1.
Coziness
“A person who writes can’t opt out of a phenomenon like the Wadden Sea. It wants something of you, that thing out there. And it doesn’t owe you or the reader coziness” ~ Dorthe Nors, from A Line In The World
I am a long way from the Wadden Sea, and yet on the flipside of the world, I’m somewhere similarly wild. Pelorus Sound, at the top end of the South Island of New Zealand.
Driving in, my eyes sweep across the Sound. Her mountains sit, filing their nails, assured and, at the same time, unaffected by their own beauty. They do not look up as the car crunches down the gravel, spitting pebbles on its way. They exist the same, both in my presence and without it.
The Sound stretches, throws crumbs off her underskirts, causing the skin of water on top to ripple from centre to shore, a parachute filling up with air. My eyes follow the movements. They are looking with a seeking of acceptance, for signs of comfort or belonging. My eyes, in their investigations, instruct my body how to feel.
How should we be here? They are asking.
We are not sure yet, she replies.
The Sound, she knows about my presence, and is welcoming, and all at once, completely self-contained. Her indifference catches my attention. Her waters the bringer of stories; those of the ground underneath now flooded, footstep hollows now filled in. Of waters flowing in from north, west and east.
‘It doesn’t owe you coziness.’
What is the water asking of me? I’m left wondering. To not be required to be comfortable feels comforting.
I hear the mountains, the water, the trees, the ferns in conversation.
I am the new girl milling round at lunchtime, attempting to find answers in the seam lines of her shirt, attempting to find her way into a new clan. The persistent, insistent decentering of self from the middle a universe completely self-designed.
2.
Landscape
A long time back I learned that the environment you teach in shares your workload, contributes to the hoped-for transformation. If this is true, I feel that I may not need to show up at all. I am here to teach a creative retreat within a landscape that is both enigmatic and dynamic. In your face with its beauty in a stereotypical New Zealand kind of way. Cliches always arise when there’s an insufficiency of words. When positioned eye to eye, a human body, and the Sound, both handwriting on paper and a printed photograph do not remotely capture what the senses assimilate and breathe in.
And yet still we try.
If you arrive by car, then you are left facing directly at the water. The light, the colour, and the sound are interchangeable, impossible to separate. The water, at first solid with darkening, shows its aliveness when the light splits through the tearing in the clouds. This Sound does not allow for a transition to lazy and flat land pacing easily to the baseline of her mountains; instead, the mountains rise directly from the Sound. It’s her hands alone that hold them up, and it seems that she alone will determine when they fall. Here, there are no margins on the page. Mountains meet water, water fills valleys, both are entangled with the sky. The spilling of the watercolour paint, the brush takes over, the artist admits to losing all control. This scenescape is one that insists it paints itself.
Behind me, the landscape clamours towards the clouds, it’s greens of moss and jade and lime and fluorescent and slight yellow-ish tinge are so luminous it’s like they are made up. We walk the tracks, between the Mānuka and the Kānuka. The Mamaku, the black tree fern, with her muscly fronds that would take you in an arm wrestle, and what’s more, win. The Ponga, the silvery fern. The Kātote, the lashing of soon to be discarded fronds flanking her sides like a woven skirt. All of the fern family and yet distinct and undeniably unique.
We brush against the leaves, thumb the curling tendrils that hang onto your skin like tiny fingers. We muse over what’s edible, what’s not. I take some photos, resolve to look them up when I get back.
Once returned and sitting in my chair, I tune into the noise that’s all around. My mind likens it at first to static electricity. That persistent, background hum. I close my eyes, the distraction of sight limiting sound. I hear better now, notice the pulsing layers. What appears to be a monochromatic tone arrives in loops. It’s not a singular conversation. Many high and low notes shared with such continuity and rhythm as to make consistent, effervescent buzz. You need to listen carefully to notice all the nuance. A clicking. An obvious beginning and an end, even if the spaces between are tiny.
But perhaps, I think, they’re only tiny to the likes of me. This big galumphing human that towers over a cricket or small insect, sitting here writing, trying to analyze their sound. Perhaps the spaces, the notes are indeed perfect. The size, the speed, the shape, all perfect for the size and sound they come from.
I imagine them concentrating- are they concentrating, these crickets? Or is this just a part of their day? Like the making of bread. The putting away of the laundry. The washing up. The tending to the children. The sound of everyday, another thing to do for a cricket simply being them and the sound of wonderment to me.
If memory had a sound, my childhood and my summers would be crickets.
3.
Chopping
We are nearing the end of day two, and I am chopping vegetables. I am irritated. Not with anyone or anything. I’m irritated with myself. I listen to a familiar, internal conversation and I am bored. I have defended these declarations, protestations, covered up my body and retreated from the sea.
I smile, I joke.
I am not made for the water.
I am a creature of the land and not of the sea.
The people nod and smile. They do not care or argue for justifiable reason or conversation. Their asking is always a politeness, an invitation. The missing out of being, of immersing in the water is mine alone to bear.
But here she is, always has been. Lapping at my consciousness. We are over half ourselves made up of water. To reject the ocean is to reject the self. To admire her but to refuse to enter is leathering to the soul. I feel this to be true.
But today I chop, and I am over it. I want to swim. I decide to swim. A small statement that appears inconsequential, but to me it feels quite big.
‘The ocean doesn’t owe you coziness.’
I repeat this to myself.
4.
Water
I am trapped inside a clear container, and it’s being shaken. I cannot tell what is up and what is down. I know I need to breath soon- now in fact- and yet breathing doesn’t seem to be an option. As I start to rise back up, the hand of another forceful wave pushes me down.
Stay there, it screams within the pressure of my ears. You will do as you are told.
The ocean, which I had understood to be previously benevolent seems blasé to my calling out for favours. I realise there are no special passes issued here. If there was ever a thought of hierarchy, of prioritization of life in relation to my humanness, all thoughts of it are drowning along with the small body of my early teenage self.
But she’s still here now, that younger self, in between the spaces of these words. She can feel the wrist burn from the arm that reached and grabbed her. The confusion of inner liquids turned to salt.
And she has stayed, a quiet and determining presence undissolved inside me.
We still love the ocean, she whispers, but remember, don’t go in.
‘The ocean doesn’t owe you coziness.’
I say out loud this time.
5.
Sund
Yesterday, I learned the word “Sound” comes from the old Norse term Sund. It refers to a body of water that’s deeper in the center, and then travels up on all sides, like a funnel or a cone. A Sound and a Fjord are related, in that they hold a similar shape, but the landscape that formed them is quite different. A Sound is river based; a Fjord glacial. The former is more gently sloping, the latter more dramatic in its steepness towards the centre of itself.
I stare out at the water and imagine peeling it back like a massive, sodden velvet curtain. What is there to be revealed? Maybe the water is the butter knife smoothing over jagged edges. Perhaps it protects a wildness that in its rawness we are not yet ready or perhaps don’t deserve to see.
Before I knew exactly what a Sound was, I imagined it got its name from sensory origins. A literal sound, an echo chamber of vibrations, caught within the arms of a mountain landscape. Maybe it’s the shape of an ear drum, I muse out loud to my new friends.
It follows with a thought that saddens me: At my own inlet home, the one that owns me, the sailors in their diaries from a century before spoke of not being able to sleep at night owing to the sound of the whales. I’ve slept on those same shores for fifteen years and never heard a whale singing out loud. Imagine what that must have been like, to have the whales sing you to sleep?
Instead, we sang them swiftly, and permanently off to theirs, the likes of which, or at least the numbers, have never found their way back. Or not yet at least.
I glance left and a Weka, a New Zealand native bird, is coming to see me. On my way down, I hear her calling out. My walking, my notebook in one hand, coffee in the other, a disturbance to the landscape. Sometimes I wonder how long I need to sit to be accepted, acknowledged as part of a what goes on. What would it take to be considered as a friend?
As I write: A Stingray. I quickly clamber down the rocks, throw my shoes off to the side. He flows through the water like an aquatic sky. I cannot see the difference from his centre to the outer reaches of his body. There are no joints or joins. He is cut, as they say, from a single piece of cloth.
I put my feet in the water and am surprised to feel it isn’t arctic cold. This is unexpected. The water where I live has conversations directly with your bones.
I secretly, not so secretly, hope that he will notice me, my new made Stingray friend, but he glides away, purposely purposeless, at least to my eyes. I feel strangely proud, as though understanding that’s how it should be. A creature not owned nor owing to anyone. And all the same, I let my feet rest here a little longer. If I am now treading the waters where he floats, am I not just a little more stingray? And is he not just a little more Jane?
6.
Self-Portrait
I want you to write a self-portrait, I tell the group. We discuss some ideas to help craft what it is we want to say. Kass, my fabulous photographer friend who is leading the retreat with me, will do a physical portrait of everyone after. She will read their words back, encourage us to step into the trueness of what it is we wrote.
I offer some prompts to begin:
I want to know…
What I know to be true is…
It doesn’t interest me…
Some sentences from the stream of consciousness that are mine:
I want to know of your willingness to feel like an alien in a landscape fierce in its bearing witness to you.
I want to know if you can face hardship or loss without questions of fairness or deserving.
I want to know if you are living a thousand days that look the same, or a thousand different days.
But I think, at the end of it, there’s not much I want to know beyond the remembering of my bigness and my smallness all at once, beyond the expectation of asking a question in the knowing I’ll hear back, beyond my body becoming another thought stream carried in the wind.
This I do not write, but also know:
I really want to return back to the water.
7.
Waiata / Waitata
At some point, I became curious about the meaning behind the word ‘Waitata’. The exact position we are in is called Waitata Bay. I’ve noticed that the more I write and become more interested, it’s often not the English names that I really seek to know but the indigenous ones. They often fill in more blanks of the stories I am seeking, expressing more about the land than they do about the person who supposedly found it- whatever it is that really means.
Waitata, it is thought, is an extension, adaptation of the word Waiata, the Māori word for song. I feel that here, with her. I hear her song. She communicates in body language, offering an exchange of energy that’s hard to express in words for the simple reason that it exists beyond them.
I feel the water as a siren call, decide I want to take back the word ‘siren’. I pause my writing to look the definition up.
In Greek mythology, sirens were birds with the head of a woman, whose songs were so beautiful that no one could resist. The sirens were said to lure sailors to their rock island, where they met an untimely death.
I scroll further down, click on another definition.
What does it mean if someone is a siren?
The answer:
It’s seductive, tempting, especially dangerously or harmfully. The siren call of adventure.
This Sound, she is a siren. Tempting, seductive, yes. But when I say seductive, I say so in a way where you are willing to be taken. Wanting to be taken. Accepting of, open to being taken.
It is absolutely dangerous and harmful, but not in the way that we might think.
It’s dangerous to the old ideas, harmful to the stories.
I was willing, am willing to be taken because I’m bored of my old stories.
I wanted the younger, interior parts of myself to crumble in the same way I see clay falling off the cliffs, sacrifice themselves, become rubble supporting the foundations for the woman I am now.
One no longer afraid of the water or the sea.
8.
Navigator
The process had already been defined. We write. The writing is read back to us. The photo is taken. I already know, already feel I don’t want my words read back, not as a form of shyness or anything else but because I don’t want anything getting in the way. I don’t want the third space of a paper holding pieces of the conversation.
This is a direct one, between my body and the Sound.
The days before I played around while entering the water. Took my time, alchemized discomfort into jokes expressed out loud.
But today, I don’t want to joke, and beyond that, don’t have mind to.
I tell Kass: I’ll have my photos in the Sound. And if it’s ok, I don’t want to read my words.
I’m concerned about looking disrespectful. Together we’ve outlined a process, and it turns out I’m the one who ends up breaking stride.
But she completely understands. I’ve spoken to her about my experiences in the water.
“You’re taking back the element,” she tells me in reply.
This hits me in the spaces between ribs, a visceral message of something that is true.
I dip below the water, forgetting that the camera’s even there.
The Sound I know does not need or require me, this I know. But if I choose to enter into conversation, she will hold me while I’m there.
I think of neither cosiness nor comfort.
I think back again to another description by Danish writer Dorthe Nors, watching a Navigator bird.
The little navigator isn’t afraid of the world. It was created to exist within it.
The little Navigator bird, unafraid.
A winged and feathered siren, created to exist within, in the place she finds herself.
I bob within the watery waves.
There are no feathers on my breast.
