|
New Adventures in the Land of the Long White Cloud
Kia ora, greetings from New Zealand.
I'm back in the land of my birth and I can't think of a more appropriate place to write my first Happy Ever After Club blog.
Not only is New Zealand the place where I began, it is actually the first country in the world to greet every new day. That's why thousands of tourists from all over the globe flocked here to welcome in the new millennium. In fact, New Zealand - as its name suggests - is synonymous with innovation, and this is not surprising when you consider its origins. Like Hawaii - another place where I have lived and loved - New Zealand was born of volcanic activity and has always been a laboratory of social and political change. It was the first nation in the world to give women the vote. It gave the world Ernest Rutherford - pioneer of atomic research, Edmund Hillary - the first man to climb Mt Everest and the hugely talented Finn brothers Tim and Neil of Split Enz and Crowded House fame. New Zealand was the first country in the world to develop a welfare state. Unfortunately, it was also one of the first to dismantle it and create the ethos of the market economy, for which the world is currently being forced to pay a huge price!
When I was growing up I often wondered why it was that New Zealand produced so many creative and talented people. Yes, it has something to do with the inherent pioneering, can-do nature of its inhabitants and the relative isolation of the country from the rest of the world, but it also has to do with the connectedness of most Kiwis (this name that New Zealanders give themselves comes from the native, nocturnal Kiwi bird who lives in the bush, is hardly ever seen and is close to extinction) have with the land. Even though most New Zealanders are urban dwellers, they live close to nature in a way that is simply not possible in many other countries. In a world where many are now seeking organic food and pure water and prepared to pay a premium for it, New Zealanders have always had their vege gardens, rainwater tanks and a love affair with trees.
Those of you who read my book So Where's My Happy Ever After? know that I've had a love/hate affair with my country of origin. This was the place where my daughter got sick, my marriage started to disintegrate, and everything I'd known about life and my place in the world was shaken to the core. It has taken another two decades, and living in another country (the Land of Oz no less!) for me to gather up those shattered pieces of self and re-assemble them. It hasn't been a "putting back together" of the old, it has been more of a re-birth, a forging of a new me that is a combination of what withstood the shake-up and what I've discovered about life along the way, as well as my hopes and dreams or the future.
As you can imagine then, every trip back here means surrendering to a gamut of emotions. When I returned in 2005 with my son - the trip that is recounted in my book - I made peace with the past, or so I thought. But then in February of this year I had the opportunity to come back once more. To my surprise, as the trip got closer and closer, I felt angrier and angrier. I ended up cancelling the trip and staying put in Australia; safe, so I thought, but life decided differently. Winter arrived and with it an unwelcome guest called illness. I got sick, sicker than I'd been in many years, and the illness forced me to deal with all the pain I had been trying to avoid.
This winter I ended a relationship in which I wasn't honouring myself and I did all the grieving for the past that sometimes has to happen - no, that's wrong - that ALWAYS has to happen before life can move on. You know in the Bible that place that's called "The Valley of the Shadow of Death"? It's the destination none of us want to go to yet it's the place none of us can avoid going to at some time in our lives. And thank Goddess for that, because in that Valley, if we stay a while and do a bit of exploring, there is a deep, deep pool and if we look in that pool we can catch a glimpse of who we really are.
Anyway, this winter, after I got through the sickness and crying, I got a glimpse of me: the Joy who can survive the ups and downs of this roller coaster existence on planet earth, the Joy who is there when the carnival ride is done. The Joy who can survive winter and embrace another spring.
And having touched that Joy again I was ready to come home again to my first home, the land that gave me birth. I booked my ticket, packed my bag and speculated what adventures might await me during my seven day visit to Aotearoa, the Land of the Long White Cloud.
Sure enough, the clouds were there yesterday as the plane circled Auckland Airport. Later, as I drove to my hotel, the heavens opened and down came the rain. Great, I thought, just as well I packed an umbrella. Even though I had prepared for the wet and my father had warned me that they were having bad weather, I was still surprised because in the weeks before leaving Australia, each time I had contemplated the trip ahead I had seen blue skies and sunny days. I should have trusted that instinct. As I sat at some traffic lights, windscreen wipers carving a perfect set of breasts across my window, I caught a glimpse of pretty colours reflecting off a shop. I turned to my right and there was the most perfect crest of a rainbow. I'm sure there were many others in Auckland yesterday who noticed the rainbow and delighted in its radiance but I'm convinced that rainbow was there just for me. Its message was clear. It said, "Welcome home child, welcome back. We missed you but now that you're here it's like we've never been apart. Haere-mai".
For more NZ adventures with Joy watch this space!
|
Hybrid Mode