{a handful of } all the ways we mother

1.

We imagine our fall from grace to be accompanied by drama. Swift. A speeding through red lights. An observable tragedy. A mistake of epic proportions that divides a life into a before and after story. For it to happen slowly was never a brief thought. A leaking air mattress, deflating overnight. A slippery slide with shoes on. The beginning of things being not quite right was surely something we would feel. Surely. But it seems, we noticed it the same as the turning of the planet. We don’t believe we’re spinning when the horizon stays unmoved. It can’t be, we remark to ourselves. It mustn’t be, we confirm to ourselves back. And then one day, the air seems still of birdsong and quite suddenly we notice. Huh, we say. Come to think of it, we haven’t heard birdsong for a while.

I imagine:

All the ways to bottle birdsong. My hands craft a forest in a snow globe.

Here, my son says, handing it to his child. Your grandma made you this.

The note reads:

These are the songs that keep you safe.

Future heirlooms of bottled birdsong and hand-crafted forest scenes.

This is what I witnessed, I want to say. I breathe these words inside the bottle too. 

My son is 8 years old.

In my mind’s eye:

I watch them open up the bottle, observing my own thoughts as though they’re someone else’s dream.

They look up, pause as though the airs been snagged with sound.

A cellular

remembering.

 

2.

See up there? He points to further up the hill. The abundance of Kānuka?

I look to the dividing line of trees.

Early succession trees, so I am told.  When the forests have been cleared, and it’s the bare earth that remains, it’s the Kānuka that moves in first to make her place.

Kānuka, she shoots towards the sun, creates a canopy under which the slower growing trees and plants can grow. She has capacity to live and to protect on land that is stressed and open to the light.

Oh, I say. Kānuka is a mother.

I read:

Kānuka is a nurse plant for many species. Over time, her need for light and fast paced growth means she is replaced by those who she has tended to and nurtured.

Kānuka is a mothering tree, I repeat back to myself.

 

3.

 

I feel the urgency to write the testimony of the forest through the movement of my pen upon the page. A voice inside my head says it’s arrogant to assume I could create something that might represent the sacred, that my hands are not holy enough to lip read the songs of newly open blooms, or to translate the murmurings of the soon to be forgotten. But still I try.

My wondering would like me to believe that perhaps it’s possible to write the sound of bird’s wings so someone reading can name them by the way they cut the air when in mid-flight, that words on a page could act as substitute ears in places absent from the murmurings of insects.

I’ll use my fingers to block littered and belligerent opinion, permanently affix my noise cancelling headphones to silence voices that tell me I’m oversensitive, naïve, or idealistic, trapped within reality as common sense as fairy tales.

Because I don’t know what to do to protect the many things I love, I start with this:

The Tūī flies as a feat of acrobatics. A flapping, and a whirring, a second or two of silence.

The Tūī flies and I listen, I look up. The sky chooses to be silent so birds can be heard within it.

I dream this is the start of the dissent, an uprising of sorts.

I imagine:

We hear the flapping of the wings, as a collective we look up, and at the same time and out loud we say,

enough.

I imagine:

That collectively we mother

earth.

 

4.

 

How’s mum life? I am asked.

Mum life. It’s such a weird phrase.

In my head:

You know, I’m really not so sure. Some days I want to rewind the childing process. Reverse the hurricane and earthquake that is birth. Stop them being exposed to everything that’s hard about the outside. Suck them in, draw them back, pull them back inside, a safe keeping, safe holding, en-wombing. A statement of physical fact. That if you make decisions that affect them, you’ll have to take me first.

I read the news last night, I want to say, and sometimes I think I love them so much I wish I hadn’t had them.

But then:

Just this morning a shaft of light appeared through the kitchen window. And we twirled and spun around, dancing with dust fairies, upward reaching, arms, branches, reaching, the top of the canopy, upwards towards the open sun.

The seed of Kānuka cracked within us, we spun. Light demanding, light seeking, light being.

Kānuka, mothering tree, mothering me.

I reply:

Good thanks. You know– busy.

 

5.

 

From The Island of Missing Trees, by Elif Shafak.

 

“Plants pick up vibrations and many flowers are shaped like bowls so as to better trap sound waves, some of which are not too high for the human ear. Trees are full of songs, and we are not too shy to sing them.”

 

The seed of Kānuka cracked within us, we spun. Light demanding, light seeking, light being.

Trees are full of songs,

And we are not too shy to sing them.

 

6.

Imagine you are in your kitchen, perhaps making a cup of tea, maybe you eating something. You are concerned with something quite inconsequential. How it seems like you are always cleaning up. How you wish that there was a place to sit that did not need clearing of the toys or of the LEGO. You are alone, for now, but still you talk. To the flowers in the vase that’s been moved over to the bookcase. The cactus that sits alone upon the window (not really alone—you’re talking with them, including them in conversation after all). You look up and you notice—icing sugar. A valley that’s been dusted. A warm snow of Kānuka flowers that blossomed in between of your last looking and your noticing right now. Flower watching, tree observing. A kaleidoscope of worlds shapeshifting every second. How does anything get done when there is so much to observe?

A memory:

Making sponge cake in the kitchen. A child of the 80’s. A delicacy was the sponge cake. No icing, just a sieve, a handful of icing sugar. A sprinking of whiteness on the top.

A sprinkling of remembering,

what’s important

in the shape of cake

and flowers.

 

7.

One day, you’ll see a small Kānuka barely beyond breast feeding rooted on the hard side of the road. You look—her leaves are covered in dust, the residue of passing cars. You get down on your knees, finger her gently. You wonder if this is what praying feels like. You do what you can to loosen the shards of hard ground around her, take her tender roots from the ground. A couple snap. You immediately feel terrible, apologise out loud. You travel with her in a cupped hand, protected underneath your shirt. Take her over to the paddock that you own. It’s more protected here. You grab a trowel, make a hole—not too big but not too small, place her inside and cover the hole over. You say you understand this might feel like a rough day, but things will be better moving forward.

You sit down next to her for a while, to keep her company and start to write.

You remember a quote that you write at the top of the page, circle round to not forget.

 

“Gardening is a contract with hope” – Elissa Altman

 

Maybe planting is what praying feels like when it’s led by the movement of the hands.

 

8.

My eldest child is fast asleep. His eyes seem even bigger when their closed, a pale skin coloured universe. His blanket is crumpled down around his knees, kicked off in the movements just moments prior to drifting off. I pull it up, tuck it underneath his shoulders and his chin. The sleeping sees the skin take on a different colour, makes other things stand out. The freckles sprinkled round his face, seeds released from the confines of the pod.

I trace the line of freckles with my finger, an air pocket existing between fingertips and face.

A constellation, a garden, a pathway

a portal

to the future.

 

9.

If you wish to bottle birdsong, the instructions you need to follow look like this:

Allow yourself to pause, treat the moment as though experiencing something sacred (you are). Find all the ways it’s possible to listen without ears. Invite the notes to trickle down your throat, disperse into your bloodstream, be carried to your cells, into muscles, let them make decoctions with your tears.

I bottle birdsong every morning just this way.

In my mind’s eye:

I see you walking up and down the forest pathways close to home. You are pausing, hearing, insisting that you learn the notes of every soundscape. This is a favourite habit, wanting to converse with the sounds you hear in song. The Tūī and the Bellbird, the Thrush and the cheeping of the Fantail. Collecting tunes within your arms, bottling them up just as I have done, storing them on shelves within your home.

I think:

Let it be intergenerational

birdsong

that we find

within our bones.

 

 

1.

Do you ever look at something- really look at something- perhaps something very ordinary, and in the process of your looking, the more wondrous it becomes? Eyes that look long enough become softened, begin to alchemise, experience a focus change that causes solids to dismember and dissolve.

And within the blurring of identity, a fuzzing of the lines between what is me and what is you, what is you and what is me, the mind itself becomes tenderised. Words of identity or description gentle. True looking is an unknowing, a flicking off the edge of what we pretend to understand.

When the edges of my looking begin to blur, I feel that to be the point I start to see.

 

2.

Archey’s frog- a frog only found within Aotearoa  New Zealand- is classified as the world’s most evolutionarily distinct and globally endangered amphibian. They have evolved virtually unchanged for 150 million years, surviving the comet that wiped out the dinosaurs, the Ice Age, the splitting of continents.

Seventy million years ago Aotearoa New Zealand cracked and broke away from Australia, isolating Archey’s frog and her relatives from all predatory mammals.

Helen Meredith, Amphibian coordinator of EDGE, a conservation program with the Zoological Society of London said:

 

 “Archey’s frog is almost indistinguishable from the fossilized remains of frogs that lived 150 million years ago […] These frogs were around before the Atlantic Ocean existed, and before the planet’s highest mountain range—the Himalayas—had even started to form.”

 

Before the world’s highest mountain range

had even started to form.

Before the Atlantic ocean

even existed.

 

3.

I’m sorry you’re sad, my eldest son whispers across the table. I look up, offer a half smile. I do not realise my face gives so much away, even though I should know this about myself by now. It’s a face made for charades and not for cards.

She’s sad about the frogs, he goes on to tell his brother.

I sit, think about the ridiculousness of my predicament. I argue with myself inside my head.

How ridiculous that I’m sitting here in a café with my boys feeling sad about the frogs.

 How ridiculous that everyone sitting around me isn’t sad about them too.

 How ridiculous is this all?

 I’m not sure I want ever to not be ridiculous.

 How do you be in the world with so much wonder, and at the same time, so much gloom?

I am sad about the frogs.

 I am angry about the frogs.

 It’s all ridiculous.

I take a breath, another bite of food.

 

4.

Frogs in fairy tales, as we perhaps understand them now, are most commonly thought of as the creature you need to kiss before you find your prince, a warping, most likely, of the Frog Prince, the fairy tale from the Brothers Grimm. In the modern version, it is the kissing of the frog that brings about the transformation; in the original it is the complete rejection of the frog that transforms him.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the original story is about the assertion of free will; it speaks of defiance, both in the upholding of what is essentially a bad deal, a refusal to succumb to a father’s unreasonable demands and most starkly, the rejection of the status and role of women in society generally.

The more modern kissing version translates to doing what you’re told, being accepting of your fate, a shaping and a moulding back to the patriarchal ideals that benefit from a keeping woman in her place.

Whatever ‘her place’ has come to mean.

Perhaps, given their current situation, frogs and women have been allies all along.

Perhaps the frogs need to wholly reject the human, to turn their fate around.

Perhaps there is a third space that we, together, can both find.

I wonder if in frog fairy tales they are forced to kiss humans in the same way we’ve designed.

If there could be a wider tale, a refusal to succumb to unreasonable demands and perhaps most starkly, the rejection of the status and role of creatures in society generally.

If not, that’s a fairy tale we most definitely need to write.

Placed under the header of non-fiction.

 

5.

The other morning, I packed us up and marched us off to the museum. We are going to hear a talk about the frogs, I triumphantly declare. In my mind, I am performing an important act of mother- the transmission of wonder. Or, by translation, a sharing of what is wonder-full to me.

Frogs are amazing, I tell them. Their response shows me they’re yet to be convinced.

We arrive and merge amongst a group of humans communing in a hallway round a fish tank. It’s the school holidays (a point I conveniently forget in the cocoon of home schooled boys) so the meeting place is somewhat of a brawl. There are many screaming children accompanied by listless and disinterested adults. I suppress the urge to man handle a boy of eight or nine who squashes his face against the edges of the tank, his hand wearing a glove of long, rubbery, fluorescent pink and orange fingers that he raps upon the surface of the glass.

Augustus Gloop, I mutter quietly out loud. I coach myself on the virtues of not being judgemental. My mind ignores my better talking half.

Of all the things I constantly wrestle with, the top of my list is the urge to completely flee and run. This gaggle I’m a part of strengthens this desire. To forest or to lake. A forest on the edges of a lake. I think that’s it. Abandon ship, as those of us harbouring such imaginings commonly say. It’s not so much to not be here as it is to be away from all of that.

All the made up things that take priority as important.  The overly loud tapping on the foreheads of those seeking out the quiet. The pressures and the structures of out there, that have somehow found their way in here, an atmospheric blurring.

Of the things I hear myself frequently say that I both loathe and lament it is the phrase I am so busy that sits alongside of its sister, I don’t have time. I want to scrub them from the surface of my mind, place my finger in the whirling fan that propels them round my insides, disinfect them from my heart before they end up as an etching on my headstone, the product of a 3D printer from an image generated by AI.

But for right now, I am here. In the museum, but beyond that still in it. I remind myself that the work is not to abandon. The work is to remain. To be present and to witness what is brutal. To bring forward the beautiful all and while you can.

The talk we have arrived for now begins. I am an enthusiastic question asker, my notebook open to a shiny and new page.

Why is it that New Zealand frogs have round eyes instead of the slit eyes, like all the other species?

 Why is it they’ve evolved to not make sound?

And perhaps, most importantly,

What is this fungus that you mentioned that is wiping them all out? The forests we are losing? Can you tell me more of that?

The replies:

I’m not sure

 I really don’t know

and

 I’m afraid I don’t know what it’s called.

 So, I’m sitting at the table, in the café, and I am sad about the frogs.

I’m sitting at the table, in the café, and I am sad that a talk about a creature so precious can be reduced to the reading out of facts, with answers that are not known beyond that which are outlined on the page. A filling in of time between the playground and a nap.

She’s sad about the frogs, I hear my boy say quietly to his brother once again.

I get up from the table, walk over to the counter, order a cup of tea.

Along the way, I’m hunting for the glimmerings. No one round me knows this. I am a silent huntress. My footsteps tell me that if one is mired in doubt, it is then that the active cultivation of enchantment must be begin.

Huntress of Enchantment.

Huntress of The Glimmerings.

6.

Of all the fortune tellers, nature is by far the most accurate and reliable. She often takes us by the arm, reads our palms based on the number of creatures we unsettle when walking in the wetlands by the river.

Frogs, I read, are an ecological indicator.

 

7.

Once, in the unconscious sleep state we refer to as dreaming, I found myself in a white and open space, sitting in front of a half circle of women that I understood to all be my mothers. I am pregnant with my first child. They ask that I take my baby out, to allow them to better see.

At first I am confused, but then I find a way to follow their instructions. I unzip my skin from my throat down to my pelvis, take my baby out and place him gently on the table, in a place they all can see.

Light filled, light full, light-ening.

Comma, exclamation mark, full stop.

A splitting of the atom.

In this moment, I recognise myself as no longer singular.

I panic, scoop him up, place him back inside myself. The metamorphosis is unfolding but I’m not ready for it to begin.

I zip myself back up and leave the room.

Singular and split, together and apart.

8.

The Archey’s Frog, along with the other native frogs in Aotearoa New Zealand, do not have a free swimming phase in their cycle of life.

Their eggs appear as milky, gelatinous balls, in clusters of nine or ten. They skip the tadpole phase that is a part of the metamorphosis of all other frog species, and instead only hatch when their legs have started to appear.

They continue to be nourished by the yolk until they are about 8-12 mm long, at which point, we refer to them as froglets.

Froglets born of glassy orbs, so small they remain easily unseen.

Fortune tellers, spawned of crystal balls, hidden in the wetlands and the green.

9.

In Sharon Blackie’s The Enchanted Life she writes,

 

In our native mythologies, animals are inextricably intertwined with both humans and gods- so much so that the ability to shapeshift from one to the other is taken to be perfectly natural. Old Irish literature abounds with humans who can shapeshift into creatures such as swans, fish, seals, horses and deer, blurring the boundaries of what we imagine still sets humans apart from the natural world.

 

To Become Frog, one who walks the forest floors of Aotearoa New Zealand, you must wait for the falling of the darkness. It is only now that you come out. You are there, behind a rock, a pile of Kawakawa leaves. You are silent, almost completely hidden by virtue of the markings on your skin.

The side of your head bears no ears, your throat no vocal sac with which to make a sound.

Your movement is the only awareness a human eye, or that of a non-frog other, could hope to have that would allow the shape of your outline to become clear.

I have thought before about Becoming Wolf, Becoming Owl, Becoming Horse but never before about Becoming Frog. Often, when I allow myself to sink towards the liminal nature of my own existence, the vulnerable part of me rises up, an attempt to pretend myself back to the illusion of immortal. The ego part of self does her best to hang on tight.

Don’t let go of being human, it tells me, as though my human self is a protection from the realities of death, the silent and unseen.

But it’s at this point, that if I allow myself to blend, to let go of what I think I know and what I don’t, to what I hear and what I imagine not to,  the outline of what is real and known starts to lose its definition;

When the edges of my looking begin to blur, I feel that to be the point I start to see.

 

10.

I sit down and write:

The start of every human being’s becoming is aquatic.

 

 

Outside my office window are two nectar feeders. They’re bright, shaped like an orange dome, perhaps to mimic the appearance of a flower- although of that I’m not quite sure. There are no flowers that look like that round here.
Every day, I unhook the feeders from their branches, carry their slightly sticky outsides all the way down to the kitchen.

Can you open the door? I shout out to my boys, hoping they’re lurking somewhere roundabout inside.

Once there, I unscrew the top, separate it out from the rounded bottom base. I take the big bag of sugar, pour 1/3 of a cup, or something close, inside. Add the slightly warm-ish water. A shake round to dissolve it.
A tap. One time, two times, maybe three, to activate the feeding holes, whose simple, plastic, brightly coloured bits become stuck with my taking of the top away from bottom.

And then, I pick them up, have them hanging at my sides, sloshing, left, slosh, right, slosh, make my way back up the path.

I reach, hang them high, as far up in the branches as it’s possible to go. The limbs of my arms, as far as they can reach.

My Tūī come.

One,

two,

sometimes

three or four.

Yesterday, I listened to a program on the radio that spoke about the Tūī. The person who was talking said in years gone by it was not unusual to see flocks of fifty or sixty Tūī flying over.

Fifty or sixty Tūī.

Imagine that.

A friend dropped by to visit just the other day and saw my tree. Sat with me in my office that looks out towards the feeders. We saw two.

You have a lot of Tūī here, I heard her say.

The collective noun for the Tūī is an ecstasy.

An ecstasy of Tūī.

I thought about, looked up the collective noun for us, the collective noun for humans.

A group. A committee. A gathering. A meeting.

Perhaps, this is the point where we could turn things back around.

A compassion,

a caring,

a tenderness,

a protection,

a wilderness,

of humans.

There is a Ruru, a small, native New Zealand owl who spends her nights perched in the tree outside my office- calling out over and over, like an album that’s playing on repeat. Her voice is distinct, a sound I find both ethereal and grounding. An anchor, a lighthouse. When the darkness pours her inky black body over the whiteness of mine, the sound of Ruru is a reminder I exist. That I’m yet to be absorbed completely by the night.

Last night, when I heard her, I sent my husband a message.

A Ruru, I said. That was enough.

Both hearing and marking bird sound is a pastime we both approach with a childlike enthusiasm and the necessary reverence. An owl of any sort is always special. I turn off the lights, everything that seems to make a sound. I step outside, push off the edge, swim away from any light.

Once, when driving up the long and windy hill that leads away from the tidal estuary we live on, I saw a Ruru perched atop a fence post on my way up. I put my foot abruptly on the brake, slowed down almost to a stop and I stared, enraptured by the sight. Her eyes followed me as I drove past and when I reached the top of the hill, I turned the car around and drove all the way back down, but she had gone. Flown into the lower branches of the road framed Macrocarpas and out of sight.

In Aotearoa New Zealand, the Ruru is a forest guardian, a protector of the great Tāne Mahuta, or the Forest God.  Some Māori traditions say that the ancestral spirit of a family group can take the form of a Ruru, known as Hine-Ruru, or Owl Woman. It is believed that these owl spirits can act as kaitiaki or guardians and have the power to protect, warn and advise.

I wonder what it’s like to be Hine-Ruru. To have eyes, green and yellow. To witness in a way where nothing and no one remains unseen. To be surveyed by the gaze of an owl is an undressing. Of everything that’s unimportant, superfluous, untrue.

Hine-Ruru, I read, traverses the corridors of the underworld intently observing from afar. But there is little more I find beyond what I’ve shared here, or perhaps, that I’m privy to. A story, a mythology, after all, is a passed on, knitted thread of legends, experiences, embellished truths that I have neither the ancestry, connections nor bloodborne requirements to have heard or held.

And yet, I wonder if there is a Hine-Ruru, an Owl Woman, that could be mine.

In the early hours of yesterday, I was up and working when a large ginger and white cat strolled across the deck outside the glass doors of my office and sauntered out of sight. Owl Woman spread her wings inside my chest, her outer feathers reaching shoulder to shoulder. A human and owl body, formed of feather, blood and bone. I pause, and catch my breath. When Owl Woman flies, the only room that’s left is for the needed and the true.

Pay attention, she called into the dark, to both the Ruru and to me.

Pay attention, I echo back, deep into the night.

My focus falls back to the cat. There she was, belonging only to herself, doing what cats do best without thought of goodness or deserving; just simply being a cat.

But to my Ruru friend, her presence equals a likely early death. The birds of Aotearoa New Zealand are unique; they have evolved without the presence of predators, a situation that’s a one-off to these island shores. As a result, their nests are often low or ground dwelling. They trust their place to hold them, seek out the natural, low lying coverings for their young. A trust that still lives in the clay of their ancient, sacred, hollow bones. Their vision both expansive and yet still to understand the hunting ground their nesting spaces have become.

They are susceptible, vulnerable in the place that is as much formed of their feathers as it is of leaf and dirt. They do not think to be afraid. The domestic cat, or the similarly introduced rat, stoat, or possum is not their friend.

The Owl Woman in me considers what it means to live these two realities. To inhabit a feathered, skin covered body attuned to times long passed. Like the owl, beyond the edges of my skin, I have a nervous system simple in design. One that still speaks to and with the land, that seeks to build her nest within places that she hopes are safe and known.

There are some landscapes I walk through where I know that I’m little more than a very brief visitor. You’re not meant to stay here, the hills and mosses tell me, and I respect them, making my footsteps lighter, my strides slightly quicker.

The landscape does not need me here, want me here, I know.

And then in the same way but altogether different, there are places I pass through, buildings I see, stories I hear, and I feel an instant kinship. My body knows, recognizes, calls out, I’m so glad to see you again, it’s been ages. I’ve missed you. Despite the fact we’ve never even met. Perhaps this is the presence of the Owl Woman within me, connecting the seen with the unknown.

It seems when in the company of the sacred, our thoughts almost always turn to those of death.

Hine Ruru traverses the corridors of the underworld intently observing from afar, I read again.

Owl Woman reminds me of the cat who also stalks me, remaining just outside my eyeline but still within my sight. I feel the presence of her paws within the rattle of my own, internal chatter. Within the call to push, do more, be more as though the days that we’re given are not finite.

I wonder what it would look like to approach death of all her kinds with an embrace and not a holding back. I learned recently about imaginal cells in a conversation with a good friend. Imaginal cells are the genome of the butterfly, planted deep within the body of the caterpillar. Paradoxically, they are both part of the caterpillar and yet at the same time, unknown to it.

In the beginning, the caterpillar plunders over ground, eating everything they can within their way, consuming food that’s hundreds of times their own weight in a day. Eventually, too swelled up and bloated to continue, they hang themselves up; it’s at this point, the magic begins to take its place.

Their once soft outsides reconfigure to hard skin. A chrysalis is formed, and it’s inside this deeply cocooned place that the imaginal disks begin to form. But the caterpillar does not recognise them, refuses to accept them. Their body rallies, fights, attempts to snuff them out as quickly as they are born.

But this is a process that the imaginal depend on. They produce, reproduce, proliferate faster and faster until, exhausted, the caterpillar’s immune system dies out from all the stress. The resulting breakdown, the remains themselves of the caterpillar’s body is the necessary surrender that builds the butterfly.

The caterpillar is programmed to resist. The butterfly relies on the pushback to her destiny determined advance.

I wonder if it was also Owl Woman that brought me to this story. I think about the imaginal cells inside myself. The things that I resist, am afraid of. Of the moments that I try to prevent my body or my mind turning into necessary mush so that it’s free to shape-shift, reconfigure, become changed. Owl Woman reminds me that resistance itself is part of the sought out transformation. An inevitable push so something else is free to pull.

I listen out for the call of Ruru once again, take my body and step outside into the night.

 

1.

I am walking and a little way along, I find that I am crying. I want to say that I don’t know the reason why, but that’s untrue. My crying is a form of bittersweetness; bitter for the loss that is to come. Sweet for the beauty that surrounds me in this moment. Perhaps our humanity exists somewhere in between. I don’t try to stop the tears, even if in my solitude, they feel a bit embarrassing. I pause within an opening, eat the last bowlful of light as it spills between the trees, autumn rations becoming smaller by the day.

I think of a passage recently I read of Dorothy Wordsworth:

“As a little girl she burst into tears when she first saw the sea, revealing the sensibility for which she was celebrated by her family. An old woman, she wept at the sight of her garden flowers after an illness had kept her indoors.”

 

Oh Dorothy, I tell her, I’m sure you had it right. There are many of us walking even now that understand your tears. I continue on with Dorothy, hand in hand.

What would you do right now if you won the lotto? A game that my husband and I often play.

Each and every time, my answer stays the same.

I would buy the track, I reply resolutely, my mind drifting to my loves that are the trees. I imagine myself not the owner of, but the guardian for; with my name on a legal document I would know that this area that has become so dear to me can remain unchanged. I could, to quote a line I read recently from Ruth Allen, allow the land to belong back to itself.

I feel so often cross that as humans we have dominion, can make decisions over that which is impossible to bring back. I force my mind to other things, knowing that in this moment, to dwell on this understanding is not entirely helpful.

The track is, of course, not her formal name, but the name we’ve given to a winding path that travels up the slopes of the old volcano Mopanui. The old track, that connects Blueskin Bay to my northwest with the steep and gravelly road on which I live used to be the main thoroughfare before the proper road existed, the clip clopping of hooves and the old wheels of the cart, moving goods, people and supplies from A to B.

At this time of year, the southern autumn, the track and her inhabitants are busy with the process of unbecoming. Underfoot is a blend of softly cushioned leaves and snapping twigs, the air being just enough to keep it damp and not quite enough to bring the squelchy ground that I know is soon to come. The weather is untrustworthy, uninhibited. We are in the Season of Bar Coded light. Spring, summer, autumn and winter all run past within the space of twenty minutes,  a meteorological Pecha Kucha provided by the gods.

As I walk, I am surrounded by both close and distant birdsong. The sound of Tuis, the Korimako || Bellbirds vibrate the air. I’m followed by a performing troop of tiny Piwakawaka or Fantails, chirping, interacting, swooping at the barely visible insects that my feet unconsciously flick into the air as they move along the way.

I stop, speak to them out loud. They are impossible to ignore, and I don’t want to. It feels rude to continue on.

Hi, how you doing? I whisper loudly. They stop momentarily, have the stillness of a toddler. Cock their head to the side and look me in the eye. They fly, land, fly again with an energy that delights me. My eyes try to catch them, the antipodean version of the golden snitch, me on my broomstick, flying through the air.

Both the greenery of my surroundings and the elevation of the birdsong work their way beyond the edges of my skin, massaging away the cold and wet, working their magic. I sigh, wish again I’d won the lotto, which feels foolish to say. I never even buy a ticket.

To my right, I see a newly broken path leading to a cleared patch of land. I walk halfway up but the heaviness of sadness makes me turn right back around. I am not ready, do not want to face the fact that my track, the area that surrounds it is being divided up.

It’s being subdivided, each with building sites, someone recently told me. I could feel a hotness burning in my cheeks. I stay silent, the only way to contain my waving, foaming feeling world.

“For the writer and opium eater Thomas De Quincey, who became friends with the Wordsworths after William married, Dorothy was all nervous energy, rather, one imagines, like a highly tuned radio picking up waves. “The pulses of light,” De Quincey said, “are not more quick or more inevitable in their flow and undulation, than were the answering and echoing movement of her sympathising attention.”

I feel all my nerve endings, instead of being on the inside, are now out. I wish that love was a good enough reason to keep something protected and unchanged.

“The pulses of light are not more quick or more inevitable in their flow and undulation, than were the answering and echoing movement of her sympathising attention.”

I reach for Dorothy’s hand once more again.

Walking on, I make my way to the base of a big Macrocarpa, a tree who has become a friend. We have a silent conversation. Our communication is not formed by words alone. In the space provided by her comfort, I allow myself to hold my thoughts a little more lightly, to wiggle the edges of what’s becoming a tight container.

It cannot be, I tell myself, that I’m the only one that cares. To assume so is wrong, self-interested and egoic. Care, and the thought of its solitary belonging, is a lot to hold alone.

I send out a silent prayer:

Please remind me we are not designed to, do not care alone.

Interwoven;  

allied; interrelated; intertwined

Care;

safekeeping; protection; watchfulness

 

2.

It is 3am and I am lying. My young Irish horse I can tell is not quite well. She is off, as we might say. Not sick enough to call the vet, yet her energy provokes the instinct of not-okay-ness. My mind frets; after losing my yearling, Bear, last year, the trip wire of concern is razor close.

I lie there, making a game plan for the morning, knowing that tonight there’s not much more that I can do. I have gone through all the usual procedures, ensured that within all earthly possibility due care is put in place.

I talk to Bear, who now lives in the realm of my horse ancestors. Take care of her, I whisper, if that’s something that feels ok to do. Please take care of her, I say.

In the morning, I send a voice message to my best friend Kathy. She seems ok, I relay again. Perkier today. I talked to Bear last night, I tell her, surprised to hear my voice fracture into cracking. I take a breath, pull myself together, and today it seems she’s more herself again.

Once, shortly after Bear died, I was riding on the inlet with my paint horse when I had the distinct feeling of him travelling beside us. I looked in the direction that I felt him and in my mind, but also clearly out, I saw him shapeshift. Free from the confines of his body, he played games, his delight causing happiness to land in prickles on my skin.

From playing in the softly moving water, he was quite suddenly, huge, tracing along the outline of the mountains. And then as quickly as pressing the buttons on a remote control, he was front, back, all around, moving faster than my eyes could hope to catch.

I ride, I sleep, I have conversations. We all do. Conversations with our ancestors, of which he is one of mine, passing between us like whispers in the ears of much loved friends.

Interwoven;

braided;  inalienable; inseverable

Ancestors;

kindred; ascendant; origin

 

3.

Helllllloo!!

The slightly sticky side door bursts open, a handful of blonde curls bounces into sight. His long and lanky frame springs into my lap.

He’s been away three days, arrived back home just now. I kiss him all over his face, am met with shrieks and protestations as he pretends to pull away.

Oh no, he exclaims, amidst the snorting bursts of giggling. You’re stuck!

I pretend my lips have become stuck to his face, like a human suction cup.

I talk out loud, a ventriloquist who’s lost control, the words not matching up with the movement of the mouth.

I’m stuck, I repeat back, my voice now muffled, making an effort to keep up with the undulating movement of a small boy.

It looks like this is us forever! What do you think we’re going to do? We’ll have to figure out a new technique to bounce on the trampoline!

We continue with our charade thirty more seconds, a well-rehearsed act we’ve performed together many years, until the moment comes we break apart.

That was close, I say to him. So close, he giggles back.

He gets up, skips over to the sink to get a drink.

Interwoven;

as one; inseverable; indivisible

Stuck;

adhere; remain; endure

 1. Let your son make the cookies. Let him measure and pour the milk himself, even though it will go everywhere. Let him do the same with the flour. Hold the chair for him, with its back against the bench, so he’s tall enough to reach. Push the ball of your foot up against the leg so it doesn’t slip away. When he takes his finger into the mix and scoops it into his mouth, let him. Let him eat all of the sweetness and don’t make mention of teeth or tummies or dinner’s soon, or the fact it’s dripping all the way down his T-shirt. Hug him and smell the scent of last night’s woodfire from the fire pit they built and the night before that’s shampoo. When the cookies are ready, tell him they are the best cookies you’ve ever eaten. Mean it.

2. Collect the buckets for the horses. Arrange them in a row. They are all black rubber, look the same. Some are more flexible, easier to walk with. Find those ones and pull them to the front. Those will go to the paddocks the longest carry away. Take out your pink plastic scoop and make it half full. Pour the beet into the bucket. Repeat this for each one. Notice how they look like grey corn flakes. Take the hose, turn it on, and cover them with water. Think about your creations, now still lakes with river shale. Let them soak to become mountains.

3. Comb manes with your fingers. Undo the strands gently. Start at the bottom and gently feel your way up, taking apart any hairs that have found their way to knots. Take your palms, run them over the contours of their body. Notice the muscles and the bones. The breath. Notice yours. If you want to tell them of your heartache, you should do so. If you don’t, it’s ok. They know anyway.

4. Ring your friend. Promise yourself you will not cry, will not make it about you. Cry anyway. Make it all about you. Tell them how you promised yourself you wouldn’t cry, that you wouldn’t make it all about you. Let your friend laugh gently. Be a pool of tears and snot and shudder. Remind yourself, it’s ok, its ok, it’s ok, even though it doesn’t feel ok. It’s ok.

5. Remember M. Soledad Caballero’s poem, Someday, I will visit Hawk Mountain.

“…But, I am a bad birder. I care little about the exact rate
of a northern goshawk’s flight speed. I do not need
to know how many pounds of food an American kestrel
eats in winter. I have no interest in the feather types
on a turkey vulture. I have looked up and forgotten
these facts again and again and again. They float
out of my mind immediately. What I remember:
my breathless body as I look into the wildness above,
raptors flying, diving, stooping, bodies of light, talismans,
incantations, dust of the gods. Creatures of myth,
they hang in the sky like questions. They promise
nothing, indifferent to everything but death.
Still, still, I catch myself gasping, neck craned up,
follow the circles they build out of sky, reach
for their brutal mystery, the alien spark of more.”

 

Remember it every time you forget.

6. If you want to ride, ride. If you don’t want to ride, don’t ride. If you want to write, write. If you don’t, don’t. If you want to move, move. If you don’t, don’t. Do not worry about the Not Riding, the Not Writing, the Not Moving. It will come.

7. Keep the nectar feeders full. Even if it feels like lots of effort. Remember the Tuis, your beloved birds. Keep the nectar feeders full and watch the Tuis. Let yourself love to watch them.

8. Take your dog’s head in your hands. Her greying whiskers and soft, curly ears. Let your hands run over her, checking her for burrs. If you find them, pull them out. Let them sit in a little furry burr pile until they make an abstract work of art. Tell her how you remember collecting her when you were pregnant. All about the ride home with her in the cardboard box. How even though everyone said you were crazy to get a puppy at that time, but that it actually worked; you both needed to pee all night anyway. Think how you wished dogs lived forever. Tell her she’s the most beautiful dog in the world (but not to tell her sister that you said that).

9. Find ways of allowing for the feeling. Write it down, even if you feel crazy. You are not crazy. Read or don’t. Listen to music or don’t. Be a pile of mush or run ten miles. Do both, one after the other. Let yourself find a way through it. There are no rules.

As ever, onwards,

❤️ Jane

A side note: Somewhere on my reading travels, I found a list such as this written in a similar format. I lamentably can’t remember the original author or the writing itself, but I know I found inspiration in their words and decided to create a list of my own. I hope you find solace yourself in the words that I’ve shared with you here.

And perhaps you’d like to write a list of your own of nine ways or many ways or three ways or one…. of ways that you can keep going when your heart is hurt or bruised or broken.

Much love to you.

 

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.

 

 

As a matter of course, I turn on the extractor fan in our bathroom that you enter off the hall.

White noise fills the air.

I make the barefoot pad round to my bed and then I slowly realize: There’s no need for it tonight. My children and my husband are away.

There’s no need for the whirling, humming sound to block the air, to absorb the sounds of life that sit behind it.

Our house, a brick bungalow from the 1960’s, is talkative and chatty. Her floorboards creak and giggle, her door’s hinges quirky, like to fuss.

The eyelids of my boys, so it turns out, open and close in rhythm with her tunes, the peeking out of eyes the precursor in a chain, the next link being sounds of feet hitting the floor.

If night is a time for sleeping my boys are yet to get the memo. The fan becomes our friend, a portal of possibility that allows for a fluttering of life into the night as she absorbs all of the sharp edges, the ones that lead to bedtime interruptions.

But tonight, I hit the off switch, crawl gratefully into bed. The house feels very silent. I feel no doubt safely held. And yet here, lying in the dark, my ears are punctuated with noises going off like tiny fireworks, the kind of sounds that lead to curly thoughts.

What is that? I wonder to myself, in response to a sharp creaking.

I pull the covers up little more.

I hear an owl outside, a certain beauty that magnifies aloneness. The edges of my skin and that outside wild place separated by a small pocket of air and ten centimeters of brick.

My body knows the swathes of forest and shores of ocean that sit beyond these walls. The openness feels vast and at night possibly foreign.

I crave solitude and yet when it’s in the darkness that she meets me, she’s a space I find confronting. My mind seeks her out, wants to lessen the restrictions of the days, a respite from all the people and all their questions.

But in the dark, and when outside, instead of peace, I find alertness.

A more switched on-ness as opposed to switching off.

I read some quotes on solitude, something useful to insert here but I don’t find words that speak the truth of what I’m seeking, despite knowing that they’re out there.

There is the solitude of sitting alone in a café or a library.

The solitude of a house that’s busy one end while you sit at another.

But this wild solitude, the one without the light of which I speak, and of which I often yearn, is something different yet again.

It’s not a quiet moment, an open book, a cup of coffee.

It’s snapping twigs, and what’s that’s, and shapes within the blackness to the eyes that seem possibly threatening and certainly unfamiliar.

It’s rampant imagination and the stringent taste of drip-fed fear.

For a woman, one that’s alone and out in nature, it’s the vivid hope that what is sensed is not a man. Our bodies vibrate with the real and conditioned fear of unwanted visitations, the concern putting a handbrake on adventures into otherwise craved spaces of the wild and unfamiliar.

The unfairness of this, I think to myself, does not make it any less of a real-felt truth.

 

Tonight, I know I’m not in the outdoors. I’m in my bed in the throes of supposed to be sleeping. But this mindscape is one with which I’m intimately familiar. She’s one that joins me often. One that I’ve known from all my years of growing up.

Of the lamp left on at night. Of concerns of being outside in the moments after dark.

Of camping in the bush, a fervent countdown to the light.

Of the logical part of your brain attempting to out-talk the effusive and outspoken stream of internal, narrated insanity.

Of the waiting for your people to be home, so the house that you’re in once more contains another body.

I read words about the dark, the confusion of our addiction, our conditioning to the light distorting the instincts of my nighttime animal friends.

Migrations that are disturbed by the constant shine that beams from urban centres.

The scrambled navigation of soft winged moths confused by outside lights left permanently on.

The death trap that is a shining space beyond the pane of reflective glass.

I think of the sensor light outside my office. I’d never considered how something so seemingly innocuous might confuse the minds of the insects and the plants. I resolve to turn it off.

I get up and turn it off.

 

The next night, I step out into the dark. My phone is in my pocket, but not switched on.

I’m venturing into the dark by choice and with no productive purpose. My mission is to let all the versions of my mind enter the wild, and to let them have their way.

I pick my way over driveway stones and up the path that winds through the Manuka. This one leads up to the stables and down to the paddocks at the back.

As I walk, the darkness around me gradually begins to thicken.

My eyes see less and less. My body feels into the spaces that in the light she doesn’t take the time to notice.

We feel security in the sunlight. Is the same possible in the dark?

John O’Donahue writes:

The world rests in the night. Trees, mountains, fields, and faces are released from the prison of shape and the burden of exposure. Each thing creeps back into its own nature within the shelter of the dark. Darkness is the ancient womb. Night-time is womb-time. Our souls come out to play. The darkness absolves everything; the struggle for identity and impression falls away. We rest in the night.

This rest he speaks of, I muse, is not the normal kind.

It’s the rest of expectations, of being witnessed as a singular, aesthetic form.

It’s a stripping back to our essential nature, an exposing of our baseline, animal selves.

In the dark, without the help of light or weapons of protection, we no longer feel, no longer are, entitled or above it.

We are reduced, aware, alert, exposed as any other roaming free, looking for a safe space on which to land.

At what point, I wonder to myself, did we assume we were entitled to our comforts?

That to seek a sense of ease was the whole point?

The thought, that my companion of anxiety and my switched-on alertness to my surroundings was something to be expected creates a paradox of comfort.

 

The creatures that roam around me distinguish between the sounds that are the norm and those that represent the unfamiliar. They are more accustomed to the night and her cloak of dark- that I know for sure- accepting the concern without adding the layering of overthinking or narration.

Night-time is womb-time.

I consider this some more.

My womb has carried the life of two babies to full term, felt the absence and the loss of two others more. But pregnancy for me was not a place of nourishment and of rest.

It was a place of physical upheaval, a body flung to sea at high tide doing it’s best not to revolt, to maintain its breath, to swim, and not to sink.

A stretching and a reconfiguration. A ever present nausea, a countdown to birth and hoped for quelling of die-ease. A growing from within and also out.

The night time, the womb time is not a place of silence or of rest. It is a place of busy, of life creasing and unfolding.

Of whole worlds taking shape without distraction of the light.

Us humans, in the dark, we don’t get to control here. We know so many things are happening beyond our noticing.

We can’t constrain the worlds we cannot see.

Perhaps it is the darkness, not the light that will assist with modern disorientation. Our dissociation from the land, how we comfort our way into the throes of unwellness and ill health.

Perhaps we require the retreat; the turning off of eyes, the turning on of skin, the reminder we don’t tread the earth alone.

A state of being only darkness can provide.

The darkness, it seems, breathes you in and spits you out. You land, grateful and disheveled, in a different place from where it was that you began, more noticing and tuned in to the light.

And here it is, the peace.

It’s found in the transitions, the hollows left for dawning and for dusk.

The not quite light and not quite dark pause between the breaths.

 

This past couple of weeks, together with my horse Nadia, I’ve spent much of my time off road and off grid on a large sheep station on the South Island of New Zealand. The following are a collection of small stories I wrote in the early hours as little reminders, snapshots of our adventures.

***

Mountains

If I painted her, with her steely shards in one layer, bleeding into watercolor shades, people would assume them an abstraction, an artistic interpretation. Such landscapes, we think to ourselves, can’t exist with such perfection if they haven’t themselves been imagined into life.

I admire her beauty and her bleakness. Her hills fold like the side of a seal, her outlines sharp and clear.

What is it energetically I find about these landscapes?

What is it about the tone of certain lands that calls out to us to stay, and some that seem to actively push us away?

We speak of wild, yearn to return to it, to become it, to rediscover it. But wild is exactly that; wild. It is not always the place we find calm and ease.

Sometimes, the magnitude of the landscape, its literal vastness, magnifies the spaces within me and I feel so alone. I reflexively seek comfort, want to temper the experience with a blanket and warm tea.

True wildness can be an uncomfortable juxtaposition. A mocking of our state of domesticity, despite our protestations to be free.

These are the landscapes that call to us. The mountains here are truth tellers. They occupy a space that does not let you turn away.

If it’s truly wild you seek, they tell us, then you must look at the carcass on the road with the same gaze you see the wildflower.

You must accept the caustic sunburn as easily as shade under the tree.

Perhaps the wildness you seek exists in the same place you fear.

The mountain spoke to me, and she said, I am immoveable and yet everything is moved by me.

****

Arrival

We rammed the last standard into the hard earth, undid our horse’s halters.

“Apparently the last rain they had here was October”.

The grass was tinder dry, wispy as hair and the colour of straw. We managed to find a corner, an oasis. A river separated the paddock north from south, a strip of willows adding a welcome splash of green to the collage of yellow and brown.

Nadia, my horse, zeroed in on a fallen branch, a detached and dry bundle of curled up leaves.

Salix Alba, I tell Liz who’s with me. It’s a natural anti-inflammatory, the same plant they make aspirin from.

Of all my horses, Nadia is a homing beacon for the herbal and the healing. A couple of years back, she almost felled a Tī Kōuka, a Cabbage Tree in our front paddock, chewing a circle almost completely through the trunk.

I follow Nadia’s lead to learn and to know. The Cabbage Tree, it turns out, is the world’s largest tree lily, able to be consumed from root to leaf. An elixir for soothing bellies and easing digestive upset.

Nadia delights in it with the same intensity as cold watermelon on a hot and humid summer’s day.

 

****

First Ride Out

On the homeward leg, we loop back around on a different track to the one that we rode in on. The path itself was a car width across, divided into four deep grooves, evidence of tyres forcing their impressions through the land before the weather baked it hard.

I give Nadia the reins, allow her to pick the track. She narrows her stride to fit the grooves, winds her way up and down as though following the lines of a model railway.

We rounded the far side of the mountain and were met with a sea of green. The willows told us we were close to home. Us humans always orient round the green.

To my right, a little brown mare weaving in serpentines, trotting up and down the steep banks, her rider circling and turning, guiding her across the land in an attempt to calm the anxious energy moving through.

Behind me, another person leading their horse on foot.

We are a group, formed of individual riders, a collective looking out for all the links in the chain.

I look down at my hands. My right index finger looped around the buckle, my left hand resting on my thigh. My horse steady the whole way.

I glance at the expanse of view that sits over to my right.

Is that man made, I wonder? The lake gives way to rock and schist, a deep plait of braided rivers, mixed in with grassy plains leading to mountain’s base.

For a moment, I am lost. In my own mind, within the view. I am riding a horse who for today looked an old hand. My thoughts flashed to a few years earlier, our first ride around the farm at home.

My husband walked with me on foot carrying the camera. We didn’t get very far.

If you’re going to take a photo, I had joked, then do it quickly, my horse an ever-inflating bubble, her feet jogging, tap dancing over stones.

To imagine this moment then would have been unthinkable.

I looked over at Ben riding an Appaloosa horse to my far left.

She’s been good, he remarked to me.

The best, I told him back, stroking her neck.

The best, I repeated to my strong and agile chestnut mare, carrying me through the windy mountains on her back.

****

Shearer’s Hut

There’s a chair I’m drawn to that sits as part of an odd bod pair of two. On the right, I see a box of toys, a handheld vacuum cleaner.

The room is long, designed to fit the bodies of many. Enough to shear the fleece of 12,000 merino sheep, the heartbeat of the station.

At the end, there is a kitchen, the old tap fitting in the sink dividing hot from cold, both requiring an extra nudge of turning to get the water into flow.

The big rooms flanked at either end with bunks.

Directly off the kitchen are the toilets, with plastic seats that make a racket when you sit, a dividing wall open from ¾ up to towards the ceiling ensuring efforts must be made to pee discreetly.

I wander in the living room, sit down within the innards of a chair that attempts to eat me whole. There’s a certain smell that is specific, but one I can’t quite place. If threadbare, patchy carpet, dust on the windows that look questionable to open and a space designed to hold the bodies of many had a smell, that would be it.

The term ‘Shearer’s Quarters” is now used for many things. It can be in the literal sense, as it is here, the housing of a seasonal worker population on a land witnessing many thousand sheep.

Or it can be a bourgeois headquarters, a deluxe style BnB, for the dweller wanting a rustic place to stay, just not in practice but in name.

Liz emerges from the toilet, her hands gently cupped together. A baby sparrow sits between.

I heard chirping, she says, and there he was.

She carries him outside carefully in the hope he’s old enough to fly away.

****

River

There’s something intrinsically satisfying about having your horse drink from a natural source. At the end of our ride, we made our way over to the edge of a fast-flowing stream, and Nadia put her head down to drink.

I remembered back to many years previous, sitting in a fluorescent lit square room with my herbal medicine teacher. At the time I was studying health science, our conversation in that moment about water.

Wherever possible, she said, add something alive to your water. A squeeze of lemon, a leaf of some sort. Water, as we’re designed to drink it, is never static, never a singular product. Water is alive, a storyboard of the nature it’s a part of, that it flows under, round and through.

I looked at Nadia drinking, lifted my gaze further upstream.

I loved that my horse was drinking in the mountains, the footprints of the animals that live here. I love that the grasses and the leaves had all added their essence to the mix.

A pinch of flax.

A tablespoon of mountains.

Half a cup of smooth river pebble and a scattering of moss.

A continuation of giving and receiving in the cycle of aliveness.

****

Sheep

It begins with a series of three gates. One has to open for the other to come back for the one that you need to go through to swing wide and somehow there’s a single chain, the connecting thread between all three.

From here, the road snakes round in the shadow of the river, the dome of the hill scattered with boulder rocks, stretching up and over to the left.

At first the sheep appear as sprinkles; the odd merino missile appearing from the reeds, evolving to a game of wooly Tetris.

And then, opening. The ground widens, the vastness of the landscape so much to take in, both in length and width. I can hear Mother Nature laughing, the surprise party behind the rock she’s been waiting years to show me.

The sheep start to cluster, move ahead. There are hundreds, maybe thousands. Nadia’s ear prick but her rhythm doesn’t change. I feel delight creeping through my cells, starting way down in my toes.

I want to call out, I feel like we’ve done this, like we’re supposed to always be doing this, but I keep my words to myself. I don’t know what I mean.

What I mean is this is heaven, to be with my horse, treading on this land.

What I mean is some part of my body has remembered, even though I’ve never had this experience before in real time.

What is this remembering I am feeling, I do not know.

The stories of many that have come before me who’ve worked of and with the land. In this moment, I am neither working on nor with, and yet I feel it. The connection of my horse, the steady moving feet. The sea of animals flanking right and left.

Whatever it is I feel, I see you, I feel you and I salute you. We can stray a long way from this feeling, us humans. But it only takes a taste to remember it right back.

You were made and set here, Annie Dillard wrote, to give voice to this, to your own astonishment.

I will practice this more, I think. The practice of being continually astonished, and of giving it my voice.

****

The Steep

You soon find out what’s working and what’s not. A constant feeding through of information. A flipping back and forth of who makes the decision to go this way or go that.

On the lower slopes, it’s my voice that leads the way.

That short grass there, I tell my horse, makes the golden patch look like the easiest route but it’s slippery, like polished glass. Better to weave amongst the tussock to get grip.

Beware the Matagouri there, it will attack you from all sides.

A thorny, spiky plant that’s best avoided.

About mid-way up, it starts to get quite steep. One horse makes a slip, ends up on their knees. A recovery is made just shortly after.

I lean forward slightly, give my reins further up her neck. I let Nadia lead the way. We weave back and forth, a gentle serpentine that ends in a final, half trot push, and then, the ridge.

Mountains on all sides. I look over at my friend. We smile but do not speak. Some experiences are meant for eyes and not for words.

I stroke my horse along her neck, her ears flicker with each stride. I feel there are few luckier than me, right now, in this moment, with this horse, in this place.

****

Cows

You move in slowly, as if your intention is disinterested. A parent moving in the room trying not to wake the sleeping child.

You look for the angle of the heads. Should we take this to the left or right?

I adjust my seat, apply a little feeling down the reins. We back up, move our shoulders, turn around and take them to the right.

We begin to stir the pot, moving round them in a circle. The energy is slow, the strides rhythmic and deliberate.

We move around, encourage the outside cows to take the same direction. A spiral, a directed flowing wave, an orchestrated dance between horse and cow.

You watch in your periphery, start to ease your way slightly closer to the centre.

A little more sideways, a little more forward. A little more sideways again.

The cow on the very outside, who was all at once still moving is now blocked.

You wait, your big chestnut mare and the glossy Angus cow in conversation.

You sidle over to her, gently cut her out, over to the side.

A single chess piece now separated from the board.

****

The Rains

Today, it rained. There’s been no rain since October, but today it rained.

We waited ‘til 12:30, saddled up our horses and rode the short route to the cows. Over the hay paddock, through the first gate to the field of lucerne. A second field of lucerne after that. On the other side, the rocky skirt edge of the mountain, hooves treading her undersides as we move to the northwest.

Every now and then, a merino, camouflaged against the gold and slate tones that framed the hill.

At first, the rain was light. A steady beat of the cumulative drenching sort that grew to more and more.

Nadia’s head dropped lower, heading into the drum sound of falling drops. Soon, we both reach saturation.

At the Shearers Quarters, we’d debated our clothing choices.

Should we take a jacket? It’s not that cold. Do you think just my jumper will be enough?

Boots filling with water. A steady stream down my coat and underneath my seat.

I look over momentarily to catch the view but bring my eyes quickly back to face the front. The rain lashing my face prevents it turning left or right.

Once at the cows, Nadia backs up to the fence line of trees and parks quite still. She’s hoping we can stay here. She’s cold, her fine skin not used to prolonged exposure without a covering on her flanks.

We debate about the cows, decide to shift them without practicing our cow work first. The standing round in rain would be too much.

We move steadily across the field, Nadia in a u-bend left, an attempt to keep away the driving flow. Once we reach the cows, she’s attentive and on task. We help take them down the paddock, over the crest of the hill and to the left to their new digs.

We wait, let them arrange themselves through the gate.

As we head back, the rain begins to ease and for some moments, there’s relief. The silence of the rain allows the squelching sound of boots and jacket to fill the air.

I pat my lovely horse, her coat drying. Despite her discomfort, she’s stayed with me the whole time. We lead the walk home, my saddle dripping moisture as we go.

The polish of rain on land has been a cleansing. The view seems crisp and clear, the light, a softening. We see the mountains down the barrel of the valley, the outline rim rising up to frame the sky.

As we walk towards the lucerne, I look back. In these parts, you can see the weather coming in. The rain is clearly on our tail.

I hold out hope that my newly dried horse and my now not sodden saddle might make it home that way, but it’s no longer meant to be. At the second field of lucerne, with the sheep sheds now in sight, it unloads.

I get off at the gate, walk the rest of the way on foot. Nadia arcs both left and right, a fast walk and a half pass across the field.

We hit the gravel driveway and it’s a speed untacking race. Throw the stirrups under the car, the saddle in the back to tend to shortly.

A walk around the shed, across the field to the far side of the paddock. A swift rub down, a rug flung on, a new pile of fluffy hay.

A movement back home to peel off the sticky layers of clothing now damply fused to skin.

The kettle on, a ceremony of gratitude to the dry.

****

Wind

At the end of the ride, we stopped at Manuka Hut. We positioned ourselves on the bracken for a seat, swapped the bridles out for halters and let the horse’s graze.

For a time, we jostled over who the sandwich actually belonged to. Nadia was convinced it was hers; I kept telling her it was mine. We met somewhere in the middle.

Mounting up, we headed back into wind. The nor ’wester was so strong, you had to slice your way through rapid current in an attempt to move ahead. Heads tilted; bodies buffeted.

For a brief while, we were sheltered by the base of the mountain at her curve, just enough to hear the sound of falling hooves, a few seconds of reprieve that would be all for the remainder of the ride.

At some point, I wondered if it could get much stronger, the horses continuing to work in a headwind so rugged that if unmounted, I thought I’d have to concentrate to stand up.

I marvelled at our little band of eight. The odd break of stride to trot. At one point, Nadia flinched when another came up behind. The only sound available was wind.

I felt my own concern rising at certain stages. It couldn’t get stronger than this, surely? But what if it actually did?

But each time, I checked in with my horse, her expression and steady rhythm staying unchanged.

Have you ridden in winds like that before? Ben asked me after.

That was certainly the strongest, I replied.

It’s good for them, he said, to have a lot going on and to learn to be able to stay with you.

I agreed but thought it perhaps the other way.

My brave and gentle chestnut horse and the plains she so gracefully carried me across today.