We have recently moved. The decision to move was not ours, but providence, as always favours the brave and bravely we acted. This is the story of the emotional and spiritual journey of one of us.
The Color of the Wind
A Long-tailed Cuckoo calls in the stillness of the night. Its cry amplifies the hushed silence. The soft moist clouds of Ngaroma hang breathless. This is my oasis.
This place, these people have nurtured me, given me strength. As I struggled to stay afloat in the maelstrom of divorce, homelessness and unemployment that enveloped me I washed up in this pleasant place. Like a seed cast recklessly to the elements, blown and swirled, trampled and swept away by the torrents of life I came to rest on fertile soil.
I have grown anew. Fresh shoots reaching rapidly toward the light of a new season. The seeds’ time had come in a land of plentiful growth nestled in the maternal swells of volcanic hills. Drenched with loving rain, caressed with filtered sunshine and a steady breeze that ruffles the hair. Ngaroma. Peopled with the produce of its climate, self–reliant, generous folk who accept community as friends. I have “become”, in a very real sense while dwelling here. Yes, become. A strange term and one that is difficult to pass from one to another without losing its meaning. Yet that is what has happened, I have “become”.
It is time to leave this oasis. Not by my choice, but by the reckoning of the wisdom of life.
And I sit here on the floor at 3am, less than a month after learning my job and my house were part of the economic crisis so talked about yet seemingly so distant. The furniture is packed, and I am unable to sleep as I sit on the verge of moving to a new life and a new phase of becoming.
Seedlings raised in a green house cannot realize their potential and bear fruit until they are taken abruptly from shelter and transplanted into a harsher environment. It is a difficult transition yet it is what sets the plant free to bear fruit. This is my transplantation, my uprooting from shaded soils and planting out in full sun, Marlborough’s sun.
Marlborough, a land of hills the color of the wind, its grass rippling like an orgasm across the taut skin of a lover under warm blue skies. A land of preserved history, yet vibrantly alive today. A place to grow.
With a trailer load of bleating, crowing and barking we drive through the night along the backbone of our island and sail the strait arriving at dawn to a new world.
It is the world of my dreams, dreamt since I was fourteen years old; Mountains and Merinos, the realm of the high country shepherd.
Truly it has been an uncertain often meandering path, this fulfillment of my dreams, and many are the charred stones of sacrifice and indecision along the way. I could mourn the lost, but those stones are the very building blocks of my current house of love and joy. In the same way the rocky steadfastness of the mountains supply stones for the shaping of the land, so the material of my life is rooted in the rock of something much larger.
I cannot see it, nor perceive it with clarity, but I sense it growing and becoming more powerful as I yield to my dreams.
Walking in the river bed near my new home I stoop and pick up a dark blood red stone. Soaked in the suns warmth its surface is silken to the touch yet the stone is extremely hard, a gift from the very heart of the mountains. Holding it in my hand I become aware of a knowledge that exists beyond the boundaries of the senses, outside of circumstance and location, it is the knowledge of the homecoming of my soul. A place of contentment where all that is lost now has its place.
