springing into autumn

It’s funny, people who read this blog see all kinds of things in it. I’m always surprised at the different interpretations of me and my mood I find reflected back at me. Some people tell me how hard it all sounds, how unsettling, how worrying. Others tell me it looks like I live in paradise and am blissfully happy, one perfect day after the next. And each of these interpretations makes me think, and in its own way, each is probably true.

I have come to a new era in my New Zealand adventure, though, a markedly different place since the US trip in March and April. I have been reading old blogs to make sense of this new place I’m in, and watching the old places I’ve been from the distance of a new vantage point. It’s been more than a year since we moved into this house, nearly two and a half years since we moved into this country. I walk through my house—now really finished at last—and into my garden which is emerging through our hard work and the help of our lovely WWOOFERs. I wander on the beach at lowish tide, throwing a ball for Perry. I rush to the train, panting, grumbling about its potential to be early (which a train should never be). I hear the tuis back in the trees, home to Paekakariki from wherever it is that tuis go when they’re not here. And in this new era, I don’t mutter to myself about how surreal it all is that I live here. In this new era, it feels like home.

Keith and I have been doing fantastic work this week in a leadership development programme filled with leaders I respect and admire. Our work with them is making a difference in their lives and in their organisation. I have not had this sense of satisfaction in my teaching since the days at IET when I could see that I was making a difference in the lives of the students whose teachers I taught. I am making a difference again. I’m writing again too, working on two different blogs and plugging away at my book. I go into the fairy cottage that is my new study and I look into the magic back garden and I think I have never felt so rooted anywhere. Somehow, I have moved out of the neutral zone in which I’ve spent these past three years, and I’m blinking into the sunlight of the new day. I have a stronger sense of what I’m doing and why, can look forward to a future that builds on this present (no, I still don’t know which country that future will be in), and can make decisions from a different space than has felt possible for a long time.

It’s autumn here, the leaves already fading and falling on the South Island, even though there are far fewer deciduous trees here at the beach. But the feeling welling up inside me is something more like sap running in spring than the full fruits of the harvest. In my internal season, this new beginning is the pale gold green of new growth. I can feel the tingling of these new possibilities, the buds bursting to flower, the beginnings of fruits so young it’s hard to tell what they’ll become. These images may strike northern readers as seasonal, but here with the howling wind and the crackling fire, they are in sharp contrast to the fresh snow on the mountains and the mittens tucked into coat pockets.

Many many months ago I talked about the neutral zone, that place where the old world is gone and the new world not yet emerged. I talked about moving furniture in and setting up house in the neutral zone because I thought I’d stay there a while. Turns out that the moving truck, which inhabits my dreams nearly every night, was here to take my furniture out of the neutral zone and into the beginning of the rest of my life. It is an autumn spring here in Paekakariki. Wonder what summer flowers the winter might bring.



Pictures today are of the dawn at the workshop Keith and I ran this week, and of my new cottage study. More pictures of this new life coming soon.