connecting to their ancestors (Ok, so this was a long shot)? No he did not. He hated it all, would never like it, could we leave right now?So then I appealed to his sense of fairness. I didn’t want to leave, the others didn’t want to leave. How long would he stay to be a good member of the group? 20 seconds. I told him I wanted to stay an hour longer, maybe more. His 20 seconds didn’t seem to be meeting me far enough along. Ok, he budged--30 seconds.
What would it take for him to be ok in that space? Nothing. He’d never be ok. He couldn’t change his mind. So, because the poor thing has a mother with a doctorate in changes in minds, this point was not going to go without a challenge. In the rose garden, Aidan got an introduction to constructivism and the way we create our own reality (for which others have actually paid money, and of which he didn’t seem quite so appreciative). And we began to chip away at his resolve. We talked about the benefits of controlling your own reactions to things. He allowed that perhaps it would be better if he hated it less (although he didn’t see that as a possibility still). We slowly crafted a plan. His job was to look for things he liked in the room—we wouldn’t leave until he had found at least 10 things. And since I wanted to stay an hour and he wanted to go in 20 seconds, we agreed that 25 minutes would be a fair amount of time to stay. He didn’t like that he couldn’t see anything, but felt like a baby when I lifted him up. A ride on my back seemed like a less obtrusive perch. We made a deal and walked hand in hand from our rose garden back into the crowded auditorium.
As we walked in, he saw the folks on the stage, doing their thing. “I love their costumes, Mommy,” he told me smiling. “That’s one,” I said. We met up with the other group and I boosted him onto my back. “I love the way their faces are painted,” he told me. Two. I told him I loved the way the smallest children—younger than Aidan—were so into it with their faces and their bodies. He loved that too. Three. He squirmed off my back to get at a little pile of reeds that had fallen off of the costume of one of the kids. He held the reed in his hand and we whispered about how it was made and how cool it was. “I’m holding something that was just in the performance, something everyone here has seen!” he whispered excitedly. Four. He liked the facial expressions, the singing, the guitar playing. Ten minutes into our timed experiment, he turned to me and said, with delight, “Mommy, y
ou were right! I can love it here! We can stay the whole hour if you want!” (Of course, by that time everyone else was just about ready to go, so we stayed a few more minutes and we were out of there.) That night at dinner, as we went around the table to talk about things we were grateful for, Aidan said, “I’m grateful for the Kapa Haka, and that I learned how to change my mind.”Tonight we walked to the new house with MG and her daughter (who is spending the night). We stood in the ruins of the kitchen and talked about hope and healing and building and growing. At dinner we lit the candles and sang the blessings and thought about Poppy and hope and healing and building and growing—and dying. We are clothed in blessings, bathed in the crystal air and the sun setting over the South Island. And as good as all of that is a little boy who has learnt to love a thing he was afraid of, and to change his mind.
***************
Pictures today:
Rainstorm at sunset over Mana island to the south
The new house in various shades of disarray
The house for sale, blessed by a rainbow
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