Kiwibergers

Crafting memories

2010-07-19T20:06:00.003+12:00

One last Bali blog, written with chilly fingers on the train from Paekakariki to Wellington. On our last day in Bali, we woke grasping for ways to hold on to the Bali experience. We called our wonderful and helpful driver, Made, and asked him to take us to the stonecutting village nearby so that we could pick a statue for our garden. Made (pronounced Mah-day, which all Balinese parents name their second-born children) took us first to the most famous stone cutter in Bali, and we wandered amongst sandstone Buddha heads the size of a Mini Cooper and green marble Ganeshas standing like soldiers along the side of the road. We fell in love with three statues, each too big to bring home in a suitcase. And, once we asked, each too expensive as well—four to eight million rupiahs each (that’s US$400-800) with shipping to NZ another five million rupiahs. Made smiled and we piled back into the car to his uncle’s stone carving shop. There we wandered amongst nearly the same statues (the Buddha heads maybe only the size of a SmartCar) with prices 80% lower. We picked four we liked and began to narrow down, knowing we wanted two for the garden. I went off to make a final distinction, visiting each of them in turn, and came back to find Michael shaking hands with the carver. “Which ones did you decide on?” I asked, somewhat peevishly (he had picked without me!). He smiled sheepishly. “Why choose?” he asked, echoing what Keith calls the Jennifer-philosophy (he had not picked at all!). So in five weeks (allegedly), we’ll get a shipment of four beautiful pieces of Bali—let the holiday continue eternally in the garden.

The second half of that day we spent creating our own art. In Bali, which is famous for all kinds of art work, you can take a class which teaches you to create rudimentary versions of the beautiful things you see: wood carvings, stone carvings, batik, silver jewelery. We picked the silver. The four of us went to the workshop of a silversmith whose work we had admired and spent 3 hours under his vague tutelage creating jewelery which would be our handmade souvenirs of our trip. His personality was perhaps less delicate and beautiful than his jewelery, and he often seemed annoyed that these ignoramuses had wandered into his shop to abuse his silver with his hammers, but we pounded on, merrily and with only occasional swearing. In three hours, we each had come up with an idea (all of us learning that our initial designs were too complex for beginners and pulling back and back and back from those ideas into ultimately very simple forms). We gained serious appreciation for the jeweler, who can take tiny gems and rough-looking silver pieces and craft them into the shiny baubles we love so much. We left the workshop bedazzled at our own artistic prowess (our grouchy teacher notwithstanding), and swapped bracelets and rings all over dinner, showering each other with well-deserved complements. I did not find a passion for silver as I found a (very latent) passion for glassblowing two years ago, but I do have a bracelet around my wrist (made by me) and a ring around my finger (made for me by Michael) in which I take new forms of delight.

That day closed with a frantic wish by Naomi for one last manicure/pedicure before heading home. We found a lovely spa which would paint her nails and also give the other three of us a 30 minute massage in the meantime. They lined up three massage beds in a room meant for two, and we left Naomi lounging in painted luxury while the three of us dipped our feet into bowls of hot water with floating petals. The Balinese everywhere were taken by Aidan’s near-white hair and smiling blue eyes, and this place was no exception. Aidan giggled his way through the foot massage and sighed happily through the back and neck massage, complete with chocolate-scented oil. The three lovely masseuses matched him giggle for giggle, happy sigh for happy sigh, taking at least as much delight in his happiness as he did. At the end, slick and reeking of chocolate, Aidan beamed at us all in delight. “I love Bali!” he said. Amen.

And then it was over. One last morning dip in the pool, one last breakfast in the open-air restaurant, the 90 minute drive through rubbish and beautiful stone carved statues, and we were at the airport, pulling on our socks and pants and stuffing sandals and sarongs into the outside pockets of our heavy suitcases. 20 short hours later we were flying through freezing rain to land at the Wellington airport. But ah, the dawn over the Southern Alps was magnificent, and Rob’s face at the end of the jetway, and Sarah and the two dogs at the doorway of our beautiful seaside house were as welcome as the tang of icy lemongrass lemonade on a hot Balinese afternoon. Aidan blissfully drank glasses of tap water; Naomi set about demolishing and rearranging her room for a new era in her life. Perhaps it’s a new era for all of us, our post-Bali family. We are closer than we were, with memories as shiny as our new silver baubles but less likely to tarnish. I am a convert to long and wandering family holidays in mysterious and beautiful cultures. And to coming home to a life I love.

Backroads through Bali

2010-07-14T18:02:00.004+12:00

Ok, so Keith was right, the backroads are better. We’ve spent the last two days getting into the real Bali, and we’ve found things to take our breath away—for so many reasons.

On Monday, we were off to Bali Treetop Adventure, which is a series of platforms and ropes challenges high in the trees in a botanic garden. We were all alone at first, which was good because then others couldn’t see that Michael and I preferred the practice patch to the actual challenges, nor could they see that Michael started off on ropes that he later found out were for little kids. Many of us got in over our heads at some point—when you finish one tightrope and round a platform and then realize that you seriously, seriously don’t want to do the next thing. Three of us spent some time or another paralyzed up at the top of a tree. But not birthday boy. He was fearless. He climbed up and down, swinging and walking and sliding and hurling himself from place to place. I would have been terrified for him (as I was for me) if there hadn’t been such excellent safety harnesses. He was disappointed to not be able to do the hardest course, and made me promise that I’d bring him back when he was tall enough. It’s not so hard to promise to go back to Bali!

The whole family was less challenged and equally delighted by our day yesterday. We began with breakfast on a volcano overlooking a lake. While the black lava fields were chilling (1000 people were killed there when the volcano exploded over a village some decades ago), the glassy water and majestic volcano cones were somehow soothing. Then to a plantation where we tasted the sweet (but not in any way chocolaty) seeds which will become chocolate and held the bright red berries which will become coffee. We sniffed the branches of a cinnamon tree and fingered the leaves of the vanilla orchid plant. And we learnt about a coffee which they sell in Bali and say is the most expensive coffee in the world. Ready for why? It is a coffee berry which is eaten by a small fox-like animal called a luwak who then poops out the intact beans, which are collected, washed, dried, and then roasted and ground. I kid you not, but I’m still not sure that they were not kidding me. Anyway, we’re tourists so we drank some—and it was smoother than any coffee I’ve ever had. No postulating about why.

Then we were onto our seriously dodgy bikes for 25kms over backroads and downhill through Bali. Other than the bike mishaps (both Naomi and Aidan’s bikes dropped their chains, but Aidan’s topped us all when he lost his whole crank and pedal), it was the most amazing bike ride I’ve ever been on. We stopped from time to time for the guides to tell us cultural things—we saw farmers planting rice in the paddy, up to their knees in water and mud. We went into a house compound and learnt about how they were set up and what they were like to live in. The kids were astonished—and perhaps aghast. In this compound, which our guide said was quite like his, there is no running water, no real walls, no glass windows. The kitchen still is over an open fire, the food processor a motor and pestle. The “bank” out back was one sorry looking calf who will be worth 6,000,000 rupiah in 3 years, two piglets and their mother (who seemed to know I was a vegetarian). They wove the bamboo at the back of their house into roofs and walls and floor mats. We were struck by the depth of the religion, the way it touches every moment of their lives, the way they live with their spirituality the way they live with themselves and their own thoughts. There was nothing about that life which was familiar to me, other than the mothers holding and nursing their babies, a common bond.

We biked past rice paddies, stopped at a tree that was more than 500 years old which vibrated with a kind of wisdom I can’t name. As we passed houses, children would race to their front doors to see us pass, shouting “Hello!” at the top of their lungs and jumping up and down with delight at Aidan’s cheerful Hello back. We chatted with the Swiss and Dutch families on the tour with us, with the Balinese tour guides. We ate lunch at a restaurant perched over rice paddies.

Then, finally, back through traffic much worse than DC rush hour, to the Monkey Forest in Ubud, where adorable and terrifying monkeys are the kings, and you are permitted to be with them as long as you don’t carry a bag (they’ll chase you as they did Michael and snatch it from your hands) or a banana (they bit our guide 6 months ago because he had a banana behind his back) or look at a baby funny. It was frightening and amazing all at once, the monkeys like humanoid rats, swarming over everything. Suddenly I got a glimpse of 5pm in New York City, when the humans swarm like rats out of office buildings. Are we really so different?

And so that’s two days in Bali. This morning we went to a local market, which was perhaps too real for the kids. Filthy and smelly and packed with scents and sounds and people who felt seriously foreign. We are not in Wellington anymore. Still, we rallied and bought a few gifts (but still not the ubiquitous wooden penis bottle opener which is in every shop). And Naomi, Aidan and I each got a henna tattoo. Now we’re home at the hotel, the cool pool a welcome and quiet space after the busy bustle of the last two days. Vacations can be exhausting.

Tomorrow is our last day. We have had wonderful and horrible times here. We will return home different, which might be the most wonderful thing to say at the end of the holiday.

Nine

2010-07-14T01:09:00.004+12:00

Tonight, now back from our bike ride (which would have been perfect for Jamie--25kms, mostly downhill), I am too tired to write. Here are some pictures from yesterday when Aidan turned 9 at a high height! I'll write more tomorrow as we laze by the pool--no adventures scheduled!

Leaving Disney Bali

2010-07-12T01:12:00.004+12:00

Keith told us that if we got off the main roads, we would find the fascinating world of the real Bali, but here we are driving from one hotel 1.5 hours to the second, and the life of the main road is fascinating. The roadway itself is a study in emergence, traffic patterns emerging and weaving, creating four lanes where just a minute ago there were two, then falling back into two lanes again. The ubiquitous motorcycles go wherever then want, whenever they want, a father driving with his three-year-old balanced on his knee, mother behind, infant pressed to her breast between them, luggage off the side and to the front. There are something like 200 times more traffic deaths here than in New Zealand. All these tiny heads, much beloved of their families, darting and weaving. I pull my seat-belted children closer watching.

We pass people shucking piles of corn, others selling it, packaged or grilled. Watermelons and corn seem to be the currency along the road, along with stands filled with bottles of clear amber liquid which we took at first to be a local drink until we were informed it’s petrol. Massive stone Buddhas smile serenely from rock carving stands and gilded teak lions roar soundlessly from woodcarving stands . Hand-woven baskets filled with daily offerings—frangipani blossoms, a banana, a cigarette or wrapped mint—sit outside each shop, each house, on the dashboard of every car. Beautiful girls in sarongs leave the baskets on the ground, in a spirit house, in front of a gate. Small boys wrestle playfully on front steps of a tiny shop.

This morning in the one hour left at our resort hotel, we went down the waterslide dozens of times, played our last games of ping pong, admired the sculpted perfection of the hotel and grounds. I heard a pattering noise and then a crash and a burst of water. A man with a machete was up a coconut palm, pruning the lower branches and cutting out the potential-missiles of the coconuts. There were no tears and it was with good cheer that we piled into this little car in our standard form: Michael in the front, the rest of us in the back with Aidan in the middle.

We pass little store fronts, grungy houses with cement walls and no windows holding up sheets of tin roofs, glimpse through ironwork gates into posh courtyards and plush hotels. Here there are rows of corn, towering coconut palms, a sign that says “antiques made to order.” Rubbish and blossoms blow listlessly in the pre-rain breeze.

Through a rainstorm, past ever more quaint villages, and we were down a side street and to our new hotel. This is not Disney Bali. This is actual Bali, a hotel in the middle of a rice paddy, a gathering of Balinese builders carrying straw and brick and dirt on their heads and back to build another villa here. Then another ride through villages, past brown hens followed by a flurry of black chicks, past a village celebration, past tiny houses selling massive paintings on stretched canvas, and we were in Ubud. This village, swarming with people and cars and motorcycles, has mazes of markets and miles of storefronts selling everything from inexpensive silk sundresses (yes, I bought one) to massive “antique” metal sculptures (made to order?). We fingered cloth and silver, and Aidan drove his first market bargain (“How much are these?” he asked. “5,000 rupiah,” she answered. “How about 2000?” he shot back in a flash. She took it.). Then, just before the rains thundered down, we got a table at Lamak, which the guidebook had said was one of the best restaurants in Bali, where we waited damply for one of the finest meals we’ve ever had. We celebrated Aidan’s last night of eight-ness with stories from earlier birthday parties and declarations of what he’d like the next year to hold. The rain splashed around our feet and legs and dripped down my back. We shouted over it and passed the mocha tart around the table.

Tomorrow we will go to the Bali Botanic Gardens, way to the north, to walk through the flowers there and play on the ropes at the Bali Treetop Adventure. It is Aidan’s birthday tomorrow, and he’s selected every moment of it, although it turns out there’s a beautiful temple near the park, built in 1633, which I’m allowed to visit. The next day we have booked a back-roads mountain bike tour through villages and rice paddies. We are discovering real Bali is even better than Disney Bali, and that family vacations are more precious than gilded lions.

Pictures today are from our last hours at the beach--perfection before the rain storm and then our first hours in real Bali, as Naomi fingers the sarongs in the Ubud Market. The last picture is Aidan's last picture of eightness--eating a magnificent dessert.

postcards

2010-07-11T01:31:00.005+12:00

And so ends this portion of our holiday. We have perhaps stayed at this beach resort slightly too long, long enough for the kids to mistake this for home, for us to know the front desk staff at this massive resort, for Aidan to have made one friend from Jakarta and another from Milan. I fear that the kids will weep tomorrow when we bundle into a taxi to take us farther north, into the world of rice paddies and temples, away

from the world of waterslides and cool tropical smoothies you can order from the bar at the pool, and drink at the bar stool, legs still swimming.

Before we go, though, here are some postcards from our time in South Bali, since none of you are likely to ever get an actual postcard from me (my cousin Michael is the best in the world at postcards, and I've seen him spend hours at it. Me? I buy them and sometimes even write them. But I never, ever mail them. Details.)

First postcard, our snorkeling trip. We piled on a boat and were first taken to Turtle Island, which I imagined as a tropical, little-explored island where sea turtles once bred and where we could have a nature walk out of the sun. HA! We ended up calling it Turtle Alcatraz, because all around us were sea turtles and other creatures locked in jail. We were knee-deep in the seedy side of tourism, with a snake with his mouth scotch-taped shut and a beautiful sea eagle in a cage just about the size of his wingspan. We couldn't get off that island fast enough.

Next stop, snorkeling in a small and sad reef in the middle of a world of container ships and jet skis. Still, we held hands, the four of us, and watched beautiful--and apparently hearty--tropical fish. It was Aidan's first time snorkeling, and it turns out he can talk constantly, even under water. Who knew?

Postcard two, the next day. Watersports.

After haggling over the price (Michael drives a hard bargain), Aidan was off to do the thing he wanted more than anything else on this Bali trip: jet skiing. (Yes, I know I mentioned those with disdain in the last postcard, and yes I still hate them, but it was the dream of my nearly 9-year-old and only 15 minutes of two-stroke engine hell.) Aidan rode at the front and one of the instructors rode behind him, and it was the ride of his life. Because the wind was wrong for Naomi's dream (parasailing), we all signed up for a two-person wake-rider. After the jet ski, we hopped onto a powerboat. First Michael and Aidan bounced along and then it was our turn. I won't wax on about the brain-jarring, bumpy, terrifying ride except to say I was delighted to be on land again. The other three loved it.

Postcard 3. Spa-ing. Bali is famous for its spas, so we wanted each of us to have a taste of the spa experience. We stopped in the heat of the day in a little village and popped into a tiny spa, just slightly wider than the massage beds themselves. While I ate the best curry of my whole life, Naomi had a mani/pedi. And when she was done, Aidan had his first massage. I've always thought Aidan was a cheerful fellow, but post-massage Aidan was so blissed out you could hardly even focus your eyes on his beaming face. He kept describing it--the scent of the oil, the feel of fingers on his scalp, the hand massage. He is a spa-convert.

Michael and I didn't need to be converted. This morning we shipped the kids off to a tennis lesson and we headed to a "spa sampler" for two. Boy do they know about the spa experience here! There was ginger tea and a footsoak (petals in the water) and a massage and a facial. Then a soak in a huge tub (petals in the water again). It was all outside and yet private, with a gentle breeze and bird song. I tried to hold as many of the sensory pieces as I possibly could--the sound of the ethereal music, the feel of hands on my scalp, the astringent smell of cucumber rubbed on my face, the taste of sweet and spicy hot tea. Bliss.

Lest you fear, it hasn't been total bliss, however. After the water sports (and all the brain jarring), we all hit a wall and ended up everyone fighting with everyone else. Then, when we wanted to be away from each other, we discovered the limits of sharing a single room--one person fled to the balcony, one to the bathroom, and the other two were stuck not speaking to one another on the massive bed. We disagree about what to do. We are hot and irritable. We have the constant battle between wanting to experience culture and wanting to stay as close to Bali Disney as possible.

And we have felt our strangeness here. We are already tired of having people constantly trying to sell us things, constantly pulling or pushing at us to buy this dress or that hat or this all-day tour of the island. We cannot speak any of the other languages around us. We have seen people desperately poor and tragically rich. We have watched monkeys in cages and turtles pining for the sea. We have felt guilty and sweaty and nauseous and grumpy with the world.

But then there are times like tonight. Aidan had wanted to go to the cheesy Caribbean Pirate’s night at the hotel, since it’s our last night. It was 348,000 rupiahs each (kids half price) which turns out to be about NZ$50 a head. Too much. So we headed into Nusa Dua town, outside the security gates, which is like leaving Disney and heading to the wilds of Orlando. We picked a German Beer Garden, just for variety. Michael had Chinese egg rolls to start and then a veggie green curry, Naomi and I split a swiss rosti, and Aidan had chicken nuggets much to his delight (Although, truth be told, Aidan’s was actually a chicken cutlet as my grandmother would have said, and he said that he actually preferred “chicken nugget food-like product” which was honest, but a bummer.) There were murals on the wall of quaint German scenes—cities and mountains. And then the entertainment began—two Indonesian folk singers on guitars, singing old favourites from the 60s and 70s—the Beatles, James Taylor, and then songs we have to assume are the equivalents in Russian, German, Spanish, maybe other languages. It was as out of place as you can imagine, and we loved it. We sang and ate food from several cultures and just were generally silly. This is what holidays are for, I think.

Next stop is Ubud. We leave Disney Bali behind and plunge into a more real Indonesian experience. How do you say "wish us luck" in Bahasa?

Learning to play

2010-07-08T00:06:00.004+12:00

A girl could get used to this.
Today I actually began to play. I went down the waterslide a billion times. I played ping-pong and lost to Aidan (but only barely). I did underwater somersaults. What a joy! I began to wonder why we do this so seldom and then I forgot to care.

When the sun got too hot, we headed back to the stores pick up some things we had forgotten. Aidan bought jandals. Naomi got a second batik sundress. Michael got a second linen shirt. I bought a purple bikini (that's different!) and a sarong. We're relaxing into this Bali thing.

Then, for dinner, to Jimbaran. This fishing village at the edge of the airport is famous for its sundown fish dinners on the beach. You actually pick out the live fish and they cook it for you (allegedly--Michael did all the picking etc because I am very nearly about to give up eating fish and I couldn't handle the reality of all of the swimming fish). Aidan drank watermelon juice and Naomi had a coconut and juice concoction while we watched the fishing boats chug into the harbour and we waited for our grilled snapper. It was utterly unlike what I expected and also perfect. Ahh how I'm loving learning to play.

(pictures today are all from Jimbaran and, my dear Melissa, include both Naomi's braids and Aidan's tattoo!)

Holiday school

2010-07-07T01:19:00.004+12:00

I am at “holiday school,” Michael keeps telling me. This is where I learn to be on holiday, a lesson that the last 40 years have not prepared me for. I am sitting looking out at the sea, which isn’t all that uncommon, granted, but in this case it’s the Indian Ocean, which does strike me as rather unusual. There are seaweed farms in the distance and the sound of the pool basketball game’s occasional highs and lows wafting up to our 10th floor room. This is Bali.

There are so many things that strike me about being here. There’s the sheer beauty of the place, the millions of colours of blue of the sea, the rumpled and rich tangle of greens in the wild space next to the hotel. There’s the gilded luxury of this resort, the nicest place I’ve ever stayed. I was disgusted that we were going to Nusa Dua, a gated resort community in the south of the island, designed to corral the upscale tourists in a manageable space. But this hotel was picked while I was working in Sydney, and it was selected for the 30 metre water slide and the interconnected series of pools. It seemed like a kind of Bali-lite to me, Disney Bali. And so it is, but geeze, how magnificently done this place is, Disney Bali or no.

We arrived yesterday, gasping into the heat and humidity of the afternoon. Bali, for those of you in the Northern hemisphere who think of New Zealand and Australia and Bali as close neighbours, is seriously far away from New Zealand (the key lesson here being that EVERYTHING is seriously far away from New Zealand). Three airplane rides—one of them 10.5 hours in a Singapore airlines plane that was state-of-the-art 10 years ago—and 20 minutes in a taxi and we were here, in the lofty open-air lobby of the Nikko Bali Resort.

I spent the whole trip not doing work. I didn’t particularly do anything else—there were no movies I wanted to watch or books I wanted to read—but I felt how strongly I was not doing work. It was like an itch I’m used to scratching or a hunger I was used to feeding and I was feeling the raw desire for it, the blind press to do something that I usually do. It was hard to resist.

This trip wasn’t planned originally as a way to test my holidaying skills. It was originally Naomi’s trip, planned for the time following her Bat Mitzvah to take the sting out of the fact that she would have her Bat Mitzvah far far from the centre of her Jewish life, far from her Jewish family and friends, far from the place where Bat Mitzvahs were a regular part of a teenage experience—rather than the semi-freakish event they are in New Zealand. But the press of the oddness, combined with everyone’s dissatisfaction at the lack of family at the event, made us postpone the Bat Mitzvah into a time in the future when we might hold it in the US. But then the question: What to do with the airplane tickets to Bali?

So Naomi’s trip became my trip, a celebration of my 40th birthday and a test of my capacity to be on holiday as this one is nearly twice what any holiday has been before (nearly 2 weeks). I’m not supposed to do anything that I feel like I’m supposed to do. This morning I didn’t work out. On the plane I didn’t work on my book. I put a vacation notice on my NZCER email. In one stunning move of self-restraint, I left my beautiful laptop at home. Zowie.

And so I’m here. Today, on our first full day, we splurged at the hotel breakfast buffet. We sat in a garden overlooking the sea, eating fruits we’d never seen before, and wondering at the range of breakfast-desires this hotel needs to serve: American tastes (eggs and bacon), Asian tastes (noodles and pork and hotpots bubbling away), European tastes (chocolate croissants, yoghurt, French cheeses). There were flower petals strewn on the tables. My tea was English, the juice guava, the water bottled. The waiters bowed as they saw us and opened doors as we walked through them. I changed into my bathing suit and went down the water slide with the kids again and again. I played pool volleyball (or, er, I tried to play pool volleyball but there wasn't as much volleying as you might want). To coax the kids out of the hot sun, we took them to the thing called a mall around here, another toe-dip into the actual Bali culture. Naomi had her hair braided into cornrows. Aidan had a henna tattoo of a dragon painted onto his bicep. We fingered sarongs and wooden carvings and tried to do the conversion math. What did it mean that the sundress was 149,000 rupiahs?

We wandered to a public beach where the sand had not been scrubbed so clean and the people in the water were as many shades of brown as there were shades of blue in the sea. (Here at the hotel there are many shades, but most of them have crispy pink undertones marking them as pasty-tourists unprepared for the Bali sun.) This is the more real Bali, and leads to conversations about poverty and wealth and what it means to be a developing nation (and what DOES it actually mean to be a developing nation?). And then for dinner, a little restaurant on a main street just out of Nusa Dua, is more real Bali still. Aidan’s half chicken was a seriously half chicken. Michael’s fish still had their heads. My veggie curry made me sweat more than the humid night air. Naomi ate rice. And we talked and laughed and ate and wandered with cars and motorbikes whizzing past. So THIS is holiday, when you just hang out with your kids and laugh and eat strange foods and listen to every kind of language all around you. This is my first test in holiday school. I think I will enjoy the next one.

ps careful readers will see aidan's new short hair. More pictures tomorrow!

Dad and Jamie: Wanaka

2010-01-29T15:59:00.004+13:00

I'll let the stories come later, but here are the 4000 words of images. Bonus points for anyone who figures out the last one...

Dad and Jamie: To the mountain

2010-01-26T22:46:00.006+13:00

It felt almost like we had engineered a slowly-unfolding New Zealand experience. The way to Mount Cook/Aoraki was, as the day before had been, gray and solemn. The mood in the car was bubbling, though, as we all searched through the clouds for the mountains we were off to see. Dad joked about New Zealand going easy on him, acclimating his eyes to the scenery in the near black-and-white of an overcast day before blinding him with both the shapes and the colours in the full sun.

The road from Twizel was perfection itself. We meandered along a beautiful lake, nestled in hills. We found ourselves in an unexpected traffic jam along the way—only four cars but ten times that many cows, spreading out over the road. The cows were being controlled by skilful dogs and cowboys (because they’d have to be actual cowboys right?), who were crossing them from one pasture to the next. We watched, enthralled with the show of nature in the water and hills and cows on the road, until the cows took a sidestep off the road and onto greener pastures.

Eventually, the delight of the ride was over and the actual mountain was before us. The visitor centres at Mt Cook are modern and sleek, designed to appeal to the many international tourists who show up in regular buses. It is an international scene, with Japanese women covered head-to-toe in merino, Germans looking sleek and blonde, Americans a little over-coiffed for the setting. The lodge could have been anywhere with its soaring ceilings, enormous plate glass windows, posters advertising this or that activity. The mountains, however, were pure New Zealand.

And once we began to walk, crossing paths with French and Dutch and Australian fellow explorers, we were united in our love for this country at this moment. The mountains decided Dad and Jamie had been patient enough, and soon there was blue sky around the peaks, and everything was blue and white and grey and green. We passed a motley collection of people: from everywhere, of every age, wearing everything from parkas to tank tops and flip flops. All of us gaping at the mountains around us. All of us swinging on the swing bridge. All of us baking in the newly hot sun.

This is a merciful country, though, and so once the mountains had been seen and admired, and it was time to turn our back to them and walk back to the car, the clouds closed in again and a misty rain began to fall—not enough to annoy but enough to cool us off from what had begun to be uncomfortably hot.

Dad wanted to sleep after the long walk—and he was still jetlagged after all—but with scenery shouting like this, it was too loud to close his eyes. And so we made our way through landscape that Dad and Jamie kept trying to identify. Were we in Provence? Now in Vermont? Now Africa? And then the Lindis pass and we were on the moon (or anyway, not on earth at all anymore).

It’s not a surprise to me how many different forms of beauty New Zealand can manage to produce in such a small number of miles. But hearing the oohs and ahhhs from the back seat somehow changes everything. For me, it wasn’t just that there was beauty all around me—this I am getting blissfully used to. It was the company. Finally here I was with Dad and Jamie. Our eyes were all seeing the same sight at the same time, with no need to describe it later, my hands uselessly drawing out shapes in the air as I talked on the phone. Here my hands waved at a mountain, and we all saw it. And when Jamie saw a bird take off or a particularly wonderful shade of azure, we all saw that too. Language is a beautiful thing, my favourite medium. But sometimes it is most wonderful when we don’t need any at all.

(pictures today are mostly from this Mt Cook day: the drive in, various mountain shots, the triumphant post-hike picture. The last two are a hint of the day to come: Wanaka in the swim!)

Dad and Jamie: The Beginning

2010-01-25T07:28:00.006+13:00

It’s true that I’m not sure there’s enough of interest in this settled kiwi life of mine to keep up a blog as regularly as I could in the early days. But there are events that will happen which may necessitate a blog or two, just to let those who might be following along see the highlight reel of our lives. These last days belong on that reel.

It began on Friday the 15^th of January, when Dad and Jamie stumbled off the plane and into our arms. It had been a weird week of coming and going. Michael left for a workshop in the US on the Tuesday, Naomi came home from 10 days at camp on the Thursday (missing our fantastic WWOOFers who left that morning), and in a burst of delight and exhaustion, suddenly Dad and Jamie were there as well. Rob, who came back from his cool bachelor pad in Wellington to help out, was the perfect host as we tried to keep our weary travellers awake the requisite number of hours (my theory is that if you make it until bedtime on the first day, you’ll be fine from then on out). But up they stayed, eating the amazing food Rob was preparing and soaking in the Paekakariki life. I have been waiting for them to stand in front of my house since we first moved here, have been anxious for the surprised inhale that comes from seeing the sweeping Tasman Sea which is our constant companion. And, while sometimes great expectations lead to grave disappointments, this moment was better than I ever expected, and their speechless delight in our life felt in every way like a dream come true.

The weekend was spent in Paekakariki gray, Jamie reading on the new green loveseat and taking endless walks on our endless beach, Dad sitting in the living room with me and talking and talking. We celebrated birthdays and Christmas past. Monday dawned perfectly clear and they headed into Wellington while I headed into work. The overwhelmingly busy work day was a blur, but the evening walk through the Botanic Gardens, the dinner on the restaurant on the harbour—those are in slow motion. Slow motion too was coming home to a Perry whose leg injury had gotten infected, who was a sick and unhappy dog. Tuesday at work was an agony of worry as beautiful Melissa took Perry to the vet and Dad and Jamie looked after him while I was at work. And on Wednesday, the rush of the work days, the anxiety over a healing Perry (now safely housed with Keith for the next couple of days) the endless housework of the working-mom-on-her-own, the pre-trip preparation—all of it was over and we were off.

We met Michael—newly back from the US—at the airport and we all flew to Christchurch to begin the journey (Michael now in airports or airplanes for 18 hours). We rented a van in Christchurch, and we were off. The first part of the trip was as boring as NZ scenery gets, but we were still so excited to all be back together again that we hardly noticed. And by the time we were ready to sit back and watch the country, the country had begun to dress up for us, getting our eyes used to a little beauty, and then a little more, and then a little more. Finally we were in Lake Tekapo, a magical glacial lake with waters brightly turquoise even in the misty gray afternoon. We marvelled at the colours and shapes—rough blue lake hurling against gray stone, green hills draped with gray clouds, spires of soft lupines alongside the hard stone of the tiny old church.

Onward to Twizel, a town we had heard was good only as a rest stop and not much for that. But our hotel (the Mountain Chalets Motel) was perfection and the little restaurant where we had dinner was unexpectedly delicious. We sat in the town square and drank New Zealand wine in the evening gray and hoped that in the morning the sky would clear enough to go visit Mount Cook. And in the morning, the visit to the local DoC office (where we said hello to one of the participants in my leadership development programme) ended with his walking outside to see if the mountain was out. And it was. We were off to see the highest mountain in the Southern Hemisphere. It was an auspicious beginning.

The end. And the beginning...

2009-12-12T09:45:00.006+13:00

Ok, so it wasn’t the close I had in mind. In some ways, it was a most typical day here. A coaching call first thing, then an Action Learning Group call with Keith. Conversations about writing, about maybe turning this blog into a book (with lots and lots of editing—anyone know an interested publisher? An agent?). Kneading the challah for Hanukkah dinner. I had forgotten to invite S and A and their kids, and Melissa and Ayla wouldn’t be around. And Rob, just last night, had spent the first night in his new apartment in town. It was going to be an anti-climactic and small scale celebration.

Naomi was coming home, though, from a school trip of two days in Wellington, and there would be the new menorahs I bought on the ill-fated trip to Philly. Michael had seen his, but Aidan’s was still a surprise. And there was delight in the air because (drum roll, please) today we closed on the Ocean Road house and finally we didn’t own it anymore—and Carolyn did. A movie finish.

And the movie got better, because Melissa called. Was she still welcome for dinner? It was raining and so they decided not to go camping tonight. And Rob texted, he was on the 5.40 train. So the house filled up as I made latkes for dinner with a bean thing that Rob made delicious when he arrived. I had forgotten the apple sauce and the sour cream; Michael had bought birthday candles instead of Hanukkah candles, but it would fit in the end.

Latkes hot and sizzling on the platter, yummy beans and challah, fresh broccoli from the garden. We raised our glasses to drink our lovely New Zealand bubbly and toasted to Carolyn and Jim, to their owning the house and our not owning it anymore. We toasted to our current (and now only) house, to our fourth Hanukkah in New Zealand.

Hold that image, will you? The toasting adults, the cheerful children, the candles flickering in the gray late spring evening. A perfect close to this chapter in our lives, our best friend from the US, our best friend from NZ, our loving children, all gathered around as we sang the praises and delights of our dear friends in the US who have bought the extra house and may someday join us around the table.

And then, because it isn’t a movie, life begins again. Naomi discovers that it’s not a cell phone she’s gotten for Hanukkah and begins to cry at the table. Exhausted from her school trip, she stumbles off to bed without finishing her favourite dinner or finding out what the offending gift might be. Aidan, in lovely good spirits, dances excitedly about his gift. I give it to him, the best menorah I’ve ever seen, a dog, silly and very Aidan-like with a bobble head and wagging tail. He takes one look at it and bursts into tears—why would he want a menorah anyway? He gets horrified at his own reaction and cries louder—filled with self-recrimination and apologising for being so ungrateful. The adults hardly know what to do with this scene which is sweet and painful and terrible all at once. We move on to candle lighting. We struggle with the blessings, missing our old menorah with the Hebrew on the side, the one Rob and I bought for Michael 20 years ago in Rockville Maryland, the only item which broke in the move to New Zealand. Finally, between us, we get both blessings out, and by now Aidan has calmed down and is making friends with the dog menorah, wanting to light the candles and nodding at its bobble head. And so this is life, candles glowing, children sometimes crying, sometimes delighted. Sometimes you sell the house when you want; sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you get the present you want; sometimes you don’t.

Now the rain is lashing on the roof. Everyone is in bed—even Rob, who will take his time moving into the new flat in Wellington and whom, we hope hope hope, will still spend plenty of evenings here with us. Our children are shockingly older than they were when we first got here; our lives are settled and utterly different.

All of this means that I’m not sure I have much that’s interesting to say in this blog anymore to those of you who still come to follow our lives (except Dad, who would be interested in it all). My current hope is to take the story of these first years in New Zealand and see if I can edit them into a book with rising action, with a moving cast of characters, with a more polished presentation of words and ideas than I’ve been able to produce here, in the moment. Wish me luck with that one, with another book with no publisher. I’ll still sometimes post pictures or cool stories if they should happen, but this chapter, at least, this chapter of the move and the saga of the two houses and all the newness of a life in New Zealand, is over.

And of course, we don’t know what stories the next chapter holds. A book or two, finally published? A bat mitzvah without family, far from home? A 40th birthday and the accompanying grey hair? Perhaps I won’t do anything in my life as nutty as those things which have unfolded here. Perhaps this is the zenith of my attempts to shake up the past and move into a new future. All I know is that I woke up one morning three years and three days ago and I lived in my dream house in Washington DC. And I’ll wake up tomorrow in my dream house in New Zealand. There have been tears and traumas and delights that I’d never have imagined. People often told us that we were courageous to strike out in this direction, and we said that courage and stupidity often described the same action, with only the outcome pointing to the right word. Tonight, as the owner of a single house on the beach in New Zealand, it feels like it was courage—with enough stupidity to keep the plot moving along. May you too, wherever you’re reading this, have the courage to strike out after your dreams. You might wake up in paradise too.

ps Pictures today are somewhat random. Menorahs and walks on the beach--what could go together more clearly? Long time readers will see that we have found paradise in our Christmast tree for the first time. We've really made it now...

Another year begun

2009-12-09T14:00:00.004+13:00

November was ghastly. I knew that there would be some serious difficulties in the month, but who knew how many and where they'd come from? There's a song I love with a chorus that says, "I'm looking forward to looking back on this day." That was November.

And now, somehow, we have begun a new New Zealand year. Today is the first day of our fourth year in this beautiful country, and I am in an empty house on a rainy-day-turned-sunny to celebrate it. I was shaken by an earthquake this morning. Naomi is off on her school camp. Our magnificent French WWOOFers have headed south. Aidan is at school, Michael at work. And I'm here in this study, beginning the last chapter of the book with no publisher. What a surprise it all is, all of it, every day.

pictures today, mostly taken by Nathalie and Quentin are:
Aidan kayaking on the beautiful weekend, Perry, Nathalie and Quentin (the fantastic French WWOOFers) with the sculpture they made for the garden, and the adult table at our "New Zanksgiving" meal.

Hairy beginning

2009-11-14T17:04:00.005+13:00

It is the end of my first week in the US. I have spent much of the week in the office buildings and hotels and streets of New York City, which is probably the best and worst the US has to offer.

I have eaten sublime meals with my partners, and walked past dozens of people sleeping in doorways on the way back to the hotel. I have watched a Broadway show where the whole cast got naked and walked out to find people dressed in evening gowns and tuxedos. I have asked friendly policemen for directions, and watched street vendors flee in terror from the officer with his knee in the back of one of their colleagues, his illegal (?) wares strewn about the sidewalk. I have rubbed shoulders with the powerful in elevators and felt my body pressed against the unwashed on the subway.

Perhaps the story to tell is about Hair, though.

I decided on Tuesday night, after eating dinner in the city and then taking a late train back to Carolyn’s in NJ, that I really wanted to see a Broadway show if I could. So after a day with Carolyn in Princeton, I headed back on NJ Transit and pushed and shoved and schlepped my way to the hotel (why oh why do I not take taxis when I travel??). It was 5.30 by the time I checked in, and I was despairing of seeing a show, but I asked the friendly fellow at the hotel. “Plenty of time!” he told me, glancing at the clock. I go to TKTS and get discount tickets at 7. Always lots of tickets. No need to wait in line!”

Renewed in my hopes, I dropped my bags in my tiny room and headed to Broadway. Ah, New York is all about the tyranny of choices! Thousands of places to eat, hundreds of t-shirt shops, chocolate stores on every corner. Which show would I watch?? The well-reviewed Hamlet caught my eye. Maybe South Pacific, since now I lived in the South Pacific. Avenue Q had interested me for years. But I asked the helpful fellows offering advice outside the TKTS booth. Ah, hard decision they told me, increasing the aching misery I was feeling. “How many shows can you see?” I can only see shows this night. Only one show, I told them, desperately. “Then you should see Hair because it’s unlike anything you’ve ever seen before.”

Now, I had seen the movie Hair years ago, and I had loved the album as a child and could sing every word (although I didn’t know what the words mean, thank God). And I had read a hysterical piece in the New Yorker about the author of Hair, back for the revival, wandering through Central Park looking for hippies. Plus it was 50% off. I got one orchestra ticket and wandered around Times Square for 90 minutes, gawking like the foreign tourist I now am.

I suppose five or ten years ago, I’d have felt awkward going to a play alone. The “Just you?” asked incredulously by every ticket seller or taker might have put me off. But I’m practically 40 now (in 6.5 months), and I have to say, I didn’t feel awkward for a second. What I felt was delighted. As the curtain fell open (because they had a big scarf for a curtain, and they dropped it to the ground rather than pulling a curtain up), I found myself beaming at the hippies on stage, wondering at the double time warp that connected me to the time of my parents’ youth (by the setting) and the time of my own (by my strong connection to the music as a child).

Hair is hardly a play at all, but a 60s concert with snatches of dialogue. The singing was sublime, the costumes appropriately rumply, the staging creative. I had waves of delight about being there and waves of deep sadness too.

The audience was filled with people my parents age, watching their youth (or the stereotyped memories of it) writhe around on the stage. I was struck by the timeliness of the anti-war theme (what the hell are we going to do about Afghanistan?) and the archaic relationship to sex and drugs (don’t these people know about AIDS?). I was moved to tears by the scathing racial undertones, the (added?) lines about how someday a Black man will be president.

At the same time, as the play went on something struck me as so primitive about their self-centred concerns. It is so quaint to be worried about an organized war on the other side of the world when terrorism and extreme hate now threaten people in random pockets everywhere. It is so quaint to be worried about your own life, your own love, in a world where deadly climate change threatens all life on earth as we know it. And yet the panic in their voices as they sang for their friend Claude, about to be killed in the war, is the essential and timeless connection of one human to another. The shallow, drugged out hippies became charged with real fear and then real sadness as the snow began to fall. They left the theatre, sadly singing “Let the sun shine in” and leaving us alone with the corpse on the stage, spotlighted in the gentle snow, their voices echoing from outside the theatre.

Then, the snow and mourning over, they raced back onto the stage again, gyrating to the music, urging the audience up on stage with them until the actors and the observers were blended, dancing and singing together on the stage and in the seats. All of the lines dissolved and you couldn’t tell anymore who was what, what was real, as audience members from 2009 danced with hippies from 1962 and took pictures of it all with their i-phones. The dead Claude, gleaming-streaming-flaxen-waxen hair now shorn, boogied happily with the rest, handing out daises to all and sundry. The dazed and drugged-out Berger interrupted to ask the audience for donations for AIDS and breast cancer, and the acid-dropping heavily pregnant woman passed a red bucket around and sold CDs for the cause.

Out into the evening, where it had never been snowing and where there had been no real hippies for decades, I passed well-coiffed middle aged couples humming “Sodomy,” and shuffling homeless people looking just as drugged out but far less amusing than the cast inside. This is New York, where it’s all an illusion and it’s all frighteningly real. This is our world right now, where we can be amused by the 60s, and long for them too, the lost youth of every generation, the lost past of our species. I power-walked to Madison and 52nd, the streets as frighteningly empty after the show as they were full before. Soon it’ll be the winter solstice in New York City. Let the sun shine in.

ps pics today are of Times Square, the New Year's ball, and a rather odd sculpture garden in the median strip of Park Avenue. Yep, a little bit of Kiwi in NYC, those are sheep sculptures...

Jetting to Neutral

2009-11-09T06:47:00.008+13:00

It is a quiet and grey morning. The house is still asleep: all eight of them—nine including Perry sleeping under the dining room table. The weekend’s perfect early summer weather has turned grey and brooding. It’s time for another trip around the world.

This past week has been so amazingly busy I have hardly been able to think straight. And before that, there was the planning and prep for last week. The conference (you can click here and read about it) was amazing. I am moved and amazed by how much I learnt, how deeply collaborative the space was, and how urgent our need to get education into a new place—now. The environmentalists I talked to are not kidding about the peril our world is in. I feel a renewed sense of an emotion that sometimes threatens to tip over into desperation. What kind of world are we leaving our children?

Then a Leadership Development Programme where we tried to help our programme participants think hard about systems and how to understand them and manage them and make powerful decisions inside them. We taught at Lake Okatina which must be one of the most beautiful spots in the world. I love that work at least as much as I've ever loved any work in my life.

And then the weekend. First the late Halloween party where we all dressed up and had American candy that Carolyn brought over. This was to mark the loss of actual Halloween which Caronlyn’s kids said goodbye to as they crossed the dateline on the way over. Then the Kapiti Coast Arts Trail where we wandered under cobalt blue skies through the village and into artists’ open workshops. I ran into people I knew from work, and the whole mob of us—my family and Carolyn and two of her kids and our lovely American WWOOFer—were dizzied by the magnificence of the place.

And now it is Monday morning, my 18th wedding anniversary. The conference is over. The Leadership Development Programme is over (until February). The Arts Trail is over. Carolyn’s visit is over. And another trip to the US is beginning for me, a packed-solid set of work and partner meeting and a new gig at the Kennedy School of Government (check this out: I'm the Growing Wisdom one). And I am melancholy like the weather.

It’s this whole split life thing of mine. I love the life I have here, and love the work I do. I find that my love for New Zealand gets more and more fierce all the time. But I also love the work I do across the world, love the opportunities I have there. And so my life here is punctuated by blank spaces where I disappear from here and pop up over there. My children complain. My husband gets sad. My work colleagues move on and make decisions without me. My chickens lay eggs I won’t eat, my garden grows, days pass that I’ll never get back. And I am changed by these trips in unanticipated ways.

So today I’ll walk on the beach in the rain. I’ll hold my children more tightly before they leave for school. I’ll try to figure out how to get from Philly to Boston next week. I’ll pack my hat and gloves—which I just stopped wearing here. I’ll turn to the issues I haven’t had time to face because I’ve been too busy (how will I organise my time? What will I do about the loss of my publisher now that the book is nearly done?). And I’ll know me in a different way next week and next week before a long trip back to summer and life on the beach.

Last week I taught about change and about the Neutral Zone, a powerful space of possibilities, but disorienting because you don’t know what’s next. Each of these trips across the Pacific is a movement into the Neutral Zone, the belly of the 777 neatly transporting me into the liminal space from which some unknown new will emerge. I’ll remember to fasten my seatbelt low and tightly around my hips and hope for as little turbulence as possible.

Pictures today are of Ryan in the garden, Michael's birthday and our silly Halloween party

We've got them, Jim!

2009-11-01T21:21:00.003+13:00

Once again, we have pieces of the Coughlin-Harris family--this time Carolyn, David, and Becky. The whole weather system was delighted to welcome them back and we had one of the most beautiful days possible. The boys even went swimming for the first time this season.

We'll keep them safe, Jim and Abby! We miss you and wish you two were here with the rest of the gang!

ps For those who are tracking, tomorrow is Michael's birthday. Emails appreciated!

Sacrifices?

2009-10-25T10:17:00.004+13:00

Last night, Michael and Aidan and I ate our first dinner of the season on our front deck (Naomi ate hers in bed—she’s had the stomach flu but she’s much much better now). In the slanting, late sunset, I ate a big salad with fresh eggs from my chickens, I watched the waves rolling in, and drank a fine New Zealand Sav Blanc. My life felt almost painfully unfair to me, as if my sitting there on my front deck was a hording of all manner of good things that now others couldn’t have because of my selfish life. Michael talked about how we had made many sacrifices to get here. Have we? What kind of sacrifices to we always make to get from here to there and how do we understand them in the moment? How do we understand them in the long run? And so I’ve been wondering about what it takes to get from where you are now to the next place.

Those of you who have been reading here long enough (or trolling back far enough), will see that my landing in New Zealand was not smooth or effortless. It is a hard thing to come around the world from a life you love to a new country, and it is a hard thing to build a new life, brick by brick. We made some terrible mistakes that first, impulsive year, mistakes which cost us in dollars and heartache. And then we bought this house, which I often thought of as my folly, and we poured everything into it. I was without a road map for the first time in a long long time, and I was lost.

Now, at the end of that part of the journey, we simply live here. We no longer struggle about where to live or how to live, but we just live. We work here. Aidan and Naomi race around the village on the weekends, checking in with us every couple of hours before disappearing with a pack of their friends into the park or down to someone’s house. We garden. The chickens make funny noises and lay eggs. Our house is constantly filled with people, our family, our friends, the lovely WWOOFERs who come and stay, the sometimes-mostly-unknown acquaintances who find themselves in our guest room, pondering the Tasman sea from their air bed.

I wonder how readers out there think about the sacrifices they’ve made to get to where they are, and how you even think about “sacrifice” on your way from here to there, or whether it’s all just called “life” and the choices we make. Today I’m watching perfect sky, brilliant waves, sparkling green hills. I’m inside, working hard on the billions of deadlines coming my way (you can check out a big part of my work at shiftingthinking.org). Is this a sacrifice? A joy? Or just one lucky woman, living life as hard as she can?

Pictures today are of last night, and of the “spring show” (these are mostly posted for John and Sheena who were as mystified about what that would be as I was. And also to John and Sheena—sorry about the beautiful sunset pictures 30 hours after your departure. Come back and next time there will be beautiful sunsets while you’re actually here!)

Down the garden path

2009-10-18T18:12:00.004+13:00

I am a city girl. For 6 years in Cambridge, my “garden” was a trio of windowboxes which grew in the deep shade. Struggling herbs, trailing lamium, colourful begonias and impatiens. For five more years in DC, my garden was a plot, steeply sloping toward the house, 20 feet by 40 feet. When we bought that house, there was a parking pad on a third of the lawn and a deck over the other two thirds. We ripped out the deck, jack-hammered up the pad, and had a postage stamp of grass under the enormous maple tree for the children and the puppy to play on. When we first came to New Zealand and lived on Ocean Road, my garden was a stunning mixture of tropical plants and perennials and succulents—but I never touched it. The combination of the foreignness of the plants and the root shock of my own transplant kept me looking at the garden but not engaging with it at all.

And then there is the garden here. Eighteen months ago, after we moved into this house, I went down to the wild and beautiful garden, and I wept. I would never, ever be able to handle the size and scope of this mysterious thing. I couldn’t even tell which of the overgrown green bits were weeds, which green bits were for keeping. Then Keith came over and when I asked about which plants I should plant where, he talked about changing the slope of the terraces. Changing the slope? I wasn’t even sure how to handle the slope I had. Changing the slope seemed impossible to me. I wept again. I would never ever figure this thing out and we were totally out of money to pay people to figure it out for us. My garden was destined to be a disaster, and I hated that.

I got my head around the first slope change and Michael and I spent days digging and wheelbarrowing and moving dirt, well, sand really. But the thing which had been slightly clear in my head became clearer, and I began to build up some levels and take out others. We have endlessly been moving dirt and sand, bringing in compost, building up some levels and taking off other levels. And bits of it take shape.

I have never understood why it was people loved to garden so much. My tiny spaces, which required almost no effort on my part, were just right. A large garden seemed time consuming and unpleasant, dirty and tiring. I figured a city girl like me wasn’t much meant for making gardens work. Except it turns out it is a joy to build new walls and move plants and cut down trees. Who knew this was for me? I’m an adult develomentalist. I do leadership development and organisational change. I’m used to slight shifts in sensemaking over long periods of time which I measure with careful and sensitive metrics because the shifts will be so small.

But in my garden three or four people can transform a path or move a tree or plant all the veggies in just a couple of hours. In an afternoon, I can build stone walls which change the way everything looks. I can move enough dirt to change the slope of a hill and then, if I don’t like it, I can move it back. Mistakes are fixable, seeds bear fruit, and when things die, you just go and get something else to put in its place.

In my regular work, I have worked for years to get competent, to think many steps ahead, to be able to picture what 200 people might find most interesting to talk about four hours into the conference. In my garden, I am blissfully, beautifully, delightedly incompetent. I can hardly think through the single step I’m on, much less the thing I might do next. I move piles of dirt from this place into another and then decide it was better where it was. I plant trees too close together and then have to dig them up and start again. I uproot the good flowers and tend the weeds. During the week, it is all about my brain and my words—can I think my way around this issue, communicate well about that plan, write carefully about this idea. On the weekend, it is my body and my eyes. Can I lift that piece of concrete over there to stack for a wall, can I feel the slope of the path under my fingers, can I get the plants far enough apart to be healthy, close enough together to be lovely.

Last weekend I woke up at 6am, butterflies in my stomach, thrilled about moving a hill and adding a path. I gardened until I was sore and filthy and could almost not move. On Monday I hobbled to work and left the garden alone. This weekend, I was at it again in the rain and the sun, the wind and the birdsong. Now the path curves down the way I like it, the tree ferns glow in dappled sun, and I feel like a sculptor of the land and the greens. I do not understand my love of this garden, and I feel delighted with my not understanding. I move my fingers along, half a step at a time, and feel my way into a greener future.

pictures today:
Michael hanging laundry about a year ago, pre-garden work; post deck/pre lawn; today, new path; Julie and Julia and their grand accomplishment--the major hydrangea removal; the path where the hydrangea used to be; the veggie patch as of today

Another reason I love living in this village

2009-10-16T09:07:00.003+13:00

From the "notices" section in the school newsletter today:
• Missing – a goose from Ames Street. Any sightings please call _________

While it has been raining steadily--and often with a passion--for what seems like forever, it's still hard not to be in love with this life....

Tsunami

2009-09-30T16:34:00.002+13:00

For all of you who might be worried about us here on the beach in New Zealand after the massive earthquake in Samoa, the quick news is that all of us are fine. There was excitement this morning as the tsunami alert went out, and we watched with some concern as coastal areas on both sides of the country were evacuated in anticipation of a possibly damaging wave. We made rules about staying close to the house and not walking on the beach until the warning was over. I was distracted enough to leave the oil out of the pumpkin muffins, creating extra snacks for the chickens, and Rob stayed out of the water even though J was surfing all morning.

The real anguish and misery, of course, is for our South Pacific neighbours in Samoa, where one hundred are feared dead and thousands will be displaced. In tiny countries, death and disorder on this scale will affect everyone, and our thoughts and wishes (and our donations) go out to everyone affected by this. This is another night to hug your children harder, tell people you love them, and know that each moment we live on this planet is a gift.

The world’s a stage

2009-09-27T08:31:00.003+13:00

This week has been all about performances. As always, I’ve been both living the life here, and also watching some of the differences between what life feels like in this little country at the bottom of the world, and what it might have felt like in the enormous country from which I’ve come.

First, the Paekakariki school performance. It was film festival week. In term 3 (the one that moves from winter into spring and lands us with a gasp now at spring break, here in this first day off of daylight savings time), all the kids make movies at school. They write scripts, film, do voice-overs. And at the end of it all, there’s a film festival where parents and kids crowd into the school hall to watch and admire. The parents are shoulder-to-shoulder in the room, sitting in folding chairs stacked on homemade risers, standing by the wall and in the hall way, busy behind the counter selling things at the make-shift concessions stand. They hold glasses of red wine and, as the evening wears on and the room heats up, the bodies like a furnace and the driving rain outside foreclosing on the idea of letting the winter back in, eat ice creams. The kids are squashed into a mass on the floor, children ranging from 5 or 6 (the tiny kids are mostly in parents’ laps) to the giants of the room, the 12 and 13 year olds. Of course I notice that when we arrived, my kids were in the middle and low end, Aidan remarkable for his white blonde hair in the front row with the youngest kids and Naomi lost in the belly of the middle. Now Aidan is a middle kid, and Naomi is one of the giants, the wispy, grown up creatures who look out of place huddled on the floor with the little kids. And at the same time, I love having those big ones and the little ones together on the floor, together in the school. I love the way Naomi knows the names of all the 5-year-olds who have started school this year, that the family trees of their classmates branch out in all directions on the floor and in the seats.

The videos themselves range from the adorable to the slightly offensive. I flash back to my teacher-days and remember the times student work got out in a form I didn’t feel good about. There are adorable movies made by the littlest kids, wandering around and filming important places in the village. I imagine kids in DC heading out by Metro to do such a movie: here’s the White House, the Capitol, the Lincoln Memorial, the Pentagon. This week it was 6-year-olds heading out on foot with their own colour commentary. Here’s Campbell Park (with the fun slide), the tennis courts (“But it’s locked and we don’t have a key, but look at that cute cat stretching in the sun!”), the Dairy (“It’s my favourite place in the village because it sells lollies and milk”). There were interviews with important community members, like the man who owns the Dairy and the woman who helps the kids plant seeds and trees at the school. There was a video of the whale who came a month or so ago, interspersed with on-the-scene-interviews with eye-witnesses (Q: What was your favourite part of seeing the whale? A: I liked it when all the kids yelled, “It’s a whale! It’s a whale” every time we saw the whale.”)

Then there’s was Aidan’s class’s video, lovingly produced by his teacher, the beautiful Miss Flighty who looks as though she’s stepped out of a Roald Dahl book. It was a complex piece of work, beginning with two children finding a time machine in an unused school closet, progressing through to their conversation with the principal (played by their principal) in which he entrusts them to care for his “lucky undies,” a pair of enormous tighty-whities with “I love unicorns” painted on them in the finest 8-year-old print. The undies are thrown into the time machine and students are enlisted to go and retrieve them. They head backwards in time to the cave people, wearing rags and swinging in the trees: no undies. They head forwards in time to a robot wedding, all the guests with metallic hair and silvery clothes: no undies. Then they stumble into WWII, where two English officers (one of them a blonde boy with a rather Americanised English accent) are having tea and noticing vaguely that they’re about the lose the war. Then—miracle—the undies fall on Hitler’s head, killing him. The English officers say “hurrah, hurrah,” very calmly and properly, and pour themselves another cup of tea. The undies are retrieved and end up over the head of the mean and nasty teacher (NOT played by the beautiful Miss Flighty). Forgive the plot synopsis for a movie written and performed by 8 and 9-year olds, but seriously, this thing would NEVER have happened in DC. The combination of the worldly nature of the settings, the willingness of a silly and supportive principal to be part of the fun, the clever cultural comedy written in by the children themselves—ah, it was a delightful and funny piece of film.

It was also performance week at Naomi’s ballet school, and for that we piled in the car and headed up the coast to the Southwards Car Museum, which has an auditorium in addition to the historic cars, and watched endless girls in endless sparkly costumes race around the stage, their hands held gracefully aloft. This too, was classically Kiwi. The tired museum made a fitting back drop: carpet nearly as antique as the cars, spaces quirky and somewhat grim (not worn enough to do-over, you might imagine someone saying, but the orange and browns anchoring the last decoration at right around the day of my birth). The dancers were what you’d expect in any common place dance recital—a mix of talent levels and body shapes—only more so, as befits this tiny country. Like the school, these dancers had a huge age range—probably 3 to 18—and so one act would be tiny girls in purple tutus wandering, bewildered, around the stage, and the next act would be teenagers in silver hot pants doing a pulsing, sexualised hip-hop song. It was both lovely and occasionally disconcerting (and, above all, it was long long long). The little girls in garish stage make up and buns plastered tightly on their heads reminded me of my time in ballet a thousand years ago, racing around backstage at the Kennedy Center as I waited for my bit parts in the Nutcracker. What a different life this is for my children! What a strange and foreign world theirs is—or mine was.

And after each performance, we come home to the sound of the sea roaring. We are blinded by the sun on affrontingly-green hills. We gather chicken eggs from our back yard each morning (now two a day!). Today we’ll say goodbye to our current Dutch WOOFer and welcome the newcomers—two friends, one German, one Danish, travelling together. Ally and Jane will come for dinner. This life has shades of what our DC life might have—film festivals and ballet recitals, spring break and sleepovers. But each of those elements—like the seasons themselves—are topsy turvy here. We have passed the equinox now, so that the sun is spending its time warming my part of the world rather than the northern part. And while most of me knows that the chilly September gives way to the warming October and often-swimmable November, there is still at least a part of me which believes I will wake up on one wintery December day, lying in my bed in DC and hearing the sirens in the distance—almost as rhythmic as waves—and I will roll over with that bleary sorrow I sometimes get on waking. “Hey Michael, I just had the wildest dream! I dreamt that we bought a house on the beach in New Zealand…”

seal of delight

2009-09-04T20:34:00.001+12:00

The seal pup was nearly as surprised to see us as we were to see her. Michael and I were walking Perry down the beach—we can do that again, now that the mornings are lighter with the lengthening of the day—and then suddenly Perry was barking, and there, racing for the sea, was a tiny seal pup. We yelled and yelled for Perry to come back, to leave this potential playmate alone, and he did, reluctantly heading back to us. The pup, now nearly in the sea, looked at us, eyes wide and alarmed. She stood up on her front and back flippers, lightly balancing, ready to race into the sea and away from us. She seemed so improbable, front flippers so big and unwieldy, back flippers oddly small, the whole body out of balance. I knew that she would be graceful and sleek in the water, but on land she was awkward and misshapen somehow, and undeniably not of my world.

Michael, running late for the train, took Perry home as I stayed and watched the seal on the empty beach. The dog gone, she ventured away from the water, slowly making her way up the narrow, high-tide beach. It felt to me like she was walking right up to me to check me out, and I had this odd burst of wanting to please her, wanting to do something that would make her feel welcome and happy here on the sand. She walked right up to me, and we stood and watched each other. Her fur was damp and matted, her ears looked like they were designed more for style than substance. And her eyes! Her eyes took up most of her head, huge dark orbs. They looked sad or curious or thoughtful or any of a thousand other emotions I might pretend to have seen. Filled with expression, mysterious, impenetrable with no discernable pupils. I was breathless as she started to walk again, nearly brushing against me as she made her way back up to the sea wall to rest her chin on the wall, and close her eyes. Every maternal instinct pulled me to pick her up, cradle her in my arms, dry her fur and feed her some tuna, and at the same time she was so wildly foreign. I remembered the slogan on the back of a DoC truck at the last workshop: “Seals need rest, not rescuing.” And I watched her closer her eyes and sigh against her wooden pillow.

I walked home and googled it to see what I should do, and learnt that I did just what I was supposed to do, that no one needed to be notified, that no intervention needed to be planned. Seals are wild creatures, beautiful, fascinating, the websites said, and this is weaning time when the pups are making it out on their own.

I came home to the first egg from my chickens, a day of writing in my garden, and phone calls with interesting people from around the world. Sometimes I almost feel like I’m living in paradise. And then there are the days when I’m sure of it.

What i saw on my dog walk this morning

2009-09-03T09:12:00.002+12:00

This morning, as Michael and I were walking the dog on the beach, we saw a funny movement. This is the fellow we saw, scooting down the beach after taking a snooze. Keith says that the seal pups are weaning and that they're alone and tired. These storms the past few days must be hard on them. I sat and watched this one a long time, as she decided not to go back in to the water afterwards, as she walked up the sand next to me, stopping three or four inches away from me and looking at me for a long time, and then heading to the edge of the beach where she could rest her head on the sea wall. I am the luckiest woman in the entire world.

Oh, and, this morning my chickens gave me my first egg. The world is springing with life and love and gifts abundantly. What a beautiful life.

(PS she looks sleepy in the pictures because she was falling asleep while we went and got the camera--and Aidan.)

August birthday down under

2009-08-30T20:22:00.001+12:00

looks like this...

Spouting with joy

2009-08-21T12:12:00.004+12:00

I know it has been rather bloggy lately with all these entries after something of a drought, but this needed to be talked about. Keith and I were in my little garden study this morning, growly with each other because we have at least four days of content we’re trying to fit into a three-day programme next week. Suddenly, a knock on the door: Rob, telling us that there was a whale in the sea. Now, Rob is notorious for saying, excitedly, “Look! Right now! Look! No whales again!” And you find yourself looking out the window, to see the no-whales. So I was doubtful. “A real whale?” I asked. “Swimming between us and Kapiti,” he told us. “Everyone’s lined up on the beach to watch.”

And so we rushed out of the writing room, not growly anymore. There, on a perfectly flat azure sea, was what looked for all the world like quite a big log. I admit that I wondered whether Rob was pulling our leg again. But no, there were dozens of people on the shore, watching the log excitedly. And then the log blew, plumes of sea water spraying into the air.

We stood there, the three of us with a wandering Perry, on my front porch in the dazzling warm sunlight, sharing the binoculars and the camera. Everyone was perfectly him or herself: Rob paged through a cooking magazine and glanced up to see a tail or head; Keith struggled to figure out what kind of whale it was, muttering under his breath (“yes, it’s a Southern Right Whale, look at its head. But no, do they have a dorsil fin? Too big to be an orca.”); I stood there feeling delighted, eyes glued to the whale, and tried to think of the words and pictures to tell you all about it here. Then, onto the sea, a surfer began to paddle; our friend John was heading out to the whale to get a close up view. And then the delighted laughter of children as the kids’ school rushed down onto the field next to our house. Now the whale had a sound track; whenever she blew or pushed head or fin or tail into the air, there were delighted sounds of children. People pulled their cars over and got out to watch, came out and stood on porches and roofs, stopped walking their dogs or jogging or talking with friends and all turned and faced the sea, eyes fixed on a mother and her baby slowly moving down the coast.

Very often, you read about tragedy bringing neighbours together. You hear about people striking up conversations after a terrorist attack, after an earthquake, after a fire. Here, though, the village stopped to watch something so beautiful and noble and, in some ways, so ordinary. From my perch on a hill over the village, I looked out over friends and neighbours and school children and felt a surge of connection with them all. “We are the luckiest people in the world!” I wanted to yell. “Do you know how lucky we are, to be here in the sunshine with each other? Do you know how lucky we are, to be living on the edge of the sea, on the edge of the world? Do you know how lucky we are, to be graced with the presence of a mammal so large, so beautiful, so much like us and so wildly different?”

I did not say those things. I stood and held myself tightly, worried just a little that in the sun and the sea and the whales and all the love around me, I might melt into the golden air and drift off over the water.

Click here for a little newspaper piece about the whales.

The pleasures and trials of life at the bottom of the world

2009-08-20T08:58:00.001+12:00

This morning, my second day back, I am vibrating with the tiny joys and sorrows of being here and not waking in the US summer this morning.
The sorrows:

That I cannot walk over and read aloud to my father, whose hurt eye was more hurt than we thought and who is now supposed to rest and heal for more than a month

That I have to schedule calls with my mother weeks in advance to be sure that we’ll get time together;

That I didn’t buy regular Cheerios and now the kids are Cheerio-free for another four months;

That I didn’t see all the folks I didn’t see—and that I won’t see them, either, not any time soon.

The joys:

The sounds of my chickens, the blooming of my new camellia, the shoots of spring bulbs;

Stepping back into my work life here with a workshop yesterday and hearing about the impact of the leadership development programme Keith and I are running and how it is rippling through the organisation in powerful and beautiful ways;

Waking in the middle of the night (just a little jetlagged) and finding that my room had turned into a planetarium and that my walls were made of stars;

Walking home from throwing the ball for the dog and surprising a flock of gold finches who rose into the sky, yellow breasts sparkling in the sun;

Seeing the South Island emerge from the morning mist slowly, slowly, until it was so hulking and solid that I could hardly believe it was ever missing at all;

The promise of dinner with Melissa on the weekend;

Holding hot tea in one hand and Naomi’s hand in the other as I walked the kids to school this morning, our conversation punctuated by the rhythm of the sea, the music of their laughter, the song of the tuis in the trees.

Where we've been and where we're going

2009-08-18T07:31:00.004+12:00

Quickly, from the koru club in the airport. I'm not sure why the US airlines can't manage clubs like this one. Zowie. and I'm looking out at a lovely dawn, over harbour to hills in the distance. Yesterday it was summer and we ate fresh berries with our cereal. Today it is winter, and while this is a lovely club, canned peaches were our only fruit.

Yesterday we took pictures of our past (this house pictured here, our first house, now on the market again in Augusta), our present (my dad and Jamie's house where we stayed this last week) and our future (?) the house we're going back to and the sign which greeted us upon our arrival in the Auckland airport. Naomi said, "They put up a sign to welcome us!" and so they did.

Summer rain

2009-08-13T02:38:00.002+12:00

The rain falls straight down from the sky here, in grey, pattering drops. We’re in the middle of a southern summer storm, after having the rolling thunder threaten for the last 18 hours or so. The sandy soil will pull in the rain, the red clay will bleed it off, and we will have some relief from the heavy hot air which has been pregnant with this possibility since we arrived in Augusta on Saturday night.

If it has been a long time since I’ve written here, it’s because my mind is so full the words won’t unfurl themselves from the others swirling around—and sometimes my mind is so empty there are no words to find. This trip home, to DC and then to Augusta, has been alternately fast and furious and slow and spacious. I have slept in many beds, seen many (but not enough) friends and family, and now am in the slow and gracious south (what Keith rejects as the south and calls the “upper-middle” believing that Kiwis know something about being in the real south).

In each of these places, we are not simply reconnecting with family and old friends, but we are finding bits of ourselves—real and imagined. Here in Augusta there are many people who were at our wedding 18 years ago, who have been in my life since I was Naomi’s age. Hearing our story come out of their mouths sounds absurd. When someone drawls slowly, “So are y’all still living in New Zealand?” I want to laugh at the absurdity of it. “Are y’all still living on Saturn?” would sound just as unlikely.

My father is discovering a new life. Whenever Jamie or Michael or I have that kind of sharp intake of breath that comes with an unexpected email or a forgotten to-do item, he smiles serenely. “That feeling you’re having right now, with the tight belly?” he says, “I don’t have that anymore.” On this, his official twelfth day of retirement, he is loving his new spaciousness and thinking only vaguely of the future.

I am discovering, uncovering, imagining a new life too, although mine comes with a tension in the belly. I hear stories of vague acquaintances from long ago and hear their stories tangentially. My friend from high school is moving to Central America for a year to give her kids an international experience. Someone has cancer. There are divorces, adopted children, little kids who are suddenly teenagers and driving. If you stay in a place for a long time, it weaves through you and becomes a part of who you are—and you become a part of who it is. Dad, who has lived in this house for almost 30 years now, is so woven into the fabric of this place that we can’t drive out of the grocery store parking lot without hearing, “Congratulations!” or “We’ll miss you so much, Dr. Garvey!” People look at me earnestly when he’s out of earshot and say in hushed tones, “Well, I probably don’t need to tell you how deeply sad we are that your dad is going. This place won’t be the same without him.” And it won’t, couldn’t be.

So the tightness in my belly comes from having an exciting and beautiful life that I love and wondering about what we’ve lost by not staying in our house on McDowell Street, two blocks from here, and having babies and teaching at Davidson for the last 20 years. The tightness comes from wondering about whether I’ve been woven enough into the fabric of anything or whether I’m a patchwork, leaving behind patchy memories in a mostly-unbroken pattern of life before and after me.

And none of this is the tight belly of real regret. I have a life so good that it makes me want to weep, and a kaleidoscope of experiences and delights which I couldn’t possibly regret. I know, though, watching these old friends now, a little greyer, a little heavier, watching my vibrant and wonderful father pack his office, pull his awards down from his wall, and give away his books—this life is all we’ve got. This one time is time enough only to stay planted for a life time OR to wander around and end up in paradise. There is time only to live a lifetime in Georgia, a lifetime in Maryland OR a lifetime finding your joy at the end of an airplane ride. I admire the choices my father has made and the choices I have made. But I cannot make them all.

And so this week I celebrate my Dad and his stability, his deep, woven contribution to the community and the college. And at the end of that celebration, I’ll get on a plane and soar home to my house on the sea in another season, another hemisphere, another south. I can feel good about my choices and regret them at the same time, just as I feel good about this rain and wish we could be out picking peaches. Life is overflowing with beauty and joy and sadness. The one moment we can be sure about is this one, the murmuring of my kids in the next room, the sound of my father’s clock ticking, the sound of rain on the roof. All of our choices arise and fall away, sinking into the sandy soil or running off the red clay, leaving rivers like blood over time.

back in the USA

2009-08-11T04:55:00.003+12:00

We're more than a week in to our US trip. The Maryland time was a whirlwind--staying with Michael's sister and her family, then to my mother's place and time with her (and a slick new haircut for Naomi). There was a fast trip for me to NYC to do a piece of work I really liked with people I really liked, and then an airplane down to Georgia to spend time with my father and stepmom.

We have been surrounded by people we love and we have missed we have seen cousins growing up--and even seen animals at the zoo who are growing up. We are connecting with the lives we used to have--driving through our old neighbourhood in DC, past our old house in Georgia, re-living old lives, re-hugging old friends, re-telling stories of our life in New Zealand.

All of this both brings back memories of what we used to have--and also brings up memories of imagined futures we never had. Once I thought I'd spend my life in Augusta; once I thought I'd spend my life in DC. Now I'm not sure where I'll spend my life, but neither DC nor Augusta seem to be all that likely. And so we give long hugs, listen urgently, try to soak in as much of this life as we can. We soak in and in and in, basking in the hot summer sun here, so that we can be full of these people and these places in our lovely, wintery home.

Seal of approval

2009-07-12T21:53:00.003+12:00

We spent the weekend over the Rimutaka range in the Wairapa, and visited the southern-most tip of the North Island, where there is a huge seal colony. We sang happy birthday to Aidan over a chocolate croissant at a French bakery this morning, and jiggled over a swing bridge in the pouring rain this afternoon. Delight beyond measure.

Aidan's mihi

2009-07-09T18:20:00.003+12:00

A mihi is the way you introduce yourself in Maori. You tell a little bit about yourself so they know where you're from and they can tell who your ancestors are. You need to say your waka (the canoe you arrived in New Zealand), your marae, your family, and your village. Aidan and Naomi have been learning their mihi in kapa haka, and here is the result.

Kiwichooks

2009-07-04T17:10:00.001+12:00

My Kiwi friends think this is silly, but I think some of my US folks may never have seen backyard chooks before. So here they are!

Theorising change

2009-07-02T10:14:00.003+12:00

Another satisfying sunset, this one from above the clouds which have been our near-constant companions these last wintery weeks. I am on the flight from Rotorua to Wellington, having finished speaking at a hui (=meeting) today. I am feeling full and satisfied (in a more spiritual than physical sense as I haven’t eaten much).

Today I talked with people at the School Support Services, a conglomeration of folks who sit alongside teachers and principals and try to help them improve their practice in one way or another. I didn’t want to do another keynote, but the people here were most persistent and convinced me I really was the right person for this—and that it wouldn’t be just another keynote, but was instead a chance for deep engagement. And they were right! What a lovely bunch of people and what fun we had today!

But the thing I’ve been teaching about today is William Bridges, and I’ve gone back and reread his books in preparation for the workshop. As I led the group through their thinking about the endings in their life and their work and into the neutral zone, I couldn’t help but be so grateful that I have made it through to the other side of the neutral zone and into a more settled place. I’m watching what has helped me reach into this new space to see whether there is theorising to be done that comes from my own experience.

So I think you could make a qualitative analysis of this blog and look at issues of control (and letting go) and power and powerlessness and new ways of getting and staying grounded in a new place (sunset now blood-orange, deep and luminous and impossibly beautiful on the horizon with inky black-blue sky with first stars hovering to take over once the orange is done showing off). I think I have been waiting in hibernation for the new possibility of this place to emerge—which it has, these last months.

Bridges tells us that the first step in a transition is mourning those things which have ended—a letting go. The second step is moving into the neutral zone and being uncertain about where you might be going next or what the future might hold. In my experience, that was another form of letting go, a way of watching without being attached to particular outcomes—or even being attached to the finding of particular outcomes. It was all an exercise in groundlessness, in letting go and getting my legs used to not having the solid land underneath me. It was all open an amorphous and wonderfully and terrifyingly full of possibility.

I notice that the physical metaphors of tide coming and going, moon waxing and waning, seasons changing—all of these rhythms held me. I could believe tomorrow would be better than a disastrous today because the southerly would blow in and be freezing and terrifying and then blow out and leave the air more crisp than I knew air could be. What would this transition have been like in a more urban space, or an uglier one? How to people manage to get through these difficult psychological spaces without the grounding of natural rhythms? Surely I would have made it through all my other life transitions without thinking of the tide or the moon. But here they were central to my making it through.

I’m also beginning to believe that in that space, the house renovation—a tactile way to progress through all these stages—was a balm for me. There were times when the house was ripped to shreds and money was leaking out the gaping windowless walls, but the solid metaphor of house coming undone, being terribly ugly, and then coming together again—this physical process mirrored the emotional process of watching my life get pared down to the stud beams, agonising over where to put walls and doors, and finally building it up again. (If only Dave could have been the chippy on my personal reconstruction plan, which I undertook without general contractor or permits from the Council.) Before we even moved into this house, I knew where all of the light switches would be and what it would feel like to knead bread at the counter. The house was made up in my head before it was made up in the physical world, and moving in just completed the metaphor for me. Talk about a visioning of the future that I was moving toward; I dreamt the house and now dream in the house.

But there is learning and relearning in the new beginnings space too. Now the job isn’t letting go, but reclaiming. Reclaiming a sense of what we could all do together, of what is possible. Reclaiming a sense of direction and focus. Reclaiming an idea of what I’m intentionally building rather than moving aimlessly with the tides. Here there are decisions to be made. Too much opportunity is overwhelming; too much plenty creates scarcity.

Here the metaphor moves out into the garden. Rather than simply wandering through the garden and feeling overwhelmed, I am making firm decisions. Walking through the garden with Sergio the magnificent WWOOFer last week, I waved vaguely at things that needed weeding. “What about this?” he asked, pointing to the monkey grass clumps. Hmm. That monkey grass was planted intentionally—lovingly, perhaps—by someone who used to live here, and it’s thrived in the shaded damp places outside my writing room. And I have left it there for the sake of the person who planted it and because something thriving should just be left to thrive. It turns out, though, that maybe that was a neutral zone perspective. You see, I hate monkey grass, wouldn’t plant it myself, and would be delighted if it all died. “Pull it all out,” I told Sergio with some force. “All this?” he asked. I got down on my knees in the dirt and began digging, digging into the sandy soil. “All of it,” I told him, hands clutched around the tuberous roots. “This is my garden, and I hate that stuff.” More letting go, this time of something I can take a stand and say I don’t want.

And thus I come to the paradox. All of life is about letting go, all of life is about holding on. These are the rhythms of our living and our growing and our dying. So the phases of transition as Bridges describes them are more about the life energy from which these rhythms emerge rather than any particular pattern (like my earlier belief that a time of endings is about letting go and a time of new beginnings is about holding on). When I feel clear about which things to hold on to and which things to let go of, I experience the holding on and letting go as lovely punctuation marks in my day—I am making a beginning and moving in an intentional direction. When I am lost and bewildered and unanchored, I experience them as inside an agony of potential regret—the ending and neutral zone spaces. The new beginning is giving me clarity of purpose and decisions, confidence and faith that the direction I pick now is the best one for me at this time, based on the current image I have of the future. Before that new beginning emerges, my decisions come out of a wandering space, and without principled reasons for my decisions, there’s every possibility that I’ll come to regret later a decision I made without clear principles today.

There’s learning here, just out of the corner of my eye, and it’s now too late and I’ve been yammering on too long to hold on to it. I will take the lovely gift given to me by the people I worked with today—and the card inscribed in te reo Maori and in English—and I will know with some satisfaction that on this day, I made decisions which led me in directions I feel good about. And I’ll return on the train to my monkey-grass-free garden and hear the gentle murmurs of the chickens in the distance and know that however I might describe this pattern, there is joy woven through it.

ps pictures today are before and after of the top part of the back yard, and, of course, the chooks (Joy in the front, Cocoa behind, and Star poking her head around the henhouse in the back)

Home again

2009-06-24T21:11:00.002+12:00

Ok, so it's not Sydney. And, in fact, it wasn't the most fantastic day in the world either. But the tide rolls in and out, turning the beach to a mirror. And the sun rises and then sets, turning the clouds salmon. And even exercising the dog becomes an experience of beauty and joy (regular readers will notice that it's my house behind me--and mirrored in the sand in front of me--as I throw the ball for the dog). It's beautiful to be home.

Loving Sydney

2009-06-23T21:03:00.001+12:00

I’m trying to figure out why I love Sydney so much. I have loved this city since I first stepped foot in it four years ago, and this morning walking to this Subject-Object workshop I’m running, I found myself with the kind of silly smile I often have on my face when I’m here.

Some of it may be context. I’ve come to Sydney this time to take a certification programme (for the Leadership Circle 360 instrument) and to teach an Subject-Object Interview workshop. In both of these workshops, I get to hang out with smart and interesting people asking important questions about how do we help support people—others and ourselves—to grow. And specifically in the SOI workshops I have run here so often this past year, I get three days of totally interesting conversations about human sensemaking, and I learn and learn and learn.

So Sydney is a place I do not live but come to visit, it is a place where I spend my days in workshop rooms with interesting people doing work I love, and my evenings out to dinner with people I’m deepening relationships with, and my nights in quiet hotel rooms with only my own thoughts for company. I walk along the most beautiful waterfront, watch the rainbow-coloured parrots in the trees, and savour the best Thai Basil Tofu I’ve ever tasted. I am fully alive here.

I have been particularly cheerful this week. It has been hard being away from home this time, and the weather has been utter crap, raining constantly. I have worked too hard and slept too little. And still, my life feels so rich with possibilities that I can hardly believe it’s my life. I think I am noticing especially where I have come to since moving to New Zealand, and how fantastic it is not to be in the transitional space I’ve been in for so so long. I love the work I do in Sydney, I’m excited about the new connections and new practice field I’ve found this week, and I’m thrilled to be going home tonight to cuddle with my children, kiss my husband and pet my chickens.

kapa haka video

2009-06-14T16:38:00.000+12:00

Ok, here it is at last, a decent view of Aidan and Naomi, kapa haka-ing. This performance was to launch a book by a local Maori poet, and he read his poems in English, Maori, and accompanied by a variety of instruments he played. Magnificent. Sergio was surprised at all the passion and talent in the room.

Chooks at the end of the rainbow

2009-06-12T20:53:00.004+12:00

It was a dark and stormy afternoon. We had picked the children up at school, piled them with Sergio (our spectacular Spanish WWOOFer) in the back seat of the car. The children were scratchy; Michael was peckish. But the mission was at hand and not to be turned away from. It was chicken day at last.

Long-time readers will remember that I asked for chickens for my birthday last year and held out hope that they would be here when I arrived home from the European trip I took in May 2008. Alas, no chooks. Since then there have been hints and wishes and nags galore. No chooks. But as my birthday approached this year, Michael got a severe case of the guilts, and by 1 June 2009 there was a rough but nearly-finished chicken house. Then some back and forth with A and J’s neighbours who raise (and show) purebred chickens. We told them what we wanted—quiet chickens, good with children, good layers. They told us what we’d get: a Rhode Island Red, a blue Orpington, and a black Orpington.

On the way north, through the driving rain, I tried to figure out why I had wanted chickens so badly, why I had nagged and moaned about them for so long. At first, it was in the panic of the beginning of the recession, the Ocean Rd house not selling, the never-ending house renovation bills. I was wanting to conserve and save. We turn our kitchen scraps into nasty smelly compost; what if we could turn them into something seriously wonderful?? Rob brought us fresh eggs from the places where he was house sitting, and the idea was, er, hatched.

Many weekends ago this stopped being a cost-effective pursuit. How long will it take to save $500 on eggs? I’m guessing a long time. And so I was feeling silly when we pulled up to the old shed in TeHoro and ran through the rain to huddle with the owner, chickens stacked in cages all around us, many more strutting proudly at our feet.

The chicken keeper, E, was matter of fact about these creatures all around her. All those in cages were getting ready to go to another fancy poultry show on the weekend, and she had been working to clean and primp them for their moment in the limelight. Our chickens sat squished in a cage like the others, maybe twice as big as I had thought chickens were.

“What do we need to know about these guys?” we asked. “How, for example, do you feed them/pick them up/take care of them?”

“It’s all common sense,” she said (a theme she’d come back to rather frequently), and then she told us about mites and scales and lice (can you BELIEVE there are more ways for me to have to deal with LICE??? The deal was almost off right then). She told us to feed them protein (they love cheese and yogurt) and good quality food. She told us to paint their perches with kerosene to keep the nasties out. Never hold them by the wings. Fresh water every day. Common sense. Our minds were spinning.

And then I finally got up the nerve to hold the grey one. Ahh, she’s soft like velvet and gentle, making the rumbling noises that don’t sound anything like the way this city girl imagined chickens might sound. I held her close and scratched at her feathers (no lice though) and maybe started to fall in love with her. And then with the brown one. And then with the black one as they came out of the cage to be introduced.

This was no time to be sentimental, though. The chickens were shoved into cardboard boxes (seriously, it looked almost like a magic trick) and we carried them unceremoniously to the trunk/boot of the car. Once home, we walked to the new coop and opened the boxes and suddenly there they were—our new girls. These creatures are not the money-saving food-producers I once imagined (in fact, these girls are young and won’t lay eggs for months, much to the chagrin of Sergio, who is leaving at the end of July). But they are our pets now, and I am already shockingly attached to them. We went out to visit them in the dark and fretted over whether the perches were enough and if they liked celery (no and who knows).

We picked Paekakariki New Zealand, in part, because it is as different from our former life as we could ever imagine. Now our house by the sea (unimaginable) with my little writing cottage out the back (unimaginable) has three chickens: the brown one (Cocoa, named by Naomi), the grey one (Star, named by Aidan) and the black one—Joy. We have a house by the sea and a coop full of Joy. We have a dog at the end of the rainbow. It is a beautiful strange life here in the wintery June. Next time you’re around, Gentle Reader, stop by for some poached eggs and a cuddle in our menagerie.

Scenes from a winter birthday

2009-06-06T10:00:00.004+12:00

The cold snap continues. I sit in front of the fire swathed in merino, fleece, and occasionally cashmere. I work proposals at NZCER and with Keith, I plug away at my book (about which the publisher is asking) and play Pictionary with the kids. I work in my writing shed (but do not write there enough) and negotiate chores with the children. I am too busy, working too much, but loving it all the same. Note to self: it takes about 2.5 years in a new place to achieve the same kind of over-the-top busyness of the place I've left behind to get away from it. I bet in a US city, that time would be cut by 75%.

So no stories today but pictures from the Queen's Birthday (observed). Sunset and rainbows at the end of the day, cake and cupcake decorating, cake delivery at the party and me, after the party, overcome with delight about the present Melissa gave me (her band's CD--to check them out, click here) while wearing the fantastic scarf J and A gave me. Not a bad beginning to the last year of an era for me...

snowy june

2009-05-31T17:27:00.005+12:00

I think of preparing for my birthday party in the hot of Georgia, the lovely warmth of DC, the first summer delights of Cambridge. Here, though, as we have cleaned and chopped and prepped, it has SNOWED here, which is a rare and wondrous thing. So, some pictures of nearly-June to cool off my northern hemispheric friends...

Pictures are of snow on the hill near our house, and kids reading on a cold day--and one of Aidan outside, scooping snow off the car (which is the only place to get snow when it's all melting away). I hope where ever you are, it's toasty and lovely.

(Un)American

2009-05-26T10:14:00.007+12:00

It has been a time of odd and lovely experiences which show us the expat life in stark relief. In this week of shockingly bad weather, with near-freezing temperatures, gale-force winds, and horizontal rains, we have been clear that we are not in Kansas (or, er Washington DC) anymore.

One of the things expats do is get introduced to other expats in the same way that single folk are always getting fixed up by their partnered friends. “Oh, I know another American couple! We have got to get you folks together!” Or there’s the I-know-someone-in-New-Zealand thing that gets us lovely new connections from Americans who have never stepped foot in this country but know people who are making the long journey across the sea. We have had two such meetings in 8 days—with two different couples from Chicago who have been introduced to us by different mutual friends. The ones last week were a quirky surprise. Our friends L and J had invited us to meet an American couple here for six months on a fellowship. When we walked into their kitchen, I was not shocked to see that I’d seen the man before, but I couldn’t place where. Was it at a meeting or conference in New Zealand’s small education community? At an event in New Zealand’s tiny education community? It was more of a shock when he placed us—we’d met in the US, sitting next to each other at the dinner at the New Zealand Ambassador’s house two years ago (you can read that blog here). To have a connection to someone from a New Zealand context is one thing, but to meet an American in the US and then bump into him here unexpectedly seems very unusual indeed. He’s an exec in the foundation that funded my doctorate, so I’d remember that dinner conversation for a long time. But I never imagined that the next time I’d see him would be at L and J’s house! It is a tiny world, criss-crossed by international threads.

The other thing expats can do is drink deeply of their new lives. In the last couple of days, we’ve had a deep drink. Sunday the kids performed in their first kapa haka. Some long term blog readers will remember the kapa haka we went to nearly two years ago, which astonished us (and rather terrified Aidan). (You can read that one here from 16 October 2007.) Now it’s my kids in front of the room with their feathers (Naomi) and beaded skirt (Aidan), swinging pois and beating chests. The house has been filled with Maori singing and chanting for the last 10 days in preparation for this, and Aidan stomps around the house with vigour while Naomi tries to get the singing, swinging, and stepping all aligned (makes me dizzy just to watch it). Seeing them in front of the group was so disorienting I could hardly process it. It is for experiences like this that people move to foreign countries, so their kids can have a bigger vision of the world. Watching my kids—Americans? immigrants? Expats?—participate in this magnificent indigenous ceremony was so moving that I could hardly make sense of it.

Somehow similar was last night when Rob had a party celebrating his permanent residence visa, which has been hard won and a long time coming. It was on a Monday night because that’s when folks in the restaurant industry are free, and so I rushed home from work to finish glazing the triple chocolate cheesecake and cleaning the house for the onslaught. It was a very Paekakariki event, with a full band setting up in our living room, the couch and chairs all pushed aside to make way for the drum kit and the amps. The sax player played in the doorway to the study; the bass guitarist next to the fireplace, and the singer in the centre of the new stage (formerly, the “living room”). We ate soup made from fish Dave had caught on the weekend, tortillas from masa Carolyn had brought on her last visit, and cheesecake I first made on a lovely Cambridge evening. The glass baubles vibrated, the children watched movies on laptops, and Perry barked to the most energetic beats. Now Rob is planted here in a different way too.

There is no hint of Memorial Day here (although we had Anzac Day so recently that the wreathes are still stacked in front of the memorial on the harbour), but next Monday we celebrate the Queen’s birthday—a commonwealth artifact that even the Brits themselves find quirky (they don’t celebrate her birthday). It happens that Monday is also my birthday, and that’s a day that crosses the oceans with me. It has marked the coming of summer and of winter, nearing the longest or the shortest days of the year. Still, there is something stable and grounding to know that wherever I happen to be now, I will always have been born on June 1st and to hope that wherever I happen to be on that day, I will have people I love around me. I am American and unAmerican. I am here and not there, granddaughter of immigrants and perhaps mother of immigrants. I have been on this tiny and fragile planet one more year, and I am grateful for all the perfection and paradox in my life.

pics today from kapa haka. I'll post party pics too (so you can see living room band) and try to upload video when I figure out how to do it on my mac!)

Happy birthday baby bro

2009-05-13T16:16:00.008+12:00

Ah, now that I'm blogging at work (on shiftingthinking.org) AND working hard on my book, it's harder to show up here. If there were particular things you readers wanted to know about life here, or particular things we wanted to talk together about, it would help to hear them. In the absence of that, here are a couple of stories and pictures, and I'll lead into them with this picture of the brick path I put in the back yard a couple of weeks ago. Pathways and new prospects for our garden...

First is Naomi at netball. We put up a hoop on our new back deck so that she could practice shooting. And she shoots and shoots and shoots. Last week our back corner neighbour, who has a daughter on Naomi's netball team, joked about how he had heard her shooting when he went down to collect the eggs on the corner of their property closest our house. He went back and reported to his daughter, still in bed, that Naomi was practicing. Instantly his daughter was up and shooting in her bathrobe on their deck, while Naomi shot baskets in her bathrobe on ours. At Naomi's first game, she got about 7 goals (=baskets) and had about a 50% shooting success rate. At her second game, she got about 14 and had close to 100% in the first three quarters. Gladwell tells us that practice is everything, and Naomi shooting baskets on the deck bears that out.

Second is my writing shed. The most recent WWOOFERs, who should be back in the US now (write to me and let me know you're safely home, ladies!), became part of the family effortlessly and made lovely changes to the house with their hard work. The best change was the painting of my writing shed, pictured here in all its periwinkle glory (and pre-WWOFERed in the picture above). It makes me happy to use my lovely little space, and it makes me happy to stand in the kitchen, deck, or garden and look at my lovely little space. So far I haven’t done heaps of WRITING in my lovely little space, but the WWOOFERs can’t be faulted for that!

Finally is Mother’s day. Here’s the breakfast Aidan made for me all by himself. I have read stories of women who cry when their kids bring them an unpalatable blend of non-breakfast items, but I’ve never actually BEEN such a woman. This year I came down from a morning workout to find Aidan spreading honey on toast for me. He picked the cherry tomatoes (ripening on our window sill) for colour, the breadstick as a treat (because those are uncommon at our house and we’d served them for dinner the night before), and the toast as the main course. I held him for a long time, tears rolling down my cheeks as I tried to figure out what was so moving about it all. It was his initiative to do something nice for me, the attention he paid to detail (the aesthetics and the food selection), the way he wanted me to be celebrated and happy. All of it done with such love and devotion, with an almost unbearable sweetness of spirit. Ah, the love of a child is shockingly precious.

I close with a picture of an ordinary night with an ordinarily extraordinary sunset. I hope all of you have enjoyed this day, my baby brother’s 21st birthday. I love you, little bro, the first child I ever loved so hard I thought my heart would break with the sheer scale of the love it had to contain. Now you’re taller than me, but my heart has grown to keep up. I hope it was a magical day.

springing into autumn

2009-05-01T21:43:00.003+12:00

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.

A link

2009-04-17T09:18:00.002+12:00

This is one of the most lovely NPR stories I've heard in a long time. Click here to enjoy

Braided

2009-04-14T21:55:00.006+12:00

Airplanes are amazing portals, and I’m trying to make sense of their power. On the one hand, the trip from Wellington to Washington is a slog. 26 hours of airports and airplanes, turbulence, bad food, aching back, hours standing in line or smashed into too-small seats. On the other hand, it is a full-on miracle that I can just shuffle from place to place, walking from terminal to gate or sitting in a chair, and at the end of a relatively tiny amount of time find myself across an ocean and a continent, in another hemisphere, with access to a whole other life and whole other sets of relationships and work. And really, now that I’m 23 hours into this journey, I realise that it’s like a decompression chamber, the space that regulates the transition from one world to the next. It takes me at least this long to prepare to be in the US, to prepare to be back in NZ. I require this nowhere zone in order to make sense of the somewheres I’ve been.

I have made this journey back and forth across the Pacific again and again, perhaps 10 times in the last 5 years. And so the travel does not surprise me at all (although I’ll admit this one business class leg is pretty spectacular!). The beauty of the southwest US, the endless stretch of Pacific, the tears in my eyes with the first sight of either country, because both of them contain pieces of my heart—all of these are familiar to me. And on this trip I wasn’t going anywhere new or doing anything new and so I didn’t expect that the portal from one world to another would also rearrange my thinking in some new way. Why is it that my thinking would get more rearranged in 10 days in North America than it does in 10 days in New Zealand? I’m not sure. But here, on the plane ride home, I’m filled with the ways I am different and that I think my future may be different from doing the same sorts of things I have always done with people I’ve known and worked with for years.

The most nameable reason for this is the confluence of a variety of different forces which lead to my work being more integrated at the close of this trip than it has ever been before. For the last 15 or more years, I have struggled with the connections between the various parts of my life: the part of me that is a writer, the part that is a researcher, the part that is an organisational consultant, the part that thinks about teaching and learning in schools. Each of those parts has a little space in my life, but they have not lived together in those spaces, have not crossed from one stream to the next except in rare and lovely circumstances.

Suddenly all the pieces braid. It’s hard for me to even hold the way the parts have snaked together, disparate elements with almost nothing in common, held only in place through their connection to me somehow. I have never imagined such integration in my work and don’t even know quite what to do with it. Here, when my life is as dis-integrated as possible, when I feel the breadth and depth of the mighty pacific, the plains and mountains and deserts of this whole broad continent, here they have woven into a clear image, a braid, a integrated whole. My work in educational research at NZCER has expanded into organisational learning and transformational professional development for teachers. My work as an organisational consultant has expanded to be about long term transformational learning. My work as a writer is going to contain the lessons I’m learning in these other spaces. In every context, I will learn things that are useful for the other contexts. In every set of colleagues, I’ll be able to connect things said by another set of colleagues so that we can each hold on to the wisdom of each group, so that all of the people I think with will benefit from the others. My Kenning partners will, through me, add value to my NZCER work. The work I’m doing for clients with Keith will feed into Kenning, and all of it will find its way into a blog or book chapter somewhere. I have this strong eureka feeling about the whole thing, have this desire to talk to people about it until my throat is horse, to bow down at an altar, to offer orchids up to the gods.

Inside all of this delight about this lovely new integration, I have questions which surprise me. Who am I if it’s all integrated? The tornness of my work has been such a key feature in who I am that I hardly recognise my own emotions. And this from someone who has stopped using familiar spelling of words. Did I have to be so physically dis-integrated in order to become more integrated? While my work is integrated so that these different groups can learn and grow from one another, it’s still just me in the middle. I’m the only one who connects across these different spaces; I’m the only one who has conversations with these different people. This means that I find myself somehow at the centre of things rather than at the margins. Suddenly it’s important to folks at Kenning that I report back what I’m doing with Keith, important to the folks at NZCER that I write about the things I’m doing at Kenning. I’m so used to being the one in the background who kind of joins pieces pi n my own head; it’s strange ot be in the foreground and have to carry these pieces from place to place because of how valuable they are to the group. When you’ve set up house in the margins, suddenly the work at the centre becomes a little more public and, well, maybe more centred than feels comfortable.

So there’s no shortage of learning in this space for me, learning about the different strands in this braid, about the weight and heft of the braid itself, and about who I am in these new spaces. This wasn’t the work I was expecting to come out of these 10 days in North America, but this is what I’ve found here, amongst the cherry blossoms and the Harvard students. Now if I could only find the silver pin I lost here too….

PS Pictures today from my long weekend back in NZ. The first one is of Jeff, one of the two best bosses I've ever had, who is visiting for a few days on his sabbatical and showing my kids how to paint (more on this later I hope); sunset from my living room; the sea in front of our house.

Classy

2009-04-09T13:03:00.000+12:00

What a funny travel day. Some number of hours ago I woke up at Jane’s house in Cambridge, ate yummy breakfast with her, and sat on her sofa and talked and talked. Then it was off to do a couple of errands, culminating with a trip to the Nerbury Street consignment shops I love so much (heaps of stores out of business on tony Newbury street, but the second hand stores seem to be feeling no pain). One pair of pants and a cushy purple cashmere sweater later (total= $40), we were off to the airport to get me there 2 hours ahead of my flight. But why oh why do we have to be there two hours early? Checked the bags, made it through security, bought lunch to eat on the plane and still I had 90 minutes to wait. So I watched the travellers and searched for a plug and tried to psyche myself up for work. And as I wandered around the full waiting area, I saw a very large woman in bright clothes with magenta hair, talking loudly on the phone and smacking her gum,. Perhaps even her size and sound would have escaped me until my eye lit on her forearm which was almost completely covered with a huge and hairy mole. Because I am not as good a person as I would like to be, I became aware of a wish that this woman would not be seated exactly next to me. I, who have often been the dreaded seat companion, baby in tow, knew this was unkind, and I tried to not think it, but the karma had been spent and, upon boarding, I found myself snuggled up next to the only person I had meant to avoid.

And snuggled we were, as she overtook her seat and came into mine. And there I wrestled with myself, feeling irritated because the loss of a couple of inches of my seat is actually a fairly large percentage given how tiny these seats are; feeling guilty because these are uncharitable thoughts and I am very lucky not to wrestle with my weight as she might and while my movement was restricted by the size of the seats and the size of my companion, she was wedged into the seat so tightly that she couldn’t even cross her legs. As she jiggled in her seat to the very loud music on her headphones, I tried to squash my tiny laptop in the only open space available and hope that the woman in front of me wouldn’t suddenly recline even more, further reducing the square inches available to me. And so I argued with myself in my mind over the course of the trip, my seatmate's arm pressed to mine, her leg hard up against my leg. I imagined how one might ask to be reseated under these circumstances. I watched the various ways I am not as nice a person as I’d like to be.

Finally, six-hour flight over, I had the merciful release of freedom of movement again in the wilds of the LAX airport. I dodged puddles walking from one terminal to the next in the drizzly fog (who ever heard of such weather in LA?) to get to the Air New Zealand terminal and the last step to home. There, I heard the most beautiful words, “Your upgrade has come through,” and I took from the hands of the angel behind the counter the business class ticket I had purchased with my many frequent flier miles.

This ticket is like crossing a portal into another world. My experience in the cattle class of the first flight, my body intimately pressed against the stranger next to me, my laptop screen dipped to a nearly-illegible angle, is a different world from this, my first foray into the world of the business class traveller. The pod from which I write, 10 hours into the flight, has walls on either side, keeping even my eyes from alighting on another passenger. I have woken from a 7.5 hour sleep which I mostly did on my stomach and side on these flat beds. This is as unlike air travel as anything I’ve ever experienced. The attendants trip over each other in the aisles, so eager are they to attend to our every need. I can watch any movie I like, keep my seat back reclined during take off and landing, and basically act like the queen of the world which, right this moment, I am.

Now I know that the ticket for this seat, should I have paid cash rather than frequent flier miles for it, is between five and ten TIMES the cost of the seats I have always ridden in before. And in some ways that makes sense as I’m taking up the room on this flight into which several very large women could squash themselves. And I feel ambivalent here too, thinking about the carbon miles that go into this luxurious ride, about the unequal and disturbing class distinctions that I am enacting—this time from the position of power. And I also know that the arguments I’m having with myself and my values in this seat are less passionate than the arguments I was having with myself and my values in the last seat. Why would I be less worried about my movement into the unfair upper class rather than my oppression by the size of my large neighbour? Mostly because I’ve been too busy eating lovely food, drinking fine Pinot Noir, and sleeping on my stomach for the last 10 hours. With so much to do, how can a girl fit in a push for social justice as well?

Finishing up

2009-04-08T16:44:00.003+12:00

And now it's all behind me. I'm posting from LAX, about to board my plane to fly back back over the Pacific and back to the kids and the man and the dog and the beach and my friends and my job and and and.
But first, a picture or two from The Big Stage. The first two are pre-lecture, the last one is post-lecture. Now I just have to figure out what this whole thing means to me. Hmmm.

where in the world is jgb?

2009-04-05T14:01:00.003+12:00

Working her tail off on a whole other side of the world. Two days in DC, 2 days in Montreal, now 4 days in Cambridge. There is so much to say that I'm speechless. Enjoy pictures from the only sunny day of the trip...

limbic connection

2009-03-25T21:42:00.001+13:00

Tonight, cuddling in a big family pile on the couch, I asked Aidan what it was like to be loved as much as he is loved. He laughed and said, “It is so good in my limbic system!” This shows that we’re geeks here to talk about these things, but it’s also so true. What beautiful limbic systems we must have.

It has been one of those days where I wonder why on earth I’d ever leave New Zealand. I had a lovely day working on the leadership development programme I’m teaching right now and feeling the deep and abiding satisfaction of helping people come to a new place with their skills and relationships. Then it was to school to watch Naomi’s netball trials, Aidan playing in the schoolyard around us. It was too sparkling an autumn day to stay at home at the end of the practice, so we headed out to the big sweeping low-tide beach. The sun was hot and the wind was cold; there were goosebumps on my bare legs, but the sand was soft and warm underfoot. We walked to the stream because Aidan wanted to climb and build and play there. Once we arrived, Naomi, oh-so-grownup now, told me that she would neither climb nor play nor build, because she was too mature to do such things. But she said it with a lilt, teasing herself as much as she was teasing me. And when she passed by me 90 seconds later, her arms filled with driftwood, she explained that she was not building nor playing but rather creating a way to cross the stream. When I pointed out that she could perhaps use the bridge to cross the stream, she turned pointedly away from the big bridge span and returned to her driftwood piles. The rest of the time there was spent in the earnest construction of a bridge structure (as it has been every time we’ve been to the stream in the past two years) and the pealing laughter and adolescent shrieking when the bridge turned out to be less reliable than planned.

On the way home, Naomi kept the subtle mocking tone. Pulling my arm tight around her, she teased about the hideous puddle (the sea), the vast rubbish piles (the hills) and the annoying mud (sand) underneath us. We laughed about how ugly it was in the sparkling sun. She affected the humourless big girl who was finding everything boring and impossible, and then disintegrated into giggles. We chased each other through the shallow water, our mirror images laughing and splashing along with us.

So here is the great benefit of this mother-of-a-tween life. Naomi is big enough to be incredibly interesting, her ironic sense of humour making me laugh so hard tears poured down my face in the wind. And she’s small enough to still want my arm wrapped hard against her, still want to stop and hug me in the sunlight. She is aware enough of her own foibles to be playful with them, even as she is caught by them. She knows that her perfectionist tendencies are absurd, and she is still a perfectionist. She knows her jealousy of a friend is limiting, and still she is jealous. She is big enough to watch herself—and feel amused, dismayed, proud, frustrated, joyful. And I watch her and feel all those things too.

Today was just about joy, though, about a dog running in circles the stream, Naomi’s purple jandal flip-flopping in his mouth. It was about cuddling on the couch while a smelly wet dog left sandy dog prints all around us. It was about admiring my children so hard I thought my heart might burst. There are times when parenting seems a trial, when every sentence feels like a conflict, when every word is a limit that needs setting. And there are days like today, when each act of parenting feels like a gift, when I don’t even regret that I’ll never hold my sweet baby children in my arms again because holding my lanky articulate children is so uniquely satisfying.

May each of you, gentle readers, be filled with love for someone precious today. It’s really good in your limbic system.

Powerless

2009-03-20T15:28:00.002+13:00

It is the long-awaited Friday of The Busy Week. I have taught things to university faculty, conservationists, and judges. My new job was announced at work in my absence. I have seen a dear friend launch her new CD and walked around a thermal lake edged by boiling mud. To say I am full-up would be an understatement.

Today was to be my wind-down day. It is the day when I could call my parents for a long talk while I cleaned a house made ragged by my busy period. It was a day when I could go through and answer the important but not urgent email that has been building up in my in-box. It was a day for sending invoices and tidying up. It was a day for regaining connection and regaining control.

When the power first went off this morning, I was mostly untroubled. The power sometimes goes out here, but never for very long. And while I can’t be on the phone or the internet while the power is out, I figured I could take a few minutes over breakfast and just sit and stare at the waves and listen to the surf. A bigger deal is that a colleague is coming to stay tonight, and very late last night when I got home from Melissa’s concert, I didn’t have time to email my future guests with directions to the house. They were to call in the morning, which now wasn’t going to be that helpful as the phones all require power. And I couldn’t email them, because I had no internet.

I called Michael to ask a quick question and mentioned that I hoped the power would come back really soon. “Oh yeah, today is the day it’s out from 9 until 3,” he told me. I can almost not describe the panic that welled up inside me as I realised that each of my plans was attached to the electric wire. I felt waves of sorrow. Not to hear my dad’s voice today? Not to clear out my inbox and write to the friends and colleagues who need my attention? Not even to blast my music and clean the house? I ached with frustration at my day’s plans now in ruins at my feet.

After solving the problem of the colleague who might think I was blowing her off, I sat down to collect myself. These are times in general when we are called to turn challenges into opportunities to be different than we were before. The financial crisis does this, and here this little micro challenge did it too. In many ways, it’s the same challenge. In a world of finite resources (with time being the most finite of all resources and money looking importantly finite), the loss of something we thought we had is devastating. Watching our retirement savings dwindle to negligible amounts this past year has been life altering even if I don’t know what the lessons are. Similarly, the passing of a day without any of the connections or accomplishments I’ve craved is somehow a void, a removal of a felt promise of time.

It wasn’t until I tried to reframe the day from a ruin to a fresh possibility that I recognised what my tunnel vision had done. I had not considered a walk on the beach. I had not considered finishing Twilight (which, ok, everyone is reading but is seriously compelling all the same). I had not considered a day in the garden or painting the cottage out back or or or. My eyes, focused on my plans, missed the possibilities.

The power is due back on in 45 minutes. I have scrubbed the house and kneaded bread dough for challah tonight and rearranged some furniture. I have unpacked from my trip and written this blog. I have taken a little nap. I have spent the day on these little bits of trivia and not felt the little twinge of responsibility saying that I should be doing something else all the time, accomplishing more, not wasting my time. I know that each of these activities would have given me pause on any other day. But today I can putter and knead and stare and dream. Somehow I’m powerless to be productive, which gives me a whole new set of powers. Who knew there was so much possibility for getting what you really need on a day when you don’t get what you wanted?

ps pictures today from the trip to Rotorua, and of us eating our first dinner on the new deck!

Work work balance

2009-03-15T07:26:00.003+13:00

It is the start of a busy week in a very busy season. I’m on a train Saturday morning at first light. I’ve left my house before the sun to start a week that is representative of the weird corners of my life right now. Today I’m off to Christchurch, hoping that the skies, cloudy here, will be clear on the flight down so that I can catch a glimpse of mountains on this short flight, snow-capped from the first fall of early autumn snow.

Today I’ll present about Kegan’s theory today to a group of researchers who are thinking about knowledge. They want to understand the connections between New Zealand’s new curriculum, the way schools need to change to face the 21st century needs, and the way teachers make sense of diversity. And they think that Kegan will help them with that.

Monday I’ll head to work at NZCER and wrestle with large issues in the world and important issues in our organisation (for the blog we’re writing about helping to shift education into the 21st century, click here).

Tuesday I’ll facilitate at a meeting at an organisation where I’ve been doing lots of leadership development work. It’s an interesting request for them to have me come in for this meeting between the chief executive and some of his senior leaders. About half of those leaders have been through a quick programme with me (and Keith), and the organisation is wanting them to both use those leadership skills/habits/ways of thinking to change the way this meeting feels.. Wednesday Keith and I will do a one-day programme with the senior team in that same organisation (would be nicer if these went in the opposite direction, but such is life). And Thursday Keith and I will give a two-hour keynote workshop to the New Zealand District Court Judges about how they might think in new ways about their work and their growth.

So it’s a week where I teach about development to researchers, teach about development to leaders to help them develop, use developmental ideas to teach about leadership, and finally use all these ideas to help leaders begin to enact change in a real-time situation.

This is not just a to-do list of my week so you’ll understand the silence or write to me with sympathy. This is the braid of my work life that I’m trying to understand, the mix of my activities in proportions I’m trying to get right. I love each of these pieces, love the braiding of research, practice, and teaching. I relish the opportunity to touch them all in a single week, to test my own knowledge and have it bump up against these many varied situations, to have the proximity of these different ways of thinking about and working on the same basic problem (how do adults grow on the job?).

And at the same time, it’s such a disjointed and fragmented list. Half of the groups I’ll work with this week I’ll never see again; the other half I am getting so immersed in I can hardly see anything else. I’ll move from context to context, teaching the same thing more than once but in these different ways; I’ll be surprised if I don’t screw up the presentations, lose the one I’m doing now for the one I’m doing next, find myself blinking, doe-in-the-headlights wondering which group this was again.

I have been wrestling with this coherence problem my entire work life. I am not interested in doing one piece of this work—am not wanting to give up the research or the writing or the teaching or the consulting. But there isn’t one job with all those bits. And so I do a piece of this here, a piece of that there, and hope that in the end these little bits add up to something bigger than the sum of hundreds of day-long workshops. It’s so hard to see the pattern of my life as I’m weaving it. Enough of this shade? Too much of that one? And how does it contribute to the knowledge base in the world? How does it contribute to the lives of individuals? To the mission of organisations? I’m not sure, and maybe won’t ever know until it’s behind me. Seems a hard way to craft a work life, especially when you’ve only got the option to write a first draft of life, without being able to go back and edit and rewrite.

Today I’ll fly off into the grey clouds. Monday I’ll meet with Robyn and think about my work life at my day job. I am excited to be in the space I’m in here; it is a privilege and an honour to be with people in the many ways I have to do that. And in two weeks, I’ll get the vantage point on my life that only travel offers when I head to the US. Fasten your seatbelts. In a time like this, there is always the potential for unexpected turbulence.

ps The picture today is just a randomly beautiful sunset from last week. And I can't even describe how magnificent the plane ride home was. Seriously, this is the most beautiful place I have ever seen, and it's changingly beautiful again and again and again...

Tweeny

2009-03-13T13:24:00.002+13:00

There is a section of department stores called “tweens” now. There 10, 11, and 12 year old girls can find clothes that are suitably fashionable without scaring the hell out of their parents by shopping in the full-fledged Juniors section complete with pre-torn jeans and blaring rock music. These girls are now a major industry with their own music, movies, video games. There are magazines for tween girls and there are websites and Disney stars. This is a demographic to die for.

But the thing I haven’t known until fairly recently is that there is a tween place for parents, too. I am a tween mom right now, and there are no department store areas set aside for me, no rock bands that sing of my particular angst. I am betwixt and between, having kids who sometimes need me and sometimes don’t, who get mad if I don’t walk them to school and then get mad if I try to hold their hands as we cross the street. There are all new rules now, and I haven’t gotten the rule book. Oh, and the rules change from moment to moment. Somebody twitter me the latest version.

Take the netball trials on Wednesday. Naomi wanted me to come and watch her—it was seriously important to her. So at 3 I went off in the sudden autumn drizzle to watch her doing wind sprints and ball drills in the school hall before playing a scrimmage in the newly-sunny school yard. Naomi is lovely at netball, her willowy body and endlessly-long arms stretching and grabbing the ball magically, her determination and drive etched in fleeting lines around her eyes and mouth, lines which time will carve into her face.

I had been briefed on my behaviour before hand. No yelling or cheering, no calling attention to myself or to her. Nothing that would suggest to any of the other girls that I was her mother (why she thinks they might forget is beyond me). I did what I was told, although I smiled at her when I arrived (seemed in bounds). I tried to sink into the wall and become innocuously invisible, as I was the only mother in attendance.

So it was a surprise when, at the end of practice, she turned and huffed home, not a word to me. Aidan and I followed, perplexed, and came home to an empty house with Naomi’s door closed—as usual. I tried to check in with her and got a grunt. Pushing it a little to see what was wrong, I got snapped at. So much for that. So Aidan and I played and talked and hung out for a while. Maybe it was the smell of popcorn or the sound of cards being shuffled, but suddenly, an hour later, Naomi was there, no mention of the sulking or what it was attached to, wondering if she could eat and play with us.

So what do I do with the push-me-pull-you of that? Suddenly, I’m 13 again and feeling slighted by a friend. I don’t want to share my popcorn or my cards with her but to glare at her and mutter under my breath about how she’s missed her chance, about how I’d given up an hour and a half of my day in this slammed-busy week without so much as a thank you, without so much as a daughter to walk home with after school. But I am not actually 13, and so I pushed the popcorn over to her and dealt her into our hot game of Go Fish. This was just a little scab, a little time for me to practice my attachment and my non attachment, to understand that she’s needing to separate and also still needs her mommy. I’m good at the theory of it all.

But the tween-ness of it isn’t just hard on her. It’s hard on me because I never know which Naomi I’ll find and thus which mother I’m supposed to be. When I walk her to school, each moment is a barometer of the constantly shifting weather; some days she drapes my arm over her shoulders; other days she storms off ahead of me. Not knowing which Naomi I’ll get makes it hard for me to find stable ground for where to put my own emotions. Her dance of attachment and separation is my dance too, only I am definitely not leading on this dance floor. The theory is one thing but the practice of it is wearing.

Wednesday night, I went to cuddle with her before I worked out, as I do each evening. Aidan insists upon the nightly cuddle, yelling out for me if I’m taking too long to make my way upstairs to him. Naomi could take it or leave it, shrugging some nights when I ask whether she wants to cuddle or be left alone to read. “S’up to you.” This night, because it was up to me, I wanted to hold my girl again. I climbed on to her bed, stepping over piles of tween magazines and stacks of tween books, pushed the dozens of stuffed animals out of my way, and snuggled down with this angular big girl, complete with velvet sleeping mask. We talked about her day, about why she was so frustrated at the netball trials (had nothing to do with me, of course—she wasn’t even thinking about me when she stormed home). After a while, I got up to go—there was sweating to do and then lunches to finish and the dishwasher to load and I am always pushing against the merciless onslaught of time. Naomi held me tight. “You always go so fast,” she complained. “Couldn’t we slow it down just a little?” And on the one hand, she was wrong. I don’t go so fast, I make heaps of time for her, and I didn’t have time to slow down a little. It was another example of Naomi putting her needs ahead of my needs to work out, to take care of the house, to sleep. But on the other hand, she was naming one of the fundamental truths of parenthood. It goes so fast. And one of the fundamental desires of all of us sometimes: Can’t we just slow it down a little? And so I relaxed back into the conversation, stroking her hair, hearing her sleepy laugh, holding her and being held by her. The memories of the chubby giggling toddler and the imaginings of a graceful grown woman danced at the edge of my mind. I am a tween mom, between childhood and adolescence. Between attachment and separation. But the thing that does not change, the rule book that does not need to be updated, is that I am fully inside of love.

pictures from the quiet

2009-03-12T20:17:00.002+13:00

ok, I know I've been super silent. AND I have heaps to write about, mostly about what it's like to be the mom of a "tween." Tonight, though, there isn't time for more than giving you a glimpse of a magical sunset with children playing on the beach. Ah, and there's the new deck, here with images under construction, and soon (tomorrow?) pictures of the final product. There will be words from me soon, too, if you're interested. Until then, enjoy the full moon that we share.

From one extreme…

2009-03-04T17:35:00.003+13:00

Ok, so it’s not like this has been a bad day. It’s the most shockingly beautiful late-summers day here. The sky is cobalt blue, the still sea is azure striped with turquoise. The seagulls are flying low on the still air, surfing the currents right at my window-height. I have been running so fast for so long, I hardly remember how to slow down, breathe, and be.

So this morning was my chance to check it out. My two close collaborators from these last two days are nowhere to be found: Carolyn is gone now, on a plane back to the US after a blissful time working and playing together; Keith is off to Europe so that he can run the board of his international NGO for a couple of weeks. The kids are off at school. I sat down, ignoring the to-do list which had important but not urgent things on it, and just worked on my book. MY book, the one I’ve been working on for years (seriously, years) about the connection between adult developmental ideas and organizational development and leadership development practices. This was heaven, bliss, brilliance. This was everything I wanted, a quiet house, a blue sky, an empty day, a laptop in the sunshine.

And that was fantastic for the first little while. And then I remembered that really what I needed before writing was coffee. So I made that. THEN I could write some. Ok, but then I was getting the nibbles, so I ate a peach (which always always makes me think of ts eliot—anyone else like that?). THEN I could write some again. But oh how sleepy I was getting. And there were emails to write. Perhaps tea and a little break to do emails. And then, er, lunch. And dessert of lunch. And after-dessert tea.

I did write, really. I wrote well, and finished off the section of this chapter I’ve been stuck on for months. Does writing always make me so restless, though? Or is it the empty house and the friends on airplanes jetting across the world? Or the constant thrumming of the hammer on my new deck?

Finally time to pick up the kids. Now I’d have someone to be with, someone who loved me. I’d put aside my work and play with them this afternoon. Naomi wanted to do a baking project—as she often has for the past nine years, ever since she could say “baking project” when she was two. But now she likes to do them ALONE, thank you very much. Aidan wanted to build a toy for the pet rats he is sure I’ll give in and say yes to. No one wanted to swim with me! Or play with me! Or do anything else that would prevent my working!

And so now I’m alone in this lovely house by the sea. Aidan has gone to cricket. Naomi is off practicing netball at school. Rob is riding his bike north of here, and Michael is riding the train south. Tomorrow will be a bustling day of airplanes and meetings and (at long long last) a hair cut. Perhaps the one extreme of people everywhere and always something I had to be doing is not well-followed by people all somewhere else and nothing I have to be doing. Perhaps gradual would be slightly better than one extreme to the next. (But please, no one remind me of this feeling when I hit the next wall of work two weeks from now. I can’t stand to shatter the mirage that I do stillness well.)

ps the pictures here are for Carolyn--ordinary visions of life here in paradise.

full on

2009-02-28T10:19:00.001+13:00

It is not generally a good sign when the blog is silent for so long. It tends to mean that either nothing at all is going on in my life, or there is far far too much going on in my life. This has been a far-too-much time. And it’s funny, isn’t it, the way life works. After 10 days of full-on work, with me go go going all of my waking hours, I have come to find myself sitting on the floor of the Rotorua airport, plane cancelled, people trying to figure out what to do with us next (the last plane tonight is already full in this tiny airport), and nothing at all to do. Isn’t life funny that way?

I have been planning and then teaching a couple of leadership development programmes and then writing and delivering a speech. Each of these pieces is another root in the soil here, another beginning at building something here. And each is an open door with no clear sense of what might happen next. In the whole world, I think, we don’t know what’s going to happen next. The thing that strikes me is that not knowing what’s going to happen next isn’t catching me anymore. Do we move back to the US? When? Who knows. Will we ever sell the Ocean Road house? Who knows. Will I get another contract for this leadership development work or any future contacts from this speech today? Who knows. It’s all feeling so impossible to understand that I can hardly even bother trying anymore. Instead I’ll bump bump into the clouds and hope to come down safely on the other side.

One of the things that happened in this busy time was that it was the first time one of my kids was hurt by another kid at school. It was in many ways, exactly the way you think it would be with Aidan. From multiple accounts, it was a whole system effect. Naomi was teased at lunch and tattled on the teaser. The teaser didn’t like it and became agitated with Naomi. Aidan came over to check on the agitation. The teaser’s big brother (and this fellow is seriously big, a head taller than Naomi even) got involved and told Naomi of his displeasure at the fact that she had tattled. Aidan piped up that he didn’t want his sister talked to that way. And then the big boy, who has a long-standing problem with violence, knocked Aidan to the ground and kicked him twice in the back, hard. I got a call from the principal at the close of the first of my many events last week, and madly checked in with all players. Aidan was sore. Naomi was shaken. Rob and Michael were angry. And I ached with all the pain of it all.

We talked and talked about the incident and about what was going on there. Aidan was anxious about this boy seeing him again when he came back to school after the suspension. Naomi was anxious about whether Aidan might be seriously hurt from the kicking and pleaded for us to take him to the doctor. She was feeling at least a little responsible because it was her tattling that made the boy angry at her in the first place. We tried to take the various pieces in turn. Off Aidan went to the doctor, to have a variety of precautionary and non-invasive tests to see whether his kidneys had suffered from the blows (they hadn’t). Naomi, suddenly realising that she was not the centre of attention, began complaining and carrying on. All of us were shaken, all needing to connect with one another and hold on to the fact that while something really bad could have happened, nothing really bad actually did happen.

Naomi and Aidan were amazingly gentle with one another for the next few days. I would walk into the living room and find them sitting tightly next to each other, reading silently. We turned toward talking about how Aidan was feeling about the boy, about whether he was afraid of him or angry at him., and what he would do when the boy apologised. “I already know what I’m going to say, Mom,” he told me. What? “I forgive you?”

I keep thinking that I have already reached the height of the love I can feel for these people, but it turns out that there are moments—filled with joy or filled with fear or filled with angst—that increase my love. And as these children grow, I find that my love and admiration for them grow as well. And it turns out that even in this busy time, everything is growing in Paekakairki.

attachment

2009-02-12T10:41:00.003+13:00

Having a pre-teenager in the house is a constant addition to my practice of non-attachment. There is so much I want to hold on to, so much I have to let go of. Just this morning, for example, when we needed her to find an overdue library DVD, Naomi put on her long suffering voice. “I am trying to eat my breakfast and get ready for school, which is the most important thing in the morning,” she told us, in an exasperated tone I recognise as mine. “You will just have to wait for a more appropriate time to be searching for things.”

I can actually feel my buttons being pressed. And the thing is, there are buttons all over the place on this one. There’s the don’t-you-use-that-tone-of-voice-with-your-mother button, there’s the don’t-shirk-your-responsibility button, there’s the oh-crap-am-I-so-obnoxious-when-I-say-those-words button. Some of them are about me, some are about her, some are about us.

I find that I am attached to SO many things right now. I am attached to her manners, to her thoughtfulness, to her helping around the house. I am wanting her to care less about brand name shoes and be more tolerant of my love for buying used clothes. I’m wanting her to be less focused on her stupid teen magazines and be more aware of the ways the world needs our assistance (and not another Disney band). I want her to be less demanding and more grateful for all the wonderful things in her world. I am attached to being the kind of mother who supports her kid and also the kind of mother who guides her kids toward something finer than they might be if left to their own devices. It turns out that when I come to Naomi, I am attached to everything.

And this is not the time for attachment, this is the time for separation. This is the time for letting this smart, beautiful young woman begin to find her way in the world. This is the time for showing up as the mother of a nearly-teenager, not as the mother of an almost-kid. The time for understanding that “Mom, I don’t want you to sing in front of any of my friends ever again,” is a way for her to control and name her own world, and not just a slam on me or a glossing over of the 11 years we’ve spent singing together.

I was shallow and brand-conscious when I was 11. I collected stupid girl magazines and talked too much on the phone with my friends. I wanted things my own way and cried when I didn’t get them. I was Naomi in my own way. I’ve turned out ok.

Now I have to be me in a new way (again and again in this parenting journey). I have to take her mood swings as the pattern of my life, a pattern I teach about in classes about development all over the world. I have to remember what I tell clients all the time—that I am not so much wanting particular behaviours from Naomi but particular thoughts and feelings about the world, and that wanting someone else to feel a particular way is a losing battle. It’s ok to demand that she set the table each night; it’s not ok for me to insist that she must want to set the table in order to contribute her share to the house. It’s ok for me to demand that she be respectful; it’s not ok for me to insist that she must feel respect for me all the time.

Last night I was cleaning up from dinner and she wanted to sit in my lap, and then, later she wanted to cuddle for a long time. In most circumstances, I’d have put her off until later—cuddling after work is done. Things are changing, though, and just because I’ll want to hold her later as much as I want to now does not mean she’ll be in that same space. So I stopped what I was doing and stood and held this little big girl, this child-woman nearly as tall as me, for as long as she wanted to hug. I tried to memorise the scent of her hair and her thin, growing body in my arms, remembering the scent of baby shampoo and slightly spoiled milk that was baby Naomi, the pudgy infant I thought I loved so hard that my heart would break. Soon she will be in a different phase and I’ll be holding a different version of Naomi, and my heart, older now, will still threaten to break with the surfeit of love.

This morning, mad at me because I would not walk home through the rain to pick up a permission slip she had left behind, she stormed off the last little way to school without a backward look. Everything in me screamed to go after her and tell her she couldn’t treat me like that. I have learnt that, at least in a momentary way, I can be as made of anger and indignation as I am of love.

I am attached to her being the same and I am attached to her growing. I am attached to her being her own person and to her being exactly as I want her to be. My attachments pull on me and cause me trouble, and in every instance my own ambivalence is mirrored and distorted by the many ways she is holding on to all the same complexities of growing up. And so I hold her when she wants to be held, and I let her storm off when she wants to be angry, and I try always to hold myself as she grows. When she was a toddler, beginning to show her strong-will and fiery personality, I used to stand over her crib at the end of a long hard day. “I love you for everything you are,” I’d whisper to her—and to me. “I love you for the good things and for the hard things and for every cell in your being because that is what makes you Naomi and that is just who I want you to be.” I tried then to remember that valuing a person for the fullness of who she was—for her faults as well as her gifts, for her weaknesses as well as her strengths—was the true measure of love. I want to hold on to that way of loving her, and the rest—my particular desires and hopes and impulses—is all just noise. Everything else is just my construction of shoulds. Now is the time to let go of my constructions and open my eyes to the person she is becoming. Perhaps that is a goal I could be attached to.

cycles

2009-02-04T06:45:00.004+13:00

As I begin this blog is it is a grey morning here at the beach, clouds gathering over the hills which have faded this summer from emerald green to olive to a tawny brown. Yesterday was the first day of school. The kids are in new classes with old friends now, the pattern of life in a tiny village school. This is a new year, a new cycle, and new and unexpected things are going to happen. There are ways that our life here feels more familiar than it ever has before. We walk into a house we know well, we come home to sugar-sweet grape tomatoes dotting the garden, we putter with Rob in the kitchen and drink tea with Melissa in the lounge.

And while things are familiar, it is a strange new world. We have come home from Sydney, a magnificent city which is half American in its self-conscious display of wealth and power, its traffic and endless suburbs, and half tropical paradise with its teal water and golden sand beaches, its parrots in the eucalypts (pictures today are from the Botanic Gardens at sunset at the end of our trip—those cockatoos are wild and fly in flocks through the garden, shrieking indignantly). We are back to home, where the rhythms of life mean that the days begin to get shorter here in February and the new calendar year brings a new school year in its wake. The sound of sirens and truck brakes of Sydney (and our life in the US) is replace by the changing but constant roll of the sea. Where were we again?

Now, though, as I come to terms with my own private adjustments, as I live out my own private changes, the world rumbles and blows around. As I recover from writing my letter of resignation to GMU last night, I have friends who are reeling from job layoffs, from rapidly changing financial circumstances. As I look at my kids, so big as they walk to school on their first day of school, I have friends who are beginning their first days of work in the Obama administration or are searching for the next big thing they’ll do now that the PhD is finished. As I worry about paying the mortgage for not one but two houses in New Zealand (?!), I hear news reports predicting a dire future—total environmental and economic meltdown. Obama offers a new kind of hope—I have had the new experience of having my president quoted as an example of a GOOD leader again and again this week; the financial and climate news is dire.

There are some rhythms to life that are predictable and known. The school year comes and goes. In the pattern of growing girls in the modern era, Naomi gets taller and more willowy; spends more time in her room, door closed, listening to music; tosses her head and goes to school without a backwards glance at her waiting mom. The dog begins to go grey in his muzzle. The mom, watching growing children, holds babies with a new kind of melancholy, frowns at the coming wrinkles (thus making them worse), wonders whether it’s really a good idea to hang the new full-length mirror in the closet. The tide changes, the moon waxes and wanes, the days lengthen and then shorten and then lengthen again.

Now, in a world of acknowledged uncertainty (because really the world was always uncertain, wasn’t it?), we can hold on to those familiar patterns as questions swirl around us. When does this global slowdown crash on these shores? What will happen in Michael’s job when his secondment is over? How do we decide how to allocate time in an era when future earnings are in question?

I keep wondering whether all this uncertainty is just that we’ve lost our way, lost our confidence in ourselves to be uncertain and also patterned, to predict some things about the future and not others. I wonder whether our lack of comfort with ambiguity is the real crisis here, and not the particulars of any one life story. We were once more certain than we should have been—that created unsustainable growth that damaged our economic systems and our planet. We are now less certain than perhaps we should be—and this is creating a financial gridlock and psychological peril, damaging our ability to live and to thrive. Perhaps what we need is to understand ourselves in the rhythms of the tides and the stock markets, to hold on to the ways the future has always been inside our control, and has always been outside of it. Today I will work, I will pick up the children from school and hear about new teachers and old fights, I will make dinner with lettuces fresh from the garden. The world will turn, the waves will come, and inside the regular patterns of our lives will be heaps of variation, inside the variation of our lives will be heaps of patterns. I wish for us all some peace in the tumult.

more pictures, now that we're home

2009-02-01T18:49:00.004+13:00

Here is a small assortment of the pre-Sydney portion of our holiday. These are in the Blue Mountains or, if we're actually touching beautiful creatures, at a wildlife park. We're home and happy--happy to have gone and happy to be back, and there'll be more pictures and stories soon.

Weaving

2009-01-28T23:37:00.003+13:00

This is one of those holidays where the holiday-life seems so surreal and then, reflecting from that surreal place, my everyday life seems totally surreal too. I am back from a day walking in Australia’s Blue Mountains. I begin this blog in a (heavily discounted) suite on the 3rd floor of an old hotel, built in the 1890s and gracefully refurbished in classic Ye Olde Style dark woods and swooping curves. Looking out the window, I see that the beautiful views have closed in with the rain until I can hardly even see the street below.

It has been a holiday with strands that weave and circle back, that connect into the future and back to the past and hold together different parts of my life. And all of it brings me back to September 2005 when I first came to Australia, on my own and beside myself with joy. I was coming to teach a Subject-Object Interview workshop at the request of two fellas whom I’d met in a café in Washington as they did a tour of the adult developmentalists on the east coast of the US. On their way from Atlanta to Boston they had lunch with me in DC and talked about Keith’s impending dissertation and Paul’s blossoming interests in this field. When they invited me to teach the workshop in Australia, it seemed like a dream; when I went for my first walk in Sydney and came to the Opera House, it seemed like a fantasy.

I wandered around Sydney on my own those two days before I headed to do my various pieces of work. I met Tony Grant, who had been the editor of a book for which I’d recently written a chapter, and his colleague Michael Cavanaugh, together with whom he ran the University of Sydney coaching psychology program. Then it was into the work of the trip with the SOI workshop attended by (among others) Paul and Keith and Michael C. At the end of that trip (at 10 days, the longest I’d ever been away from the kids) I took whirlwind excursion to see a little more of this lovely country with Keith as my tour guide: first to the beach south of Sydney and then to the Blue Mountains to do some walking in the crisp mountain air.

That was the beginning of a series of ongoing friendships and partnerships that have re-centred my life and turned my world upside down. But how was I to know any of that at the time? All I knew is that I was having the time of my life, that I was loving this place and these people and this magical opportunity to be me, only really really far away.

That whole trip, each exquisite thing I did, made me wonder whether I would ever have such an experience again. Would this be the last time I ever saw the Sydney Opera House, would it be the last time I ever saw the Blue Mountains? Would it be the last time I ever saw Paul and Keith and Michael C? Each place or person I said goodbye to I thought was possibly forever.

And here, in the space of just a few days, I’m with all of them—all those people and places of that first trip (except Keith, whom I worked with at my house on the day before I left for Sydney). All of these people have become players in my life with on-going parts rather than the walk-on role I once imagined.

And, in order to emphasise my re-walking of these old footsteps, today I went to the visitor centre in the Blue Mountains to pick out a walk for us to take. I had been on a walk in 2005 with Keith, lovely but mysterious—I was so overwhelmed with the place and the experience that I didn’t take part in planning anything and just followed along the path Keith had picked out. So when I examined the descriptions of the various walks we could take in the Blue Mountains, I was looking for one that sounded familiar. No such luck. Instead of revisiting, I just picked out what looked like the best walk of all, and we set off to the trail head.

As soon as we arrived I knew it was the same walk I had taken nearly four years before. I plunged into the lovely temperate rain forest, this time with Michael and the kids in tow. On that first trip I took heaps of pictures to bring back to Michael (the kids were too small to care much) so that he would get something of the feel of the place. And now, nearly in a blink of time, he was there too—along with our kids who are troopers on these long walks (another piece of the future I’d never have imagined when they were little kids in DC). This time, I took almost no pictures (and you’ll have to wait to see any of them as we’re paying for this internet access by the megabite)—why bother?

The next morning, we woke up and drove to the wildlife park Paul and his family took me to two years ago—where I got to pet my first kangaroo. Like the Blue Mountains walk, it was bringing threads of my life together: my Aussie thread and the rich experiences I have here, and my family, none of whom had ever touched a koala. Dinner with Paul and his family at Michael C’s house, a morning watching Paul teach my kids to surf on a North Sydney beach (yes, that's Paul cheering when Aidan stands on the surfboard for the first time in the other pictures), an afternoon watching my kids feed the kangaroos—all of these are weaving fabric of my life in a more integrated whole.

Somehow as I watch the present and past, my work and family contexts, all blend and connect, I am also wondering about how all of these pieces connect forward through time. I no longer believe that this is the last time I’ll see the Sydney Opera House or that maybe I’ll never see Paul or Tony again. But I wonder what the future holds for me with these people—and the new people I connect with at each workshop I teach. Now that I understand how profoundly unpredictably my life might progress, and I know that I don’t actually know where it’s going next. Will I bring Dad and Jamie here someday? Will Mom and I teach a workshop at the Uni? Will I have clients here? Visit grandchildren here? Which threads get picked up in the ongoing pattern of my life, and which ones get left behind? I’m curious, and I’m also not rushing to find the answers to these questions. Instead, I’d rather watch my kids swim in the sunset, feel the soft fur of a roo under my hand, find myself teaching another intelligent and lovely group of people in a familiar and graceful (if HOT) room. I was here once and I will be here again, and I am trying to hold all of that and also be here now.

PS This trip was planned around the moving of some fantastic cousins to Sydney. I had imagined playing at the beach with their girls, holding their new(ish) baby, talking long into the night. That was the plan which, due to circumstances outside their control, was cancelled at the last minute. Who knows whether we’ll weave them into the fabric of our Southern Hemispheric lives. All I know is that no matter what you think is next, no matter what you plan for, there are surprises all along the journey. U and R, we hope all is happy for you and that this looks, at sometime in the future, like a grand opportunity. We love you.

Aussie holiday

2009-01-26T19:30:00.004+13:00

We are having heaps of fun in Australia. I'll write about this tomorrow, but here are the most exciting pictures we've taken so far. Look what my friend Paul taught my kids at a North Sydney beach...

Life, here

2009-01-16T17:33:00.001+13:00

Last weekend was the best and worst of life in New Zealand. It began with waking to the sound of the sea and the dozens of shades of grey and silver that a cloudy morning holds. This merged effortlessly into a walk on the beach with Michael, Aidan, and Perry, and then flowed into a fantastic Sunday-morning breakfast with Alli, our glorious American WWOOFer. And then the realisation that this was not just a regular Sunday here, but the corresponding Saturday when I would, in another life, have driven the long hours up the New Jersey Turnpike to have the Garvey Family Christmas.

I called at the appropriate time and heard the roar of the party in the background. I could see every piece of it—the guests blowing in out of the cold, the hugs in the foyer, the laughing and talking that marks one of these parties. And I, for the third year in a row, was a disembodied voice on the phone, a person passed from uncle to uncle to aunt, forcing the talker to cower in a back bedroom or bathroom so that he or she could hear what I was saying on a grey summer morning on the other side of the world.

Then, shaking my head after the disorientation of this winter phone call with so many people I love on the other side of the world, I went into the grey summer afternoon to go for a walk with some friends. This is New Zealand, though, so our walk—just a few minutes from the beach house our friends J and L were borrowing—was up lush, viney woods, lacy with ferns and palm trees. Together with J and L and their three kids, Michael and Aidan and Alli and I (Naomi was away at camp) pushed our bodies up up up a hill. We marvelled at the colours of the green, at the layers of the leaves, at the gentle sound of rain hitting the canopy high above us. After the walk there was lovely dinner at a café and then a sunset walk on the beach north of here, with a whole different view of Kapiti. The boys sat down next to the water and played in the sand while the adults stood nearby and, well, played in the sand.

On the way home Alli quipped that if we really wanted to do well in the WWOOFer book, she needed a rainbow. We had popped into a grocery store on the way home and I glanced out the window at a sudden burst of sun on a cloudy day. I said, Your order has arrived, and out we went into the rain, to see the most amazingly bright rainbow lighting up the sky. We drove home, keeping the rainbow in sight over moderately ugly strip malls and magnificently beautiful hills. At home, we marvelled at the view of the sea, hills, and rainbow from our front porch.

And so that’s the life here. Magical and fantastic, and also on the other side of the world from everyone who shares our DNA. With every joy there is a corresponding sadness that I am so far away from those I love. People will ask, “So does your partner’s family live near by?” Nope. “So what family do you have here?” None. “None?!” People are amazed and horrified about that, and they talk about how they couldn’t do it, etc. And as they say how impressed they are, I think, “Hey, maybe this is the stupidest thing in the world!” And so it goes.

So here we sit, in the middle of summer holiday, wind blowing the sea into a frenzy, kids working each other into a frenzy. Naomi is home from 10 days at camp and reacclimating. I’m trying to get work done and play with my kids and not doing either very well. Sounds like holiday time. This weekend we’ll build a chicken coop (!) and play in the garden. I’ll try to finish a report. We’ll fly a kite in the park. We will enjoy one another and the lovely people who come and stay with us, and we will try to celebrate the life we have even as we mourn the life we don’t. That is perhaps the thing we are all called to do, every day.

tying a bow on the weekend

2009-01-11T22:16:00.002+13:00

Ok, the actual blog about this will come tomorrow, but here are a couple of pictures of the magical place we live.

Whatif

2009-01-03T08:39:00.001+13:00

The thing about life is that how we just live it without noticing how close we are—at all times—to not living it anymore. Sometimes we are reminded, and mostly those reminders aren’t that fun. On New Year’s Day, we went to yet another party—our third in a week. We drove along the coastal state highway 1—a magnificent stretch of a two-lane highway (one lane in each direction) that juts out from a mountain and nearly laps into the sea. It was a lovely day, bright blue sky and big wind ruffling the sea and sending waves crashing into the sea wall and sea foam sailing through the air. I was chattering with the kids about books they’re reading and with Michael about the colour of the sea when I saw the squished car from the accident in the opposite lane. It hadn’t been a bad wreck; everyone would walk away from it—most would even drive away. Michael’s attention was distracted by that accident, too, and as we rounded the curve, he was startled to see the cars in front of us stopped. He slammed on his breaks and pulled hard onto the shoulder (in one of the only places this tiny stretch of road even has a shoulder). In the split second that I was thinking that it was unnecessary for him to have pulled off the road like that (we could have stopped in time), the car that had been behind us slammed into the car that had been in front of us. There were tires screeching and metal bending and glass breaking all around. The noise was everywhere as cars all around us joined into the pile up.

In some ways, nothing happened on to us on this shining new’ years day. It took only seconds for the screeching to end and the cars around us to come to a halt. Because we were towards the beginning of the pile up, we didn’t even have to suffer through the traffic that the accident would have caused; we wove our way through the damaged cars pulling off the road and were at the party in 10 minutes. This was a typical fender-bender pile up with no one’s car smashed beyond recognition, no one likely to be badly injured.

Yet the what-ifs, which are probably circling invisible all the time around us, become palpable at times like that. The car behind us that hit the car in front of us would surely have hit us much harder with 12 feet less braking time. We’d have been smashed into the car in front of us. We’d probably still have been fine—this is why we drive a Volvo—but what if? And what if we hadn’t gotten the Volvo and were still in the van we’ve had most of our time here? We’d never have gotten off the road so quickly—we’d have spun or tumbled—or have braked so smoothly. What if then? What if it had gone badly and we’d have ended up in a helicopter to a hospital on New Years day instead of a party at a friends’ house. What if our lives had changed in that moment of screeching metal?

Over the course of New Year’s Day, Michael and I found that those questions don’t stop coming. What if we hadn’t moved to New Zealand? What if I had never been asked to come to the Southern Hemisphere at all and we hadn’t fallen in love with it? What if Michael and I hadn’t gotten job at an ice rink together in 1987? The questions spin in circles through every piece of our lives.

We like to believe that we’re in control of our lives, and to some extent we’re right. We decide what to do each day and how to respond to the events life throws toward us. But in making those decisions, we put ourselves at risk for utterly unexpected consequences. When I decided to have lunch with a Kiwi and an Aussie in Washington DC nearly four years ago, it was just about weighing how much time I had on that particular day with how interesting it would be to meet these strangers. I could never have known that that lunch would start things in motion that would have us leave our house and move to the other side of the world. What if we hadn’t had that lunch?

And on and on. We can anticipate only small bits of the outcomes of our actions, and mostly the pieces we anticipate come true. Most car rides end up just the way you think they will; most lunches do not lead to international moves. Perhaps the most startling thing of all is that it’s nearly impossible to anticipate which actions in our lives will turn out, later, to have been the momentous ones. We know that our wedding day will change our lives, and know that the day our kids are born will be memorable forever. But what of the day you wandered into the café and met the future partner? Or the day you met the person who would become your best friend? Or stumbled upon an interesting question that would turn into a powerful piece of your life’s work?

When we engage in relationships or go to parties or wonder about something, all of that is a risk that something might, well, happen to us. And the happening can be terrible (a car crash) or wonderful (a new love), or somewhat indefinite (a new question that arises). And I’m pretty sure that risk of something happening is called life. And then, eventually, one of the somethings that will happen is that we’ll die. There is no escaping either of them, the life or the death, really. There is only how they happen to us, and how much we get out of them.

This blog, when I began it early in the week, was about our Hanukkah party and what it was like to have a big party in a new country. And then it was going to be about having the beautiful and kind Anna, our German WWOOFer, back with us (she came for a week and then left—we all thought for good—and then came back for another week and celebrated her 20th birthday and New Years with us). And then about the New Year’s Eve party. But the squealing of tires made those things less present in my mind. Here at the new year, I am noticing again the gifts of being alive. I’m watching Naomi prepare for summer camp, watching Aidan learn about the world. Part of me wants to hold on to this time—and to these children—with a grasp so tight that this can never get away. I was scared by the crash, scared by how close each of us is to death nearly all the time. And I’m also noticing that part of what makes this time beautiful is that I cannot hold it. Naomi will go to camp and come back different. Aidan and I will walk on the beach and talk about the universe and politics and history, and we’ll have to come home and google everything I didn’t know about to get the answers he requires. The nights are already getting shorter as we make our way through summer to fall, to winter, and around and around. All of this is a cliché except for how much I feel it in my gut. The waves come and go. Cars drive and drive and sometimes crash. And each second of this year is a miracle for happening in just the way it happens—whatever happens next. Happy new year to you all.

Images from Christmas at the beach

2008-12-26T09:09:00.002+13:00

Michael hanging out laundry on Christmas morning--this is more fun and satisfying than I ever would have guessed.

The kids playing with AJ's new science kit on Christmas morning.

AJ dancing to some internal music on Christmas morning

Classic multicultural Christmas/Hanukkah at the sea

The Christmas cookies you'd have gotten if you lived closer.

Have a beautiful Christmas day/ Hanukkah evening/ holiday season.

Christmas spirit

2008-12-21T13:13:00.003+13:00

The buying of a Christmas tree seems to be a yearly challenge. Last year’s was so ugly that once it was fully decorated, I had Michael and Rob carry it to a place in the house where I wouldn’t see it so often. I didn’t even know how beautiful fir trees were until I came to a country where Christmas trees are spindly and floppy pines. This year would be different, we vowed. We would drive the 1+ hours to Graytown where there was a Christmas tree farm, begun by Canadians, selling what they called “Real Christmas Trees.” Ah, but the weekends were so busy. So we punted and asked them to deliver us one, at great expense. And so it was, on Wednesday of this week, that we got the phone call…We had asked for a tree to be delivered? A 7-foot tall fur, brought to Paekakariki? Yes, that was us. Sorry. No tree, no delivery. Maybe next year.

Crushed, we regrouped and decided we’d settle again for one of the floppy native pines. Now we had to find one. In the US, Christmas tree stands pop up like mushrooms after Thanksgiving. In New Zealand, they spring up by the side of the road for an hour as someone sells the 20 pines from his backyard, and then are gone forever. Last year we wandered endlessly searching for something, and the best one we found was as horrible a tree as I could have imagined. This year, we couldn’t find any at all!

So Keith directed us to a driveway in a local suburb. He claimed that we’d see a sign by the side of the road, “Christmas Trees, $20.” And so we did. We pulled up the drive, braved the WARNING GUARD DOG sign and rang the bell. A sour-looking fellow, tank top stretched tight over belly, appeared on the other side of the fence. “All the good ones are gone!” he told us. “Only ugly trees left!”

Because we found all of the trees generally ugly, this was either a nonsensical point or else a serious worry. But we followed him in anyway. An adventure.

He led us past his house, past the doghouse where we let the sleeping dog lie, and down a path. Thick forest all around us, the clear cut for the new subdivision ahead showed what humans often consider progress. His lawn was punctuated by veggie gardens and a scattering of straggly pines, with a view of the subdivision on one side and cows in a pasture on the other. “All the good ones are gone,” he repeated in a thick Dutch accent, surprising for one who had been in this country nearly 50 years. “Maybe you find something that is not so bad.”

And so we wandered from tree to tree. He followed us with saw in hand, helpfully offering advice. “This one isn’t so ugly,” he’d say if we stopped at one he seemed to like. “At least it’s green,” he’d point out if we stopped at a seriously ugly one. Then more plaintively, “This is taking a long time, eh?” as we wandered around the floppy trees for the third time.

Perhaps it was the thick putrid scent of the cow manure and the festering stream. Or perhaps it was that four Americans were being led around by a Dutch man in shorts as they tried to pick their New Zealand Christmas tree in the summer heat. But finally we pointed to one (“at least it’s green”) and he took his saw and quickly cut it down (at least it’s fresh). We carried it up the hill, shoved it in the back of our car, and went out for Indian food at a strip mall. Ah, the pastoral life.

The tree, in addition to being truly ugly and almost entirely without branches (but it’s green and fresh), has one more appealing quality. Maybe because it is summer here, maybe because it grew in a meadow, it seems to be covered with enough pollen of something so that Michael is deathly allergic to it. But no matter. The windows open to the sea rain seem to have washed most of that away, and now that it’s decorated and we have come to understand the concept of “lipstick on a pig” in a whole new way, the tree brings a kind of unfamiliar Christmas sprit to the house. Friends try to come up with nice things to say about it after they get up from being doubled over in laughter (“it doesn’t interfere with the view of the sea” or “look how well your ornaments stand out”).

There are benefits to having a tree like this. This year we will not mourn when we have to take it down, will not weep when it becomes firewood. We don’t waste time gazing lovingly at its branches. There’s always a close-by source of amusement. And, my favourite, this tree provides the clear motivation to get ourselves to Graytown next year in early December and cut down a Canadian import. It is heartening to know that some things are not more beautiful in paradise.

Ps Thanks to all of you who wrote in response to my blog question last week. It is amazingly satisfying to hear from you and hear what you make of this whole enterprise. I feel you with me in a new way. Perhaps we can keep up more of a back and forth, eh? And craft this new life of mine—two years in now—together.

Old friends and big waves

2008-12-17T19:33:00.005+13:00

Today, the last full day of school, was the best boogie boarding I've ever done. After school, Naomi and Aidan and I--along with Anna, the beautiful German WWOOFer and Keith, who had just been on a conference call with me--headed to the beach. I've had some folks ask for us to show a video of what this looks like. Here it is.

Also today, we heard from some lovely new old friends. Check out the second comment on this blog entry . We look forward to our next time with Duane and Janet, and I'll never sit next to someone on the airplane with quite the same feeling again...

This from Aidan: Hello all it is good living here but we really miss you .It was great to visit you all.And to everyone that that we didn't see last year that we saw this year we miss you too.

This is from Naomi:
Hey Everyone!
I just have some free time, so i'm just saying hi. If anyone remembers, i used to have my own blog, and since school ends tomorrow (YAY!!!) I have decided that I will start blogging again as a sort of summer project thing. So my blog address will go here and you can see what I'm up to.

Point inflection

2008-12-16T19:16:00.004+13:00

We have come to another of those many inflection points on the journey from here to there. Last week was our two year anniversary of life in this new land. To celebrate, my work friends brought Afghans, a wonderful and odd kind of New Zealand chocolate cookie, to our afternoon meeting. I looked around the room at NZCER and thought that two years ago I was in a total identity crisis about what my life would be like and where I’d find friends. And now here I was, surrounded by people whose thoughts and opinions I valued deeply, people I have been thinking alongside for these past years. We passed around the cookies and laughed and worked together, and then walked down the hill through this familiar city to the familiar train together. In addition to being impressed with the quality of their thinking and writing, I also genuinely like these folks, admire their values, love to laugh with them, learn from every interaction. That’s a beautiful thing.

Then, to celebrate this occasion, I got a present out of the blue from Michael. In the US in October, Michael bought a MacBook for himself, a present to replace the work laptop he was leaving behind as he began a year-long secondment in another governmental department. Ever since, in the evenings when Rob and Michael and I sit in the internet café that is my living room, I’m the odd one out with my little grey Dell laptop next to their shiny white Macs. For our two year anniversary, Michael bought me a new computer for this new land, an amazingly sexy MacBook Air. I have coveted this computer since I first laid eyes on it, but never harbored a thought of actually buying it—this is a global recession after all. In our 21 years together, Michael has never surprised me as much as he did for our two-year anniversary present, and now the sexy computer sits in my lap on this familiar train.

And then today, the third marker of this inflection point. For a variety of reasons, when you are awarded permanent residence in New Zealand it comes in two different visas: one that allows you to stay here forever, and one called a “returning resident” visa, which allows you to come and go whenever you want. That one expires after two years, a way to make sure that you actually live here in NZ and don’t just bank the residence permit for use at some later point (like after you’re 55 and you can’t get this visa anymore). But if you’re good, and you live here and work here for the 2 years, that visa too converts to permanent. And so, now that our anniversary is behind us, Michael headed over to immigration, proved the various things that needed proving, and now we can come and go from New Zealand whenever we want for as long as we want. We belong here now.

These three inflection points have left me looking at this new land in a new way. My work seems to be here and the work in the US is gone. My house seems to be here and my house in the US is gone. Even my visa says I belong here, no more checking of expiration dates as I clear customs or board a plane to NZ without a ticket to someplace else. I have long wondered when I’ll really feel like I’m here, when I’ll stop feeling my strangeness, noticing how American I am in accent and culture. I have wondered when I’ll get to feel fully like I belong, either here or there.

The big lesson for me, though, is that it is a life-long journey from here to there. Through facebook, I’m back in touch with a huge number of former students, and they ask and ask, “Why New Zealand?” It’s hard for me to answer that question, or the inevitable follow up questions about how long we’ll live here and where we’ll go next. This is my home now. These hills are familiar, the sheep, bedraggled after several days of last spring rains, are the regular companions of my trip home, along with the kite surfers I pass as I go through exactly this part of the journey on a windy afternoon like this one. I love it here, love waking up to the sea and falling asleep looking at the stars. I don’t know if this is our home for the long haul or what comes next. But at this inflection point I am here and at this moment, here is home.

PS Here, after keeping this blog for 2 years—when I never thought I’d write here at all—I am at another inflection point. You may have noticed that I am writing here less. That’s because I have lost the plot about what this blog is for and whom it communicates with. If any readers have opinions about that, I would be grateful.

PPS Pics today of Aidan on Karen's bike (cool Karen!) and from the surf club on Sunday

and counting...

2008-12-08T20:19:00.001+13:00

It’s my two year anniversary today. Two years since our plane touched down early one Thursday morning in a cold and damp December. When we moved here, I said I’d be here at least 18 months. Seems like we’ve met that target. Wonder what’s next.

(“What’s next” turned out to be MORE nits in Naomi’s hair. This is a fitting celebration of our 2-year anniversary. For those of you who haven’t been following since the beginning, it’s worth a dip back into the horrors of December 06.)

Goldilocks, the skylight, and the quest for perfection

2008-12-07T09:16:00.001+13:00

On Tuesday I decided that I would make one last big move on the house and then call it really seriously finally done (for now). When we bought this house, the attic was just a cavernous space of an easy standing height, crossed with support beams, and occupied only birds’ nests. We wanted up there! We dropped the ceiling in the kitchen and hall to get one lovely room and a bathroom, a haven for guests. But over the rest of the house, the ceilings on the ground floor are high which makes the space above smaller. The other half of the attic has been an unfinished space—with reinforced floor and the beginnings of dry wall and one small window. On Tuesday, I decided we’d just make that one last change and then we’d be done.

So I called Dave, the Builder Extraordinaire. How much will it cost to put one skylight in that room and plaster it up? I asked. And when can you do it? Dave gave me a figure that was less than the cash I had on hand from my work in Sydney last week. And he said, I’ll come tomorrow and be done by next week.

And so it was, on Wednesday, that I was looking at my attic walls and pointing to the place where I wanted the skylight. I was on an international phone call and so I had very little time to get the placement right. I wanted it far forward so that this skylight wouldn’t interfere with what we wanted to do to the room later. And I wanted it low enough to give me a view. Thursday night, I looked. The skylight seemed to be in the right place forward, I thought. But it was so high. I’d never get a view from there. I agonized, discussed things with Rob and Michael, and wished for the view.

Thursday morning I laid out my problem to Dave. How much work would it be to drop the skylight another 2 feet so I could see out of it? “No worries, Jen,” Dave told me (I think Dave is the only person I have met in the last 15 years who calls me Jen). He dropped the hole and I stood in the opening, delighted with my imagination of the view I’d see once the roof was cut open.

On Friday, I got to experience that. Shaking of house, rattling of windows and suddenly sunlight streaming into an attic that had never seen the day before. And, through the hole in the roof, broad views of blue sea waves lapping onto green hills. Perfection. God how I love perfection. I had exactly what I wanted.

Have you ever noticed how short lived perfection really is? And so it was, when the skylight was moved into place, when it was perching, not in the hole as I had imagined, but on top of the hole to be flashed above the roofline, that I once again remembered how little perfection there is in the world. The depth of the roof plus the depth of the skylight raised the viewline up 8 inches. The only eight inches of my sea view. Now, from my eye level, I look straight into the edge of the skylight and can raise my eyes to see the tips of the hills bumping into the sky. To make things worse, now the window is too low to add head height to the room, and maybe, just maybe, it’s a little too far forward.

I am in agony over the 8 inches wrong here, the 12 inches wrong there. I brooded around the house yesterday, feeling stupid for having made Dave move the hole once and wondering whether I should have had him move it again when I saw that it wasn’t what I wanted. This bed is too hard, this one is too soft. How many beds to you try before you find one that’s just right?

I try very hard to remember that perfection is the enemy of the good, a lesson that doesn’t come easily to me. But, ah, the responsibility of choosing where to put a window in a windowless wall. Suddenly, the world seemed full of responsibilities that I wasn’t up to meeting. How do you pick the perfect high school for Naomi? What shall we serve our dinner guests, controlling for multiple allergies? How do we know which country is the best one for us to live in? What colour should we paint the walls that surround the too-low and too-forward skylight?

And it’s also totally absurd. I have a good friend who is trying to come to terms with his dying father. I have other friends trying to figure out their loves and make relationship choices for their futures. I talk with teachers who are trying to figure out what on earth to teach for the new curriculum. We are gifted and plagued by our ability to measure and weigh, to agonize over decisions and to hold future—and backwards—images. We decide which things are too high, too low, too hot, too cold, too hard, too soft. This is life, though, where we cannot get it exactly right each time. There are roof pitches to take into consideration (oops), unexpected storm clouds, whether she loves you back, the effects of the new leadership on morale. There are unexpected detours and a confusion of competing commitments.

I spend big swaths of my day looking at the sea, watching its relentless rhythm. I watch the clouds get pushed around by the wind, the green hills go yellow without rain. I should be getting natural patterns, should be understanding that this life I lead is small and the choices I make (do I go to the UK in March? What shall I make for morning tea for the kids’ Sunday school class tomorrow? How do I support a high school’s leadership team?) are just part of what the fabric of the next part of my life might be. Paul pointed out that perhaps it would have taken a president as disastrous as Bush to get one as astonishing as Obama. Each choice opens and forecloses, like the thrumming waves.

When Keith came over yesterday, having heard something of my discomfort about the window, he leapt up into the attic room and smiled broadly. “What do you mean no view?” he asked, looking out. “This is perfect!” I pointed out that it was perfect for some and useless for others and he looked at me confused. Putting my hand on his shoulder, I stooped him down until his eyes were level with mine, looking straight ahead at the edge of the skylight and into a sea-less hills and sky beyond. He burst into laughter. “The window isn’t too high—you’re too low!” he said. “Or we should raise the floor!” He pulled over a paint can for me to stand on, and there was my beloved view, swath of sea ruffling into hills. There isn’t an objective too high or too low or too hot or too cold, there’s just Goldilocks and the particular mood she’s in and the fact that she’s closer in size to baby bear than to Mama or Papa. There is only what is, a window there, a skylight there, the waves forming white crests in a silver sea.

images of a week

2008-12-06T12:11:00.003+13:00

Ok, there's a substantive blog coming, but first there is lunch to get for the kids and a cake to bake on this beautiful Saturday afternoon. So until then, here are pictures from the last week or so: Naomi at surf club, Aidan experimenting with a new hair style (like it?), me in Sydney, the grounds of the school fair last weekend (only, er, in the backwards order--not sure why).

Creating spaces for change?

2008-12-01T11:16:00.000+13:00

I spent a day last week in a school full of dedicated, passionate teachers, all interested in trying to figure out how to make their school the best place for students—now and into the future. These teachers were devoted and energetic and smart—and terrified and exhausted and overwhelmed. In a world without enough time to keep up with the demands of the present needs of students, parents, school leaders, community members, how on earth will teachers make a change to something different? After all, there may not be general agreement about exactly how schools should change to meet the demands of the future or exactly what those new schools will look like, but there is widespread agreement that schools do need to change somehow. The question I’ve become curious about isn’t even about what schools in the future should look like, but what schools today need to look like so that they can develop into schools for the future. How do we create schools as spaces where teachers to be able to experiment and make changes?

The key problem here is that teachers have neither the time nor the permission to make real changes. Schools are busy places, and teachers are devoted to the students they have right now and don’t want to take any chances on messing up those students’ lives in order to try some new fad. Parents, too, are pretty devoted to the school experience their children are having now and are not interested in sacrificing any quality their kids might have now for some future gains for other children. And yet, if we don’t want more of the same, and we also don’t want the inevitable risks that come with innovation, we seem pretty stuck.

People notice when someone tries something different and it falls flat. We can recognise a failure when we see it. Can we also recognise the time after which continued success, in the same way, will also be a failure? If cars today had the same safety features, gas mileage, and performance as cars 100 years ago, what seemed like success at the time might strike us as a big problem. It’s possible, though, that we might not notice at all that cars hadn’t changed much in all that time; it’s hard to see—and regret—innovation that doesn’t happen anywhere. If schools today are still educating some percentage of our children work in yesterdays’ jobs and live in yesterday’s society, maybe there’s a hidden failure there to which we should turn our attention. And it’s not just teachers who need to have their attention turned in this way; it’s all of us. Parents need to be more supportive of innovation, even when it doesn’t work. Principals need to support teachers to have new ideas and then get out of their way as teachers try things out. Community members need to be less reactive to the stories the press puffs up about chances teachers have taken that haven’t gone very well.

But all of this needs to be done inside a context where real children spend their time—not a social science experiment. We have to be smart as we are being bold, have to be cautious as we are being creative. These are hard mixes; even at companies where there’s plenty of time and money to spur innovation, there are all kinds of barriers to doing things a new way. I’d love to hear from those of you, reading this, who have some interests in this area—whether you’re school leaders, parents, teachers, community members, or students. What makes it possible to keep innovation going where you are? What do you wish you had more of? How could we think of ways you could get what you need? This is a hard thing we’re trying to do. It would be easier if we were thinking about it together.

after dinner walk through the park

2008-11-19T20:39:00.002+13:00

you've all been wanting to see the hobbits, right? tonight i found one!

lofty

2008-11-14T22:46:00.003+13:00

Today was a teacher work day. Yesterday, the Council came and signed off on our house. They think it's finished now (they don't care about a couple of patches of paint that's needed etc). The combination of these two things meant it was loft day--the day that we could open up the lofts and move the kids upstairs. And so now they're tucked into their little beds upstairs, sweetly sleeping under their skylights as the sea thrums on. It's not a bad life.

Miracle in a far away land

2008-11-08T23:09:00.003+13:00

On my Wednesday I had a meeting in town. I woke up and thought, “people are voting now.” I walked the kids to school thinking, “people are voting.” I took the train into my meeting. People in lines, at voting machines, making phone calls. Voting voting voting. Who were they voting for??

We had arranged to watch the election results together at the pub in the village because a) I don’t have a TV and b) I wanted to be around other people. Melissa and the kids and I would be there, Rob would pop in from his job at the deli across the street, and Michael would join us when he got home from work. And so it was that I was there on my own, anxious, waiting for the kids to walk there from school and Melissa to show up from work. And there, at a table in an empty pub, I first saw Obama take Pennsylvania. I was surprised at the surge of emotion, at hot and unexpected tears. Here I was, alone in this bar, crying at the television.

The kids arrived, barefooted in the kiwi style, and Melissa blew in with Ohio. I ran across the street to update Rob, and realised that I didn’t want to be spending the most important election of my life as one of four people who cared about what was going on. When the TV news cut to pictures of Americans at the US Embassy election night party, I told Melissa and my kids that we were heading to Wellington. After some convincing, I scooted the rest of the group out the door. Melissa ran to get her daughter from a friend’s house; we headed to the train.

Little did we know that the train that leaves just after 4pm leaves at 4.04 rather than 4.08 (all the other trains leave at eight minutes after the hour). And so we raced for the train, and missed it by a breath. Until that minute, watching the train chug away and learning that the next one wouldn’t be there for 45 minutes, I hadn’t known how desperate I was to be near other people who cared as much as I did about the hoped-for election of the most exciting politician of my time. The weight of my loneliness in a country on the other side of the world from those voting pulled at me; I put my head in my hands and cried.

I wasn’t alone, though, and Melissa, who saw how important this was to me, piled us into her car and south we went, towards the embassy that would let me be with my people.

Or perhaps not. Michael called to tell us the news. Five minutes ahead of us, he had gone to the embassy party and been turned away. You had to have tickets. “Aren’t our accents tickets enough?” I asked. Nope. We met in the lobby outside the embassy party to regroup. A friendly New Zealander at the door smiled at my Obama button and asked us what we were doing.

”I’m wanting to be in a room filled with cheering Americans on this amazing night,” I told him.

“Well that room up there isn’t for you,” he said in hushed tones. “That’s a political event, lots of Kiwis and political folks. Not much cheering. What you want is the Democrats Abroad party at the Irish Pub on Cuba St. That’s where you’ll get your cheering Americans!”

We thanked him and headed up to Cuba St. where the red, white, and blue balloons marked the pub. Inside, it was bedlam. I stood inside the doorway, blinking to adjust my eyes to the dark and then, with a glimpse at the TV, to adjust my heart to the light. CNN had just projected an Obama win. I was in a room filled with Obama signs, with Kiwis and Americans eating and drinking and smiling at the TV. There were occasional yells as another state was called for Obama and then another. This is what I wanted, this communion of passionate people. This was my place.

The night is a blur punctuated by images I may well never forget. Watching McCain’s speech and hearing the cheers at his admission of his defeat and the silence in the room when he told us that America was the greatest country on the earth. This room full of people living in New Zealand had no interest in interacting with that statement, and there were low murmurs in response. There was the breathtaking moment when President-elect Obama (those, by the way, are currently my three favourite words to string together) took to the stage. There was Aidan, delighted with the Obama win, who really came to life with the promise of a puppy. “There’s going to be a puppy in the White House?” he asked There was the hugging afterward, everyone weeping, all of us overcome with the beauty of the moment and the magnificent possibility of the future.

Afterwards I realised who I was missing the very most, even in this room so perfectly filled with celebrating people. I called my dear friend Mark, with whom I had taught about race again and again, with whom I had talked through issues around this election and the new possibility of the world. He answered the phone from a crowd.

”Mark, this is your congratulations call from New Zealand!” I said into the phone.

“I can’t hear you!” he shouted

“MARK, this is a celebration on the other side of the world, in New Zealand!”

“Sorry! It’s too loud here and I can’t hear anything.”

“MARK!” I said, yelling into the phone, “IT’S JENNIFER IN NEW ZEALAND!”

“JEEENNNIFEEER!” he howled. “Oh Jennifer! BABY IT’S A MIRACLE!”

And I wept again to hear his joy, and to hear joyful yelling on the streets of Washington DC, where my dear friend and thousands of other celebrating people had wandered to the White House to mark the change.

Four years ago, I found myself nearly constantly in tears after the last election. I would be sitting at dinner and suddenly realise my cheeks were wet. Michael thought I was frightening the children, which was probably true. I had it bad.

This week, I find myself bursting into smiles without knowing that I’m thinking about President-elect Obama. And when I think about that beautiful family moving into the White House, when I think of those girls—my kids’ ages—and their fantastic mother and their new puppy, my eyes fill with tears again. These are not Bush tears, though. These are the tears that are about pride in my country, hope about what might come next, joy over a barrier that was knocked down decisively.

Here in New Zealand, we’ve just had an election today. Here my party didn’t win. Tomorrow I’ll deal with what that means. Tonight though again I’ll go to bed smiling. President-elect Obama. Welcome to the rekindling of the American dream.

Dangerous liaisons

2008-11-05T09:38:00.002+13:00

[I have been working on this entry for several days in snatched time between the many writing projects which are now nearly blissfully behind me. Really the thing that’s most important here is obviously the election—voting going on as I type—but here’s a diversion from earlier in the week.]

My partner Mark says that one of the most risky behaviours one can engage in while traveling is to speak to the person in the seat next to you on an airplane. If ever I mentioned any in-air conversation, Mark would tsk-tsk at me and remind me that a conversation gone bad was bad, without escape, for hours. He’d advise me to plug in ear phones, avoid eye contact, and, if worse came to worse, feign sleep in order to escape from the dreaded conversation of the seat mate.

So it was with Mark’s warning fully in mind that I took my aisle seat on the five hour flight from Dulles to LA last week. My seatmate kept to himself, reading a guide book, and I kept to myself, editing a journal article. But, because I am not Mark Ledden, I couldn’t help noticing that the book opened next to me was a NZ guidebook, an unusual reading choice on a flight to LA unless there’s a longer flight directly following. And so I engaged in that most worrisome of airplane behaviours: I talked first.

Duane (as his named turned out to be), answered. He was meeting his wife in LA and together they were flying (not on an Air NZ plane like me) to New Zealand for 10 days. No, he had made no plans so far and had only a reservation in Auckland for his first night in the country (he is my kind of tourist!). Yes, he was delighted to be sitting next to an American who lived in NZ.

We talked maps and travel plans. He had never been to NZ, but had lived overseas when his son (now 20) was small, in the Caribbean doing work for the Peace Corps. He was on the right side in the upcoming election and had already voted in the swing state of Virginia. He was lovely, with interesting things to say, a gentle presence, the ability to be alternately talking and quiet over the course of our hours strapped next to one another. Duane and I had heaps in common. We seemed drawn to roughly the same tourism activities (not surprising—someone going to NZ is not usually the bright lights and big city kind of person). We even did the same basic work; he was the head of leadership development for a US agency. We talked about a wide range of subjects—and, perhaps more importantly for this introvert pressed by writing deadlines—were often silent together—over the course of our 5 hours of forced-communion.

And so it was, as we prepared for final descent and tucked up our tray tables, I did something far more dangerous than beginning a conversation; I invited him to come and stay with us during his travels. I gave him my name and phone number, and off we went, our separate ways in LA.

As I left the United terminal to cross over to the AirNZ terminal, I was surprised to see Duane waiting for me with his wife, Janet. We chatted about some of the wonderful things she might look forward to, I reiterated my invitation to them both. My gut reaction about Janet was that she was open and lovely, warm and gracious. I plunged out into the warm autumn evening in southern California figuring that I’d never see them again but pleased that I had shared this tiny moment with them.

Five days later, I opened my door in a magnificent spring evening in Paekakariki and welcomed Duane and Janet in for, as it turned out, more moments together. They came bearing thoughtful presents—a bottle of wine, a bag of chocolate chip cookies, a purple flowering plant to grace the garden of our purple house. The kids, when they got home from trick-or-treating, were offered armfuls of art supplies and the gentle guidance of Janet, an artist and art teacher. Over dinner we talked about leadership and travelling, about bringing your children to new places to live, about US politics. They were model guests, playful and interested in the children, warm and grateful (even about a dinner that lost some zing as Naomi and Aidan got carried away by their trick or treating). They talked about the trip so far, and we poured over maps for the trip to come. We walked on the beach at sunset and watched the sliver of a moon sink towards the sea. They were overcome with the beauty of the place. It was hard to believe that these people, total strangers to us, fit so easily into our house.

Duane and Janet had intended to go on to the South Island the next day, but I warned them about an approaching gale. They revised their plans to spend a rainy Saturday in Wellington and a Saturday night cozy in front of our fire before heading off to the ferry in the morning on a sparkling Sunday. And so a second night in our living room, drinking excellent NZ wine, we were feeling grateful for hot fires and double-glazed windows, and for strangers come together to be friends. In the morning it was with real regret that we said goodbye to them, watched friends who were just yesterday strangers go off into a big world where we’ll probably never see them again.

The lessons of this story are subtle and not generalisable. The truth is that I rarely even share a sentence with the person sitting next to me on a plane, because planes are for working and not for chatting. It also could have gone very badly. They could have been difficult under longer circumstances, or Janet could have been justifiably wary over the invitation her husband received from a woman to spend the night at her house (ditto with Michael, by the way). But in that moment and with those people and with me at the exhausting end of a long and often-difficult trip, it was the perfect thing to do. I love being in the world in this way and meeting others who live in that same world. I love that just as I was feeling so far away from the familiar conversations and sounds and relationships of the US, I imported US reminders into my very own NZ living room as a bridge between my lives. I love that this afternoon, there will be other Americans I know—on the South Island—huddled in front of TVs in some bar or hotel lounge rooting for a man who will (I hope) win the presidency in the same week he so sadly lost his grandmother.

Sunday Michael and I went out to breakfast with some friends in town and came home and sat on the cool sand with Melissa to watch the kids in their first week of surf club. We walked home along the beach where I finished Michael’s birthday cake while Melissa and Rob cooked dinner. Here were longer-standing relationships, deep and better aged. Here were four Americans making their way in a new country, celebrating Michael’s 42 year on the planet. Our house, our lives, our hearts, contain space for old and new friends, for quick connections and lifelong ones. The world is vast, and it is also connected. Relationships are the most difficult thing we have, and they are also as natural as breathing. Love is a natural resource without any constraining factors.

Happy birthday Michael.

Happy one-year-in-New-Zealand anniversary, Rob.

Go Obama—let this be the start of a better world order.

writing, swimming, celebrating

2008-11-02T21:33:00.003+13:00

It has been a week of reports due, chapters due, journal articles due. I have been writing like mad (but I bet you're not interested in what I've been writing!). It has also been a week of Halloween costumes, birthday cakes, and strangers who have come to be friends. More on that tomorrow. Tonight, my belly full of birthday cake, I'll just offer pictures of the week...