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.

 

A snippet from a post I read on Facebook:

“In The Lost World of the Kalahari, Laurens van der Post writes about living among the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert and describes how shocked they were that he couldn’t hear the stars.

At first they thought he must be joking or lying. When they realized he really couldn’t hear the stars, they concluded he must be very ill and expressed great sorrow.

For the Bushmen knew anyone who can’t hear nature must have the gravest sickness of all.”

A comment on the thread of the shared post:

I wonder if some of us, maybe most of us, are too far gone to be able to connect to nature again. Short of going out into the wilderness alone and completely unplugged, how, how, HOW do we come back to that state of being?

A comment that hung on to me, and so today, I write.

A Western World Dwellers Prescription For Listening To Stars

1.

A cup of True enough, with large spoonful of Belief

I was staying in a hotel in Portland when I picked up a copy of Monica Gagliano’s Thus Spoke The Plant. My room overlooked a carpark that was ringed by a number of shops, one of which included a huge Barnes and Noble bookstore that became my hiding place and respite from the busy-ness of the outside. I’d heard mention of this book before, so I added it to my pile of purchases- which were many- and made my way back to the hotel.

I remember the exact place I was when I read this. It was one of those moments that shifts your perspective on its axis. Monica talked about how our current scientific understandings of sentience and intelligence are based around the necessary presence of a brain and a nervous system. Her studies with plants suggested that they too live and operate with profound intelligence, even though the mechanisms at play are fundamentally different to how humans and animals operate.

Her findings were controversial and not necessarily well received in scientific circles. Accepting them, naturally, involved a paradigm shift; a reconfiguration of thinking requiring us to acknowledge the intelligence of organisms outside the brain and nervous system model.

In other words, a letting go of what we know to be true and a making space for the possibility that a whole other world exists that is foreign to the metrics of what is currently measured, understood, and controlled.

For Monica’s scientific colleagues, one of the most confronting things about her studies was how she conducted her research. Instead of setting out with an idea that she would then seek to prove, she simply observed. In essence, her experiments were a series of open ended questions and she allowed what wanted to be shown to find her, without any sense of certainty or attachment to what, if anything, would present.

She knew that something was happening. She just didn’t know exactly what.

What Monica dedicated herself to was not to hearing, but to listening.

And in the process, her whole world opened up.

***

What moved me so much about reading this book was not so much the information. Instead, it was confirmation of something we innately know to be true, even if the rational and sensible world is yet to validate our intuitive knowing with the data.

Of course this non-human, vegetal and arboreal world is intelligent.

Of course it is.

Of course, even the non-human world of the animal is more intelligent than we give it credit for. There are naturally other mechanisms of knowing that exist.

Of course, of course, of course.

So what’s my point? How does this relate to your desire- our desire- to listen to the stars?

I wonder, Dear Person That Also Wonders, if the problem lies in being someone who seeks to hear, rather than someone who seeks to listen?

I wonder, if you became someone who listens to stars, rather than someone who hears the stars, what difference that would make?

To listen is a generative act. It exists separate to the certainty of hearing.

If we dedicate ourselves to the process of listening, then are we not, by default saying to ourselves:

I believe there’s something to be heard.

And beyond that, maybe it’s the practice of star listening itself, the process of star listening, that holds the benefit, rather than the need to hear the result?

I wonder, what if stars weren’t listenable? But we believed them to be?

What else might we discover in the process of attempting to listen?

What else might we find on that adventure?

And beyond that, is it not the process of believing- the believing itself- rather than the who or the what, that is the cure?

An elixir to the heart, a love letter to the universe that knows there is more to the world around us than what we currently experience.

The clay of our body tells us:

It’s your birth right to listen to the stars.

We know this, no matter where it is we’ve strayed.

Is it not our knowing that asks the question to begin with?

Believing I can hear the stars, choosing to believe that to be true, adds something to my life.

It enhances my sense of connection.

Commits me to acts of daily beauty seeking.

Fills me with a sense of wonder for something that exists beyond myself.

What good does it do us to deny that?

The humility of wondering, and at the same time knowing, there is always something to be heard.

2.

1 ½  Cups of Welcoming The Gladness. Add liberal amounts of Staying Open hearted Within The Complexities of Life as needed.

At the beginning of the year, I lost a being I was very close to, my horse Bear. His death was not a slow and peaceful one. Instead it was torrid and traumatic and upsetting and not at all befitting the ending that a creature of such benevolence deserved.

But in the days that followed, something interesting happened. I shared my story of Bear, poured my heart into my writing, not as a quest for sympathy, but in tribute. In tribute to the simplicity of his life, and the deep and lasting impact it had on mine. The many conversations I had on and with death did something unexpected; they further enhanced life.

Experiences of death have the curious effect of magnifying your aliveness. You realise- or are perhaps reminded- of how death and life do not exist as separate poles. That they’re not a linear game, with a beginning and an end.

Instead, as you look around, you realise that death and life are intermeshed.

That death and life hang in the leaves of the same tree. That the very thing that supports you underfoot, that carries you through life, is a combination of composting detritus, the residue of life that forms the very earth, now, in death.

Have you noticed, that in your darkest moments, perhaps even your greatest traumas, how close you’re pulled in towards the curtain?

How you see with a different sharpness, even if what you see appears confusing?

That it’s when you’re on your knees that you really feel the limits of this animal body; how close you are to nature; how fine the edge is that we walk on every day; how close we always are to falling, a noticing so many of us have comforted out of our awareness.

And how many of us, in this state, when our chests are unzipped, our hearts bare to the world, how many of us continue to welcome in the gladness?

Welcoming the gladness means that we’re open to receiving, even in the midst of pain, discomfort and confusion. Even, perhaps, because of it.

Nick Cave talks about the irritation of the world being persistently beautiful when there’s so much suffering going on around us, on both a personal and wider, global level. That this is the hardest thing we find in grief to reckon with.

So why this conversation? And what does it have to do with listening to the stars?

To be open to the universe- and what more tangible manifestation can we speak of than the stars?- requires us to hold all the forces of being human, without them hardening our shell and closing us down.

When we believe we can block out the forces that cause us pain, we block out the forces that bring us joy.

In short, we forget to listen, and begin only to control.

Being human, and being open to the gladness means carrying the expectation of heartbreak and heartache, and staying open anyway.

When we say, we expect to be taken down. And we stay open anyway.

When we say, we expect to have our hearts broken. And we stay open anyway.

When we say, we expect to get it wrong. And we stay open anyway.

If we can stay with the experience, and move through it, the experience itself creates an immediacy to life. Where the constant experience of change and flux become nothing more than confirmation of humanity, our practice ground for micro-dosing death in a way that maintains liveability, humility and aliveness.

And it’s in this state:

Where the heartbreak sits alongside all the joy.

Where the loss holds hand with all the love.

Where the unfulfilled desires meet the being-lived adventures..

… that the opening for wonder first appears.

Then you can sit, look up, and see stars hanging against the black like animated questions.

Not offering promises or certainty, but all at once infinitely generous and utterly ungraspable.

Maybe then, we can forget about our knowing. Maybe then, we can let go of our controlling.

Maybe then, we can look up, reach out and let all our facts take flight.

3.

A tablespoon of Prayers to the Ancestors

When I was pregnant with my eldest child, I had a dream. I was sitting around a table, shaped like a half moon. At various points sat the women of my maternal line. No one looked familiar. Skin shades of many colours. Faces of many ages. Bodies of different builds and shapes. I could not find the likeness of my face amongst them. And yet I knew our connection to be true.

In this moment, I was sitting with my ancestors.

I undid my belly like a pouch, placed my as yet unborn baby on the table. They picked him up, cradled him gently, and looked at me with a direct, unbroken gaze.

He is a child of the light, they told me. Take good care of him.

When they handed my baby back, I panicked, did not know what to do. Here he was on the outside- I had no idea how to put him back.

They smiled and said I could do so with my intention.

I relaxed, open the pouch of my belly.

My baby returned to the depths inside my womb.

***

In the many years since, I have found comfort in this dream. In the thought that I am part of a maternal line, full of names I don’t know and perhaps never will. But the not knowing does not cancel out their presence.

I wonder, if our biggest challenge is getting beyond the rational. The we’ve developed a deficit of trust in intuition and imagination being a legitimate source.

Just as our ancestral heritage cannot be denied, our cosmological heritage is one that still rings true. The stars- understanding them, being guided by then, finding shapes and patterns in them- is as present in our bodies as the people who read them. A cosmological heritage.

David Abrams describes imagination as the gift we have to throw ourselves forward of reality; a reaching of the hand through the curtain in an attempt to make contact with something we cannot yet perceive, to extend us beyond the limits of the rational and the sensible.

I wonder what this requires. It seems to me it’s nothing more than the willingness to do so.

The willingness to imagine yourself as someone that listens to stars.

The willingness to be someone who asks the question, what would it be like to be a person who hears them?

I imagine that a person capable of hearing the stars takes the time to hear what they have to say.

I imagine that a person capable of hearing the stars seeks them out.

I imagine that a person hearing the stars is someone who does not throw ridicule or shade or scepticism, saying what it is they’re hearing isn’t true.

Maybe we need to oxygenate our imagination.

Maybe imagination is what narrows the space between us and the stars.

Maybe we can pray to the ancestors to help. A prayer to the cellular nature of self.

We will pray, and we will say, we know that you know how to hear the stars.

But we’ve forgotten. We’ve forgotten how to hear them.

Perhaps at the end of the day, we’re praying into the deeper parts of ourselves.

Into the doubt.

The disbelief.

Into the surely this can’t be true.

Praying to those from whom the clay of our body rose.

Praying to those we have lost and who we aspire to be.

Let our prayers be to the unknown and the yet to know.

Let our prayers be in homage to the questions.

4.

Sift out the Handful of Distractions, Over Here.

I have in my hand, a rectangle of information containing the whole world. A screen of distraction from which my friends voices spring, both local and from across the waters. A playground of people, of stuff, of facts, of wonder and the inane.

A constant, pocket sized call to Over Here.

Over Here to a google search for the answer.

Over Here to a message.

Over Here to the Wikipedia, that connects up to the YouTube, that connects up to a tunnel of Over Here’s leading down to middle earth, that’s somewhere Over There but never Here.

A constant sliding door of demands for our attention. A technological seduction, a whisper to our gaze and our attention…

Over Here.

Over Here.

Over Here.

What does this do to us, I wonder.

Is the rectangle in my hand an off button for the stars?

5.

½ cup of What I’m thinking of

I’m thinking of how our daily actions affect the weather systems. How does the meeting at work, or the way we speak to our children, or whether we gather together for meals or eat alone, or what happens in the school classroom or the newspaper printing room or the local government office, how does this shape the rhythms of our planet, our ability to listen and to hear the stars?

I’m thinking of cycles of creativity and rest; of rejuvenation and nourishment. Of laughter and lightness and deleting off my phone the little bits of data that see me locked in comparison or not-enough-ness.

I’m thinking of the heartbeat of forest mice, the roar of grass responding to the rain, the breath of a wave as it breaks.

I’m thinking of a poem I read today by Brian Turner:

Sky

If the sky knew half

of what we’re doing

down here

it would be stricken,

inconsolable

and we would have

 

nothing but rain.

 

 

Maybe the stars are just waiting for us to pay attention.

 

6.

Perhaps, Dear Wonderer, I should have started at this point, and saved you the many minutes it took to get here.

I wonder, if at the end of it, the answers very simple.

I wonder, if the way to connect with nature, is to remember that you are nature.

Which then means,

the best way to learn to listen to the stars, is to first to learn to listen to yourself.

Lately, I’ve been musing on what it means to have a sense of place. What is place? Is it assigned, found? Can it be both? What does it mean to be searching for it? Or to lose it?

These are my meditations on place from the last week of October, 2023.

 

Sense of Place, definition, from anthropologists Steven Feld & Keith Basso:

‘the experiential and expressive ways places are known, imagined, yearned for, held, remembered, voiced, lived, contested and struggled over’

 

Overnight, Thursday 26th October

Weather

It’s not a night for sleeping. I lie in bed, listening. The rain hunts the ground like a pack of hungry wolves. I’m craving stillness, rest, a space for things to quietly become.

This house of many thoughts holds the ability for silence. When everyone (finally) goes to sleep; when the sheep have moved from the field next door and the sound of lambs calling is no longer confused with that of children crying; when the words are written; when the birds are resting (where do they rest?); when the wind drops; when the rain stops.

I think of my horses. When it rains, I always think of my horses.

In the morning, I notice:

The round pen filled with water, a moat circling a mound of unmoved sand.

Dry rugs on my horse. Must be some hours since it stopped.

The slipping of the feet with the feeding of the hay. A ground still oily wet.

Half water filled black feed buckets. A horsewoman’s built-in gauge.

I walk and I look up. The clouds. I am filled with the desire not just to watch them but to know them.

Girl on the ground, knower and namer of clouds.

My eyes follow like greedy lovers. Try to stop them with my thoughts. A pearly show of meteorological seduction that always ends in tears.

My phone pings. A friend from town.

Still up for meeting? she asks. A shame about the weather!

To her and I today is something different.

To her: A minor inconvenience; a change of shoes; a jacket.

To me: A muddy schlep of hay carting and feed giving; a checking of fences; a merry-go-round of tending and of care.

I continue, one foot behind the other, this woman made of water and of bone.

Overnight, October 27^th

From my bedroom window

Last night, I saw a satellite move across the sky.

Me, lying in bed, pinned under the firm, insistent hands of my newly purchased weighted blanket.

The satellite, smooth skipping, moon walking round the sky.

It started on the left, my eye catching it as it launched from the outline of the Kowhai tree. I followed it until it disappeared beyond the outline of my window.

I wonder, who else is looking up and out their window at 9.57pm on a Friday to see a satellite on the move across the sky.

Sometimes, I call my mum.

Look up, I tell her. You see the moon?

We’re watching it together.

Place: Still searching

On Choosing Place

A remembering

I’m in a big hall, the belly of a whale. It’s too large to hold us with any sort of cosiness. Us, a small group of 8. Above, the beams of the ceiling run from right to left like a rib cage. When I walk, I do so slowly, intentionally. The echoes make the sounds of careless footsteps available for everyone to hear. This space does not feel welcoming, but it’s also not resistant. It’s neutral, ambivalent, neither here nor there. It watches out of one eye, gives the impression it would rather be somewhere else. Spaces of academia are like that to those who’ve rejected their insides.

I am here, in my chosen land that did not birth me, to learn Te Reo Maori (the Maori language). The pamphlet says it’s for beginners. I quickly learn it’s not. When you aren’t born to a culture, or a people, there is breathed in knowledge of place and word absorbed with osmotic frequency. I have entered from the outside. I scrabble to catch up.

We begin to learn a Mihi, and a Pepeha a formal introduction that describes land and place connections. I find it beautiful, a relief, to start not with my name, but with my mountain.

Once, I asked my dad why they chose the name Jane.

“It was easy to say,” he answered.

Oh, I replied. Girl, named after words that were easy to say, is about to choose her mountain.

Go away for a few minutes, the teacher tells us, and when you come back you can share your mihi with the group.

Tēnā koutou katoa,

Hello everybody

Ko  ……..     te māunga

My mountain is

Ko ……..  te awa/roto/moana

My river/lake/ocean is

Ko ……… te waka

My waka (canoe your ancestors arrived on) is

Ko ……… tōku iwi

My iwi/ tribe is

Nō ……. ahau

I’m from

Ko …….. tōku ingoa

My name is

Nō reira, tēna koutou, tēna koutou, tēnā koutou katoa.

Welcome to you, your ancestors and your descendents.

This is the format we are given.

I begin. The names of things I’ve chosen, they are un-given.

My mountains are not one.

The Blue Mountains of New South Wales

Mount Arthur in Tasmania

Mount Donna Buang in Victoria

Mount Eden, in Auckland

Māpounui, the mountain over my home

My river/lake/oceans are many:

Wentworth Falls

The pond at the bottom of our land in Bangor

The Yarra River

The Pacific Ocean

… to name a few.

To New Zealand, I arrived singly on my Waka, my canoe. I am the first.

My tribe is my family, and my friends. Spread all over the world. Not assigned but mostly chosen.

I’m technically from Australia, but sometimes, I’m not sure.

My name is Jane.

All my mountains. All my rivers. All my people.

My name is Jane. My name is Jane. My name is Jane.

Welcome to you, your ancestors, your descendents.

Welcome to those still falling from the sky.

On Childhood Place:

The Blue Mountains

Snippets of what I remember

I remember: Taking scissors and giving haircuts to the Pine Trees; dragging my mattress into my parent’s bedroom, too scared to sleep alone; kookaburras; hot sun through curtains in the summer; the Three Sisters; eucalypt oil in the sky; my rabbit, Alice, living in amongst a pile of cut off tree stumps in the empty stable out the back; taking my forty cents to buy blank notebooks at the newsagent; twenty cent bags of mixed lollies at the shop; watching Kangaroos at dusk behind the fallen logs; a VW beetle where if you lifted the car mat under the driver’s feet you could see straight down to the road; riding with my mum in front of the saddle; our old dog Ben; pretending I was the lead singer of the Bangles, belting out tunes in the empty and newly built extension of our built of bricks 60’s home; having stomach aches on Tuesdays when it was maths; eating Shepherd’s Pie every week because I didn’t want to tell my mum I didn’t like it (she thought I did); the big Plain Tree in the front paddock.

October 17^th

Place: At home, feeding my horses

I’m standing under a cluster of Blackwood Trees. It’s started raining lightly. The ground under my feet is still dry, a network of elevated roots making it possible for me to raise up higher still should that situation change. The contour of the land means I’m standing above Merc, a lead rope length away, eating his hay, the lower, thinner branches of the trees allowing just enough room for his height and width to stand sheltered and cocooned but not boxed in.

We knew the rain was coming before we felt it, before we saw the clouds open like a paper bag softly torn across their base. The strong smell of soil and rotting leaves and bugs with busy lives underfoot sent out the calling card aroma of Land Before Rain. A scent that feels damp and rich and heady, soil speaking eagerly to sky.

I lean against the rough trunk of the tree. My eyes fall on the ashen colored tones of bark mixed in with tans and browns. Some single drops of rain run in between the grooves, arms tight by their sides, heads stretched out, racing towards earth.

We are here for The Waiting. The time of day when Ada, my almost-yearling filly eats her feed- slowly, methodically, with baby chews and some obligatory, fumbling awkwardness- and I stand with Merc, lest he steal away the goodness in her bucket.

He’s finished already, moved on to his hay, the line of rope between the halter and my hand still holding a soft loop. In my busy-ness of feed making and hay transporting, I have my ear buds in, listening to a book. My stopping, The Waiting, makes that very specific type of listening suddenly seem all wrong. An inherent disrespect. A missing of something, although to whom and of what, I’m not sure. I notice all at once I’m being watched, being witnessed, by nothing and by everything at the same time.

We must miss a lot, I think to myself, by hurrying over land.

Merc reaches his nose towards me. In the position that he’s in, he could easily displace me, push me over. But he does not. His reach is gentle, enquiring, a whiskery “hey, hello”. Maybe he’s heard what I am thinking, his nudge a cue to bring me back. I reach out and instinctively rub his right eye, remove the long strands of forelock that have merged themselves with the sticky globs of waxy dust that together found their way to the corner.

He turns his head the other side; we repeat it on the left.

His ears stay soft, forward. I feel like he’s enjoying my company but what communicates that to me, I’m not sure exactly. I feel pleased. I let myself trust the feeling. So many beautiful moments lost by not trusting what we feel.

And even if it’s not the case, may my believing make it so.

 

It would be 6 pm in an area of suburban Portland when the light would start to dim. The red tinged bark of the young Sequoia Tree that lay directly in my line of sight from my hotel window seemed especially luminous at this time. I marveled at that tree; strong, proud, absorbent. I imagined her insistent roots under the concrete. I wondered if there were ever moments where she craved, called out for the big forest. What intelligence within her felt displaced.

Fernweh, is the word they use in German. Longing for a place you’ve never been.

Every night, we’d both watch a man with his life piled in a shopping cart, push it from one side of the carpark to the other and disappear from sight.

Me in my hotel room overlooking the car park, her in her planted spot, overlooking the carpark.

I thought of that man and wondered, what happened to you?

If he knew he’d been witnessed, by me and the Sequoia. And if he even cared.

I talked to my tree and asked, what’s it like to be planted in a place you can’t escape from?

 She was too gracious, too accepting to form an answer. A rock and a hard place.

When I got home, my son asked me about my time away and I replied:

I learned a lot, but I wouldn’t say it was enjoyable.

I meant to say:

I wanted to lie in the soil and let it cover me. I wanted grit in my nails and a squish under my toes. I wanted light that changed so I had to shield my eyes. I wanted to look out and be forced to stop my feet so I could make the looking last for longer.  

 I missed the world outside the city. And I am grateful to be home.

 My time away made me realise how my world of the non-human that surrounds me- my trees, my birds, my dogs, my horses, my everything’s- inspire so much of my words and my work. And without them, I was a little lost at sea, in search of a new anchor.

On Wednesday, I travelled to the airport in an Uber for the two-day journey home. I had yet to write something for this week to share with you today, yet to formulate my question.

I knew the nature of the airport would not inspire, but a conversation with my driver did. Inspiration from nature of the human nature kind. And with that, my mind took a swift right turn, moved sharply sideways, and then galloped straight ahead.

This week, my challenge to myself was what can I see if I look differently?

This was my answer to that question, a piece of writing I mapped out on my adventures from Portland to LA, LA to Auckland then Auckland to Dunedin.

 

Human | Nature : Portland to Auckland

Total Minutes of Friendship: 831 minutes, 16 seconds

 

Uber Driver

 

He pulls up with his white, hybrid station wagon, pops the boot,

grabs my heavy bag by a strap designed to hold together but not to lift.

It’s New To Us, he tells me, tapping the roof,

which I understand,

the second rung down from New To Everyone.

I give a satisfied nod,

position my face in a way I imagine someone who

might appreciate cars would position their face,

especially when the car

is a New To Us car.

 

The traffic will ease, he says,

you won’t be late.

When they first put this road in

we thought three lanes was

over the top.

 

Whyever, would we need three lanes? we said.

 

Now we say hallelujah when it merges to five

and finally, we get somewhere.

 

He points out the window, I turn over to the left.

 

When they finish that train line- wiggles his finger with some force- they’ll take you right from where I picked you up,

 

to right inside the airport.

 

“Inside”, he repeats, admiring, incredulous, emphatic, his now cupped hand gesturing up and down as though trying to catch an unsuspecting passenger with a cup.

 

He seems satisfied, triumphant, which confuses me,

coming from a man

 

who gives lifts to the airport as his job.

 

You know, the other day, I picked up a man.

He flies to Idaho every Thursday,

has a Ballroom dancing lesson with his daughter,

the gets back on the plane,

and flies back home.

 

She’s getting married soon.

 

I smile a half smile, my insides warmer with the thought of a man who flies every Thursday to Idaho to take ballroom dancing lessons with his daughter.

 

If I’d caught the train, I replied, I never would have known that.

 

His face looks pleased.

 

I call my trips five-minute friendships, he says.

 

I smile, make a note on my phone.

 

5-minute friendships.

 

By your scale, I tell him, we’re already over five friendships in.

 

Total Friendship Time: 26 mins 37 secs.

 

_______

 

Lady at the airport shop selling bags (and other things)

 

I don’t know if you’ll like this, she says, but that’s not why I’m showing you. I just like showing people my favourite things.

 

She clutches the patchwork leather, multi-coloured bag to her chest. She’s tagged me as an easy sell. I wonder if I send out wafts of Easy Sell.

 

They don’t buy all the leather, she tells me, holding the bag forward. Not new anyway. They’re off cuts.

 

She’s proud, like she’s made the bag herself, instead of being the lady behind the counter in the airport shop selling them.

 

Off cuts! She continues, emboldened by my interest.

 

I am interested. I do like bags. Wafts Of Easy Sell That Likes Bag. Must not look too interested.

 

I lean in.

 

They collect them, the offcuts. Dump them out, arrange them by colour palette.

 

Her hands scatter in the air like a Jackson Pollock painter. My eyes see bits of leather flying round.

 

You want to know something else?

 

She’s enthusiastic now, like a busker in the street who’s finally drawn a crowd.

 

I kind of don’t, but I kind of do.

 

She takes the flappy part that closes the bag and swings it over the top.

 

It’s reversible, she says. You can make it look different by clipping it the other side.

 

She stands Dragon’s Den triumphant.

 

Reversible.

 

She gives me a moment for the news to sink in, reaches her hand inside the bag, pulls out another smaller, scrunched up cotton bag.

 

A bag for your bag, she says, waving it like a flag.

 

She’s delighted, cackling.

 

I want to buy the bag.

 

At the counter, she draws a third line on her page, like she’s counting groups of five.

 

You’re my third “My pick today”, she says, self-congratulatory, oozing delight.

 

I think, perhaps, I should feel used. I do really like the bag.

 

She flips the paper over, more marker lines across the page. That’s yesterday, she booms. When I marked off how many times I was right.

 

She cackling now, out loud, a smoker’s rasp.

 

I tell the other girls here, there’s no reason that the day has to be boring. The other day a lady told me I was a genius. I think that’s worthy of repeating.

 

She’s laughing harder now.

 

My daughter says that every time someone makes a nice comment about something that she’s wearing, it’s like getting a free taco. She’ll call me and go, how many tacos did you get today, mum?

 

Walking out, she yells after me, keep spreading the joy! We make a difference.

 

Total minutes of friendship: 16 minutes, 33 seconds (and a new bag)

 

 

Browsing

 

I wander round another shop, finger the clothes hanging on the rack.

 

I like your jacket, the man behind the counter says.

 

Thank you, I say, glancing back at him, my jacket and myelf swishing

Right out of shop.

 

Of course, he says.

 

Everyone in Portland says Of Course.

 

One taco for me, I think.

 

Total Minutes of Friendship: 2 mins, 46 seconds

 

 

Air New Zealand Flight NZ 3, Los Angeles to Auckland

 

I’m Jim, his hand outstretched to shake. He’s 6’3, maybe more.

 

A smiling face, warmth as big as he is high.

 

This is Tammy, points over to his wife.

 

Jane, I say.

 

I like them very much. Less than 30 seconds later, their names escape me.

 

I’m sorry, I say, I do this all the time.

 

Do you know Jim and Tammy Bakker? Jim replies.

 

I think I do, but I wonder if I don’t. The reference seems to help.

 

I nod in spite of myself.

 

There! He says, you’ll remember our names now.

 

He’s laughing now, out loud.

 

The airline hostess makes a drink, Jim makes a joke. She does not laugh. I laugh.

 

A bit stiff, I whisper to him.

 

Anal, he replies.

 

We sip our drinks and smile.

 

Total Minutes of Friendship: 13 hours, 6 mins (plus exchange of WhatsApp numbers and a google search of Jim and Tammy Bakker)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A letter.

Dear Jane,

I would like to ask you to pause for a moment and consider what you could say to us that could help us move forward with the challenges we all face. Perhaps you can lift us into a more joyful state. 

From, Seeker Of Joyful States

Dear Seeker of Joyful States,

Let’s start with a story. The patch of land on which I live, I know and tend to intimately. Within it, there are one or two pockets I know more deeply still; those I’ve spent more time in, looked at more often, those I feel a greater sense of kinship with.

The trees outside my wooden panelled office are one such place. All around, they cocoon me in my book adorned, computer tapping space. The one directly to the front, beneath the window straight ahead, is not concerned with height, but with width. Her green arms, with their tightly spindled leaves spread out in all directions, maintain a constant resting state of impending embrace, an arboreal dream catcher.

Facing front, there’s an apple tree. Her apples and my taste buds don’t get on. Their slightly sour taste makes my face screw up. I don’t tell her this of course; a friendship preserved by the omission of unnecessary truths. Her gnarled arms and over-knuckled fingers, old and youthful in equal amounts, are all at once ordered and chaotic, an intriguing maze that draws the eyes upward without allowing them to reach a specific destination.

The knobby bits that stick out from the branches, it turns out, provide the perfect resting place for the hooks from which my nectar feeders hang. Naïvely, I started with just one, wondering if anyone would come, a solitary bright orange, sugar filled lantern hanging suspended in the sky.

Word soon spread in avian society that there was a new dealer in town. An innocent one, they probably chuckled to themselves, foreseeing my future as an dedicated nectar peddler, an open all hours enthusiastic feeder of feathered friends in need of their next hit.

 

 

Inspired by an idea I recently read to create a pen-and-paper only, no technology corner, I bought a fold up beach chair made of some man made washable fabric and a cheap, olive coloured fluffy blanket that compels you to say “Gosh! isn’t this soft?!” every time you touch it, despite have done so many times before. They delight me, not least of all because I’d been looking at much more expensive versions when they stumbled in my way. A bargain always adds an intangible certain something-something to a purchase.

So, I took my $30 beach chair, unfolded it, slung the blanket over the top and placed it on the rug inside my office, faced towards the tree where my nectar feeders hang.

And every morning, I sit, with my notebook on my knee, writing pen in one hand, coffee in the other, and I watch.

The first few days my nectar feeder hung, it attracted the Tuis. This was the expectation. The Tui, a native bird to New Zealand, are honey eaters, of a size you’d need both hands to hold, with elegant features, a finely contoured head, and eyes that assert that they’re clear of their place in the world.

From a distance, the unknowing eye might think they are black; up close, their feathers shine with peacock iridescence, like an expensive piece of jade seen beneath a layer of crystal water.

On their throat are two white tufts, conductors of the orchestra to their very distinct song. Their tune is a stand out in my island forest and to the human ear haphazard, arriving like a series of audible fairy lights undergoing intermittent power surges. At the start, they make a hollow tapping sound, before briefly breaking out at maracas, trilling momentarily, descending to a low note and before using their whole body to crescendo with a loud climatic squawk and then looping the track back round again.

One pauses feeding, looks at me directly.

You’re welcome, I said, as though doing him a favour. We both know the favour is reversed. Today, he’s feeling gracious, let’s me think that he believes me.

Overnight, the Tui’s spread the news. At first they talked to the Kaka, the big mountain Parrots. The sound of them landing on the guttering before leap frogging to the tree makes me jump. They came, stood on my nectar platform and inquired with their beak. Feeling it out, tasting with their tongues, hanging off the side and upside down. Their brown and green plumage with burnt orange flushes, crawl all over and under and through my tree as if gravity was something they could choose.

I didn’t expect you, I told them. But I’m glad that you are here.

Me and the Tui’s and the Kaka.

Then came the Wax Eyes. So many Wax Eyes. Birds the colour of silken moss and lichen, the green hues blending to yellow without transition. An ombre work of art. Their white rimmed eyes, their body forming a kind of perfection that makes you wonder if their even real.

All along the Wax Eyes had been there. I had never seen so many, arriving like forest confetti. Perfect winged gifts dancing right aside my window.

 

Where is this story leading, you may ask? Well, directly to the first part of my answer which is:

Both within challenge and without, we have to find our metaphorical nectar feeder. A space that allows us to make an offering, sit down and pay attention, to something other than ourselves.

We have to take the time to notice what’s already with us; what beauty is camouflaged amongst the leaves, what requires a little more sweetness on our part to make itself visible.

Challenge narrows our focus. Wonder widens it. And life in its details is wondrous if we are still enough and interested enough to seek it out.

It’s not something that can be forced. But we can let it find us by creating the right conditions, asking the right questions.

This story I’ve just told you about my office and my chair and the trees and the birds. In some ways you could say it’s nothing special. And I guess that’s what I love about it. It’s both ordinary and extraordinary.

What makes it one or the other- ordinary or extraordinary- is how much I’m paying attention. Einstein said, “The most important decision we make is whether we believe we live in a friendly or hostile universe.” Watching the birds remind me of that decision, and I do my best to remind myself as often as I can. That I believe the universe to be friendly. Because it’s from this space- the space of believing things to be innately friendly instead of hostile, wonder filled instead of challenged- that I can meet the hard things that inevitably come up and not lose my gentleness. Or at least, have a place where I find it returns to me if I do.