a whole new year

The blog has been a quiet space these last weeks, and it’s because I’ve been percolating. And I’ve been sitting on the beach. I’ve gotten fundamentally relaxed about some things and wound up in a knot about others. That’s actually a better record than I might have had before -- I didn't used to ever get fundamentally relaxed. A couple of stories.

First, the week before Christmas I flew up to Auckland to meet with some people there who are doing leadership development. I loved these people and their mission and everything about them. I was totally excited about the chance to work with them. And then they offered me a role in the organisation. It could be part time, and I could do it from Wellington. Those are the beautiful upsides. There is quite a bit of travel—small trips, but still several days at a time away from home. And the pay is seriously bad. Seriously. These are major downsides. I have to say that this combination spun me out. I have spent the last three weeks going in circles and questioning everything. How much do I want to travel? How do I want to spend my time? I work two days a week at NZCER. I want to leave some time for unpaid writing work as I write this book which was due so long ago and write on this blog and maybe even get back to some fiction. But I also really miss teaching and leadership development work, and here there’s a door open right for it. But since time doesn’t expand to fit the available opportunities, something has to go. I have been several weeks alternately lounging on the beach and spinning over that question. I am still spinning on it, amazed that one small job offer for one small job could put everything into question. Life is like that, though. When elements come in or out of focus, they change our relationship to the other things we see in our picture. This element changed my sense of things and left me wondering. Why do I do what I do? Who cares? What is the biggest difference I can make in my life? What brings me the most joy? I am still pondering.

Christmas and New Years were both jewels. On Christmas day my family of five plus my friend Karen and Melissa and Ayla and two of her dear friends piled into our house to fill it with laugher and fantastic food. The chefs cooked (nearly all of the adults have been cooks professionally), the children and I made Christmas Crackers (not the ones you eat but the ones you pull and make a big popping noise and get a toy and joke), and the house was cozy and magnificent. It felt like a postcard family Christmas, with laughter and children and feasting. Only it was a postcard some-other-holiday with our shrimp barbeque and the sound of the sea in the background. I thought about how lonely I was last year at this time and breathed in the difference a year makes. And ahhhhh, the food! (Reread Ode to Rob if you don’t know how lovely the food was!)

On New Years eve, Melissa took us to a party with some friends of hers who live up the street in the village. This is New Years, Kiwi style. There was a barbeque and kids playing on a water slide and climbing trees in this huge section of land. We struck party gold and met some couples who might become friends for us. And then, after the boys went home (Michael, Rob, and Aidan were all tired), Melissa and Naomi and I sat with her guitar in a little circle of people, and we sang songs in the late evening dusk. We watched the stars come out one by one until there were billions, and we sang songs I used to sing with my dad, his guitar in his arms, in the stairwell of the dorm we lived in in NY. And like those times, the circle grew and grew. Children who had been nestled into tents on the hill brought sleeping bags down to lie in the circle. Grownups pulled up chairs. Everyone tried to remember the words as Melissa struggled to read her songbook, candle held high above her. People hummed and laughed and sang the wrong words to the right tune or the wrong tune to the right words. By now it was dark and I couldn’t see any of them, and just felt enveloped in a circle of singers who were including me in their midst. The songs were punctuated by fireworks being set off in nearby houses, and so the stars would get momentary extra sparkle. I breathed in the beginning of the new year in a chilly summer’s evening, the southern cross blazing out of the other, still unknown constellations. Naomi and Melissa and I walked home hand in hand, singing The Circle Game as I thought about the seasons of my life turning.

And the seasons, they go round and round

And the painted ponies go up and down.

We’re captive on the carousel of time.

We can’t return we can only look

Behind from where we came

And go round and round and round

In the circle game.

Looking behind from where we came, things look pretty good here at the beginning of 2008.

(pictures today: the pohutakowa tree, the kiwi symbol of Christmas; a gray but fantastic afternoon during the Christmas holidays; Christmas morning and evening.