Mapped and unmapped

In Sydney, I taught about adult development, I watched the flying foxes at the Botanic Gardens, and I went to the opera. This, as it turns out, is a recipe for a most delightful time, especially when done in what I think is the most wonderful city in the world. This combination had me thinking about the way we live in the world with some of our paths mapped and others unmapped, and what that means for who we are and how we live.

The plane schedule meant that I had a free morning before the meetings and the workshops began. A friend had suggested a particular neighbourhood might be the right one for me to wander through on my way to the harbour and botanic gardens. I glanced at a map on my computer in my hotel room and was surprised by it (I wouldn’t have guessed that I was as close the harbour as I was) and trotted downstairs to pick up a map to take along. It is my destiny, however, to wander around cities blindly (especially when I leave the guide book on the bookshelf in New Zealand)..So of course the two maps the woman offered me didn’t go enough to the left (is that south?)to have any of the neighbourhoods I was wanting. So I set off blind, as I often do, and walked that-a-way.

I wandered through old Sydney neighbourhoods with front porches decked out in iron scrolls and draped with tropical flowers. I had memories of Old San Juan and Charleston in the pastel-painted stucco houses which were interrupted by the shrieking Aussie cockatoos. I wandered, keeping a diagonal track away from my hotel. I wanted to end up in Darling Harbour where I could catch a ferry to the Circular Quay at the Opera House and botanic garden.

I loved the walk. I loved the realness of it, the way I passed real people who lived there and were doing their real work, mothers pushing strollers (or would they say “pushchairs” like they do here?), young people milling about. I loved the excitement of walking to the top of a hill to wonder what was on the other side. Would that be the Harbour? But I was also conscious of losing time, that I had only until my meeting at 2 and that I hadn’t eaten in 18 hours. I needed to get somewhere, which is harder to do when you’re lost. And so I sat with it, content and uncontent in my lostness, thinking of it mostly as an adventure, and only rarely as an error.

Then, finally, I saw Ferry Street, which seemed like a good sign, and I took it, winding down a hill and ending up at Harbour—bliss! Only this wasn’t Darling Harbour at all, no actual ferries came here at all! My heart threatened to sink with disappointment (I love to be lost until I’m ready to be found again, and then sometimes I can begin to hate the whole adventure). But wait, there was the Sydney fisherman’s wharf, and there were tables in the sunshine where you could eat your food and watch the pelicans swimming around the fishing boats. I bought broiled fish, chips, and salad and carried them into the sparkling sunshine. I ate my first Sydney meal (I had skipped dinner the night before and hadn’t yet had breakfast) and felt the worry of lostness melt away with the squawking of the seagulls. This was the life—and I’d never have meant to come here and couldn’t be happier anywhere else. Lost was wonderful.

Then, belly full and at the Harbour now, I set over across parking lots and under highways. My intention was to hug the water and assume that would take me to Darling Harbour, but, on the far side of the highway I found…a map! The map showed me the shortest way, which meant turning my back to the water and climbing a hill, an unintuitive way to skip the wandering fingers of land that jut out into the Harbour. So off I went, pleased to be so well found again. Soon there was Darling Harbour and the ferry stop, and the symmetry and known-ness of time tables and familiar routes. I sat on the ferry, watched the Opera House move into view under the Harbour bridge, and thought about how wonderful it was to be found.

It wasn’t until later that I found out that that little spit of land I skipped, the one the map showed me how to miss, was a fantastic sculpture garden. When I heard about the sculptures dancing in the wind or floating in the water, I cursed the map that showed me the shortcut over the hill. I also know, though, that winding my way around would have left me with less time to wander the Botanic Gardens and perhaps I’d never have seen the cockatoos digging a hole in the ground. There are lessons here about lostness and foundness and shortest ways. Perhaps the best road to walk is the one you’re on, mapped or unmapped. Perhaps we are actually always lost, actually always found.

(pictures today are of me lost and found in Sydney, and of Aidan, well-placed at home)

House beautiful

Just for the record, the house is very nearly finished now. There are un-done pockets--the mantle needs restoration, some of the skirting isn't affixed, the stairwell floor needs to be finished. But mostly, the house is done, as highlighted by the fact that the scaffolding came down on Saturday. And now, instead of living in a construction zone with a beautiful view, I seem to be living in paradise. Shocking.

There is so much to write about here--about my first opera in Sydney last week, my time with the fantastic folks there, and the time I had with myself. There are things to consider as I think about myself as a writer and wonder what writing I should be doing right now. There are preparations for the trip to the US at the end of this week.

And so, when there are so many things to write about, there is nearly no time. I am a commuter this week--with train and plane rides galore--so this silence won't continue for long. And until then, you can look at the view.

The Paekakariki Idol Finals

It's arts week at the Paekakariki school, which means that Aidan had his big day in the sun again--at the Paekakariki Idol finals tonight. Here is his song, in its entirety, for people with DNA connections to me, mostly. Ahh, but I was a proud mum tonight!

My favourite part of the Botanical Gardens

Guess where i am this week...

tribal

It is a dawn flight to Christchurch again, to continue on with a research project I have been doing there. I’m working as a consultant to a project with a Maori tribe, and I have had the most amazing time. I have long had a belief that diversity isn’t something we need to be able to tolerate and learn to live with, but something that we cannot live without. This project has confirmed and reconfirmed that idea with each conversation, as I am able to increasingly think thoughts I have never been able to think before simply because I’m bumping up against people who are different and who think differently than I do.

A moment, though, to wax on about what’s outside my window rather than inside my brain. This is the fifth flight to Christchurch I’ve had in the last twelve days. For every flight, I’ve sat in a window seat that looks out the right side of the plan (F on the way there, A on the way back) to see what I think is the most astonishing plane journey I’ve ever had (I suppose it’s really the percentage of magnificence to airtime that makes this one so special; about 90% of the time you fly along snow covered mountain ranges tumbling to green sea). Each of those flights has been in low cloud, leaving me imagining how beautiful it must be, until today. Today I am looking at impossibly craggy ranges dusted with a powdered sugar of snow from this cold southerly we’ve had over the weekend. The taller ranges are thickly encased in snow, the light and shadow etching the wind trails into the white. On the lightly powdered hills, the warmer north faces are brown while the colder south faces are a bluey white with yellow tips from the rising sun. The thick snow on the top of the tallest hills blunts the craggy sharpness but as the snow falls into the crevices lower down the hills, it highlights the angularity, making spiny fingers pointing towards the valley. Now the Kaikoura peninsula is below me and what I know are some of the richest waters in the world for marine mammals. I have walked on those rocks amongst the seals and swum in this cold water with the dolphins. It is a wondrous land at sea level or way above. In the enclosed valley, there is low mist rising from the braided rivers, puffs of cotton that somehow got trapped in the tangled mess of river and rock. I am breathless.

I think the discoveries I’m making about the world, and about my own thinking, are no less intense and beautiful than the folds of this green and white, brown and blue land. I am here to understand a particular set of strategies, and I have thoughts running through my head about privilege, responsibility, community, membership.

In a bicultural place like New Zealand, where the Crown made a kind of peace with the tribes more than a hundred years ago, how do we live together in ways that are the most honouring of those differences and that let us learn the most we can from them? How do we use our resources in intelligence and money and land and love and relationships to create opportunities for more of that? And which responsibility belongs to which group? Whose job is it to make sure that children succeed in school? Does that belong to the state or to the tribe?

There is something massive about the organisational implications of being a tribe rather than a company. I am just getting my head around what it all means. They have lots of money because the Crown didn’t keep its promise for generations, and then paid a price in the settlement of that claim. But the money doesn’t belong to individuals, but to a people. And it’s not the familiar “shareholder value” that so many companies put up as the ultimate goal. Here the money is sensibly used to invest in the people of the tribe and in their tribeness, their culture, their language, their traditions. One person I spoke with told me that he didn’t want to have a 5 year plan, he wanted to have a generational plan, a multi-generational plan. The tribe had been there for 1000 years, and he thought he probably needed to think of his work as a part of a 1000 year plan. This is why it matters to protect the land and to remember that what happens in the mountains eventually makes its way to the sea—it’s for your grandchildren’s grandchildren. This is why it makes sense to protect a language that is nearly dead, and to try to revive it by getting parents to speak it to their children, to compose waiatas (songs) of joy at the birth of their babies. What is the incentive plan for that? How do you get people to change their individual behaviour like that? They’re working on the hows of it all.

I find that I have become invested in their mission. I believe that the world will be a poorer place if they are not successful, if they cannot save the language and the waiatas and the stories. When I spend time in interviews, my mind swims with the frequent peppering of words that sound so foreign to my ears: the whakapapa, kaupapa Maori, the whole idea of the runanga system. The syllables wander and blend, and I struggle to make meaning out of them, listening for words and patterns to repeat, trying to spell them phonetically in my notes so I can ask my partner later. But surrounded by Pakeha (=white New Zealanders), I miss the music of te reo Maori, miss the mystery of it, miss the way it washes over and through me.

It is in the missing of a language I don’t speak, the thinking of questions I’ve never thought, that I see the great promise of diversity and the great need for us to protect and cherish the many differences we have. I want to help this tribe thrive and succeed not only for their sake (because they deserve it) or out of some kind of sense of responsibility or guilt (because it was white people who got in the way in the first place). I want them to succeed because the world is richer for them, because they have a place in the cultures of the earth and they are the only ones who can fill that place. I do not want to bring a romantic glory to these cultures that are so foreign to me. Rather, I want to notice the way my culture creates me, and I want to be a part of helping others cherish their cultures. We need one another.

This all leads me to wonder about our global tribe and what we’re all doing in the world. What are we all building toward? What is the beautiful thing we’re creating and leaving behind? What is the language we speak to our children that we want our grandchildren to hear? How can we think of all our communities and organisations as a tribe planning to live together on this planet for the next 1000 years?

dating games

Last weekend Karen was finally back in town after a couple of weeks of spectacular island holiday, trekking through jungle and peering into active volcanoes. She came over for dinner and to share pictures and stories, and Melissa came over too, to celebrate Karen’s return. It had been threatening rain all day, and sometimes had delivered on the threat. Michael and I, seeing that even this grey day was the best of the weekend forecast, had spent several hours in the garden, digging the top of the hill away and building the rock walls for the terraces. Karen watched us work for a while, and then retreated into the house to roll on the floor with Perry, smell the fantastic soup made by Rob and left temptingly on the stove, and put together her dinner contribution (which on this day was, er, the whole dinner). Michael and I dug. Karen discovered that she had left the ingredients at home and headed dismally to the grocery store to buy new ones. Michael and I dug. Karen came home, wrestled with the filo dough, told the kids what to chop and break and mix, and put the spanikopita in the oven. Michael and I finally, at long last, finished digging and began to plant. Melissa arrived, her motley dinner contribution cheerfully in hand. Michael and I dragged our weary bodies inside, pulled on clean clothes, and sat down at the dinner table with the full knowledge that we’d be sore for the next three days (and right we were!).

It was lovely sitting in my warm house (fire blazing) and eating fantastic food prepared for me by friends. It was a treat to feel my body bone tired and muscles screaming, and to know that the work I had done would lead to a better look for the back yard and also to salads picked fresh from the garden. I was outrageously blissed out. And it was still in that blissful sleepy sore state that I sat down on one side of Karen with Melissa on the other to check out pictures from the islands. Multiple laptops out and wireless in front of the fire, we three sat on the couch and thought we’d dabble in the internet dating sights briefly before turning to the serious work of holiday pictures. I was about to learn about the perils and pleasures of internet dating in a tiny country. It began like this:

Melissa had met a nice fellow on the local internet dating site, and he had ended up bringing his kids around to play for the day. Somehow they ended up looking at her internet page together, where he discovered that Melissa had just been winked at by a new guy…who happened to be this fellow’s ex-brother in law. Welcome to New Zealand. Karen wanted to see this new fellow (she hadn’t dated the brother-in-law) and asked Melissa to pop up his picture. Ahh, it turned out that Karen and Melissa were on the same internet dating site. Picture popped up, and Karen recognised this guy! He’s the vet, the one who likes jazz. She’d looked at his page as well. Laughter all around. Turn to the next one in Melissa’s queue. Karen didn’t know that one. But she knew the next fellow, and the next, and they ran through Melissa’s list with peals of laughter.

“Ahh, that’s the ecologist—I was thinking about winking at him.”

“Don’t bother, he’s seeing someone now.”

“This guy got a new picture, way better choice!” And so it was, down the list. They read profiles, admired screen names, told stories of outrageous first contacts. I found myself in multiple foreign worlds, there on my couch in front of my fire. There was the world of internet dating, which I know about only through the eyes of friends and media stars; my last date was well before the internet was invented. And there was life in this tiny fish bowl of a country, where you can guess that you and your ex-brother-in-law are on the same dating site and winking at women who will have dinner together and judge whether your new pictures are better than the old. I met Michael’s eye as and we toasted to each other for keeping us safely out of internet dating sites, and to Melissa and Karen for being brave enough to date in a fishbowl. Here's to the hope of love for us all.