Becoming Moth

That’s not me in the arms of the donkey. I’m the little brown fairy at the back! photo credit: Lara McGregor

“Moth” is the smallest role in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In the cast of characters, her name comes last, after Fairy 1 and the other three fairies: Peaseblossom, Cobweb, and Mustardseed. Moth speaks only twice on her own…to say, “And I” (after Peaseblossom’s “Ready!”) and also, “Hail” as the fairies greet Nick Bottom, transformed to an ass. This is the role I play in Dunedin Summer Shakespeare’s production this year. 

I’m not too proud for such a small role; I have only acted in three other plays–ever–and all of them within the past year. For this production, there are three professional actors in our company and a host of accomplished thespians, both on- and back- stage. I arrive every day with humility and gratitude, ready to learn. 

When I was first cast in this role, I recall feeling embarrassed and thinking that perhaps the director (the fabulous Kim Morgan) was hoping I might simply bow out. How could they cast a 50-year-old woman in the role of a fairy? In my mind, being cast as a fairy was a micro-step up from being cast as a tree or a squirrel. No one has been cast as a tree or squirrel, by the way–it’s not a grammar school performance after all. So truly, there is no step up to Moth. But much worse than that, I have always imagined fairies as the typical ethereal English entities, light of foot and fair, played by nubile young women about half my size and half my age. I’m not large, but I’m athletic. And I’m certainly not fair. I just couldn’t see it.

When I saw my name next to that of Moth on the casting list, I knew I couldn’t not accept my role: Dunedin is a small theatre scene. Actors need to be gracious and accept the roles they are offered, especially when they are just starting out. Maybe that’s always true. I’m still learning these things.  I made lots of jokes about being a “fifty-year-old fairy”--it was the easiest way for me to accept it. Laughter and self-deprecation seemed the easiest way to lean into this fairly uncomfortable new thing. I accepted the role, but I had many reservations. 

On the occasion of the first assembly of the entire cast of 21 actors, plus our director, stage manager, and technical director, we had an informal mihi. Everyone seemed to know what to say to introduce themselves. There were proper pepeha, short and sweet accounts of the past three years’ experience with the company, and truncated lists of theatrical backgrounds, obviously meant to downplay accomplishments the troupe were mostly already aware of. I had little to say and felt as small as my role. It was uncomfortable and strange and, I noted, I could feel myself growing.

Growth is like that, right? It hurts. It’s uncomfortable at best. It’s what we agree to if we’re brave, but that doesn’t make it easy. In my early years, I avoided any activity I couldn’t dominate. I was a mediocre water polo player, so I only played one year of that as a kid. Otherwise, it was gymnastics, springboard diving, and surfing, the former two for which I was typically on the podium and the latter of which put me in a realm with very few women participating, let alone competing. It was easy to excel; there were simply zero expectations for your everyday female surfer in the ‘80s. So yeah, I wasn’t taking a lot of risks.

On that first afternoon, standing in the circle on Shore Street with the entire Shakespeare company, guided through voice work and theatrical warm-ups, to say I felt completely inadequate is an understatement. It was all so foreign. I knew I was pushing myself. Challenging myself. Though I had a strong impulse to flee, I stayed. These people seemed kind. And they weren’t looking at me at all. Each was involved in their own experience, fully engaged and unconcerned with what was beyond their own skin. Until it was time to connect and then—then the connections among them were profound. To me this was incredibly admirable. It was exhilarating. And beautiful. These might be some of the bravest people I’ve ever met, I thought. 

I wanted to be brave like them. Maybe if I let myself, they wouldn’t know how hard it was for me. Because it was hard…but also it was completely exciting and liberating. It made me feel like I could do anything. Maybe they would see me as one of them. Maybe I could grow to believe this too and thereby let the thought of not belonging go completely. I allowed myself to soften, bit by bit. I closed my eyes and engaged. 

Even as I was moving my body, lifting my voice, controlling my breath (all things I had embraced in the realm of yoga over the past 23 years), I was aware that at no point earlier in my life would I have been willing to be vulnerable in this way. It was always important to me to be poised. Controlled. Lovely. I had always wanted to be dignified. Maybe you’ll notice how many of these adjectives are determined from an external locus of control. It wasn’t what I wanted to be so much as how I wanted to be seen.

At no point in my life had I ever been so brave as to let myself appear silly, awkward, foolish, uncontrolled. Not on purpose. Many characters call for these things. It’s fun. The audience is clever; they know to separate the actor from the character. Why couldn’t I? In all fairness, I didn’t grow up in this scene, had not been surrounded by these courageous and generous people. I wondered how my life might have been different if I had. Some part of me knew, even in my discomfort, that I had missed out in many ways.

I was very much at odds during the break while actors drank tea together and laughed, recalling other shows they’d done together and catching up about their most recent projects. I remember Miriam Noonan, cast as the beautiful Hermia, approaching me very sweetly and asking me how I was liking being in New Zealand–in my introduction I had mentioned that I’d been here for only about 18 months. I remember her forlorn look as I proceeded to tell her, very near tears, that I was coming to the realisation that I, in fact, don’t belong anywhere. I was probably talking about not belonging there. In that place at that moment. Miriam smiled and looked at me with compassion, and then, like any sane person would, she took the first opportunity to escape. I remember wondering, “What am I even doing?”

As rehearsals went on, I began to get a glimpse into the vision that our director had for the play. The fairy sprite Puck was also cast with a woman my age in the role: Jessica Latton is one of the three women who founded Dunedin Summer Shakespeare. She is a huge personality in Dunedin theatre with a vast and varied background in acting, dance, and movement. She is the director of her own theatre company as well. If she could be Puck… And Barbara Power, one of the three professional actors in our company, was cast as Titania, Queen of the Fairies. These women are both amazing, and I have watched them closely, every chance I’ve gotten, and soaked in their process. Marveled at their unabashed willingness to try and even to fail (how else to perfect?). Their willingness to imagine. To embody. 

There is something that feels ageless about the world of magic that it is our charge to create and then hold sacred space for in the course of this play. Mustardseed, Peaseblossom, Cobweb and I, Moth, are responsible for casting the spell of the fairy ring. For weaving the gossamer fabric of magic that envelops the audience throughout the play. With our bodies, we move and enchant the space…lawn, gardens, fairy ring and all. I am so involved in this work that I sometimes forget to say my one line. This makes me laugh, and it totally doesn’t matter that much (though Kim might beg to differ!), because the other three fairies always remember (it’s spoken in unison), but I think it speaks to how truly enchanted I myself am in the business of spinning a wordlessly magic veil and sending it out over the audiences that show up each evening and open themselves to the dream of this experience. My favourite is the children who marvel at my little wooden puppet (also a ‘moth’ and made with heartrending attention and aroha by our prop/set designer Matt) who dances before them. They marvel at the way I might break the “fourth wall” and give them a little wink. We are playing together as I move through the garden, and it is a delicious kind of freedom. It is beautiful. I am beginning to see who Moth can be to me.

I think Moth has come into my life to remind me not to take myself too seriously. I can be a 50-year-old woman, which indeed I am, with whatever personal history that grew me, whatever serious responsibilities in my career (and however many flaws and insecurities and imperfections), and still play a fairy named Moth. I don’t need to be beautiful or accomplished or dominant in any way–just committed to doing the small but important job I have been given. Moth came into my life to remind me to find joy and to propagate it. She came to me, as in a dream, and said, “Time to let go of the last vestiges of ego”. 

I got to fashion my own sense of Moth (which was then fully realised by our costumer extraordinaire, Sophie Welvaert). Our director Kim asked us to draw on our own cultural ideas around fairies. “All cultures,” she said, “have some version of a fairy. What is yours?” Culturally I am a bit of a mashup. My skin is brown, but I have a lot of English and Irish ancestors. I have Tsalangi (Cherokee) ancestors, whose faces are mirrored in my own and in my black eyes, but my family have been denying that staunchly for generations. My cultural rootlessness is most certainly a reflection of colonisation, so it made sense to build out my concept of my culturally relevant fairy with a layering of traditional styling and bits appropriated from the over-culture: the deer bone and abalone shell choker and bracelet made for me by a Kiowa/Cherokee man decades ago, a bowler hat, feather earrings, a men’s waistcoat…bells around my ankles. With this vision and this costuming, Moth began to take shape.

As Moth chose her style of movement, she took both direct and indirect routes, depending on what was happening and with whom she was interacting. She moved slowly, crouched low, primal and animal-like. She was shy but profoundly curious and always entertained by the complex interactions between her fairy Queen and King, among mortals, between the spellbound Titania and the transformed weaver named Bottom. She didn’t shy away from taking it all in, manoeuvering to see every mannerism, every interaction that took place in the fairy ring. Eager to speak and to be seen, she is the least of the fairies and several times, when it seems that she will get a word in, she doesn’t. She sinks back down to her crouched position, a bit crestfallen, as Titania intervenes between the ass-headed Bottom and her moth-like minion. But Moth recovers quickly–her interest in the scene supersedes the momentary disappointment of not getting to engage with Bottom. And she is devoted to her Fairy Queen…her service to Titania is all. 

I work to tease out the nuances of Moth and her significance in my life. Being her, I feel joyful and free. I feel childlike and curious. Spry and playful. She looks directly into the eyes of tamariki entranced by her puppeteering, by her gossamer wings, by the garden itself. She sways and turns gracefully but with grounded power and sureness of foot. Her fellow fairies also move in unique ways and are accoutred according to their own cultural concepts of fairyhood…Mustardseed is a wood nymph, and her costuming is inspired by flora, her movement by the energy-wielding T’ai Chi. Peaseblossom is goofy and silly; her colours are all shades of blue and she wears an enormous shell necklace, reminiscent of the sea. Cobweb is a punky, goth-inspired fairy, her long black hair falling in gentle curls over her arms as she crouches to observe the wiles of the devilish Puck and the fallout of her charms and spells.

We are a troupe within a troupe, and when our Fairy Queen and King join us, there is a camaraderie that transcends the story. It transcends the act of entertaining or art-making. This camaraderie has more to do with being so utterly vulnerable with these very people. With giving all of ourselves to this endeavor, together, and heading, undaunted, into the fray of an unknown audience. It is shared with the other mini-troupes, too…the “Mechanicals”, the “Royals”, the “Lovers”. Is it possible to love these people? I blush. But in my heart I know the answer is an unmitigated yes. 

As Moth, I have been braver, more alive, and more authentic than I have perhaps ever been as an individual. The older I get the more I understand each experience as issuing from my own intention, as helping to shape my journey as a human on this planet. All I have to do is pay attention. Allow myself to grow in the ways each event and moment can grow me. I am Moth, full of lightness, of curiosity and innocence. I am Moth, full of beauty that I don’t have to grasp for or feel ashamed of. I am Moth, full of aroha and burgeoning with flight.

Beneath the Loam

Vincent van Gogh: Pine Trees against an Evening Sky, 1889. (Van Gogh Museum)

Beneath the Loam

Face up on the forest floor: 

contemplation of light entering the canopy 

on a slant--how dust motes

climb around inside it, disorganised 

and weightless. 

Drum of discord

thumps its insistent rhythm

on the underside of each leaf, 

pervades the air with its hunger.

Small tremor at regular intervals 

disturbs the sailing of particles.

Soul slides into hair that mimics roots:

strands find their way to nourishment.

Soul shakes itself from split ends,

is absorbed with the body by earth: skin 

the color of loam, mottled and porous--

thin layer of protection.

Drum beat drags self from self,

anthem for the hurting--

general disbelief in this congregation of trees,

their girth. Their texture and their living.

Below: leaves obscure features: 

Knees, toes, tip of nose,

even mounds of breasts

sink beneath the loam. 

Disappearance of corpus--

eradication of the whole.

And still the drum. It’s what remains

in the end. Disembodied staccato,

alive on its own, shakes cells apart 

and hastens the dissolution

of all that is human.

The System

Teens captured by media inside the Malmsbury youth detention centre. Picture: Darren Howe

So this is language I hear all the time. The System, with a capital ‘S’. It comes out of the mouths of youth and it comes out of the mouths of adults, typically laced with a substantial amount of disdain. At work it’s normally talking about the systems of Youth Justice and Care and Protection under the Ministry for Children. It’s about the web of protocols and personalities and bureaucratic red tape that surrounds any of the youth who come through my classroom door. The web is born of a good intention. Of course it is. But ultimately it becomes a tangle of the above named elements that threaten to strangle the youth, along with their whānau. It’s certainly strangling me, an educator trying to provide services to youth whose education has not been a priority for a pretty long time.

No judgement. It’s hard to think about literacy and numeracy, let alone creativity and innovation, when the immediate concern is finding a safe bed for the child to sleep in. And when the adults making the decisions—social workers, youth workers, therapists, remand home kaimahi, and sometimes parents—have almost all had a traumatic history (at best an unsavoury one) around education, it’s hard to convince anyone that what a teacher has to offer has any value. In fact, it’s worse than that. Try convincing someone who has been let down by a school system, one that has allowed them to be shamed or jeered at for their cultural ineptitude (or aptitude!) or simply counselled them out of mainstream education because it “wasn’t a fit for them” that education itself is not actually harmful, and you’ll begin to see the barriers that are in place. These barriers are systemic.

Most of the students I get are around the age of 16…nearly there or just past. They’re in custody because they have offended…it’s a lot of car theft and shoplifting, a lot of substance abuse, but sometimes people and even animals are hurt, too. These kids have done some damage. We must know, though, that kids don’t think up these things on their own. They don’t exhibit deviant behaviours because they’re bored of their abundant, happy, safe home lives. Most of the kids I get will remain in custody after they’ve served their time, because their homes are also considered unsafe, and such decisions are not made lightly. Evidence to support them usually appears on the youths’ bodies or in the behavioural manifestations of their trauma. My job? It’s rough, and there is a lot of posturing, a lot of resistance. But those behaviours, that resistance? They are not the problem.

In New Zealand, kids are allowed to stop going to high school at 16. It’s a choice they’re allowed to make, along with their whānau. The scenarios I see in this remand-home-educator position had me convinced that this opportunity to leave school at 16 was one of the most visible aspects of colonisation at work in New Zealand today. I thought, “It’s innocent enough. Listen to the ‘voice of the child’ and all that. But the result is actually quite sinister, and it is that those children and their whānau are kept in the precise positions they currently occupy: in the ranks of the lower socio-economic class”. This is indeed the result of that last step in a sequence of problematic decisions and situations, but of course leaving school at 16 is not solely to blame. In fact, it doesn’t begin in secondary school at all; unfortunately, it starts a lot earlier than that.

So then I thought, “Well, my tauira (these youth on remand) are not representative of the typical high school student”, so it’s not fair to judge anything based on my experience with them and the system that enfolds them. But you know, they are in many ways representative of a large number of New Zealand’s students. While the current education system more or less works for about 82% of New Zealand’s youth, for almost 2 in 10 of them, it seriously does not. That’s around 16,000 kids. By the time a youth turns 16 and is given a choice of whether or not to continue in the struggle of what many would describe as trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, they’re most likely going to make the obvious choice to leave school. At first my argument was this: ultimately, a kid who has just turned 16 simply doesn’t know. They aren’t equipped to make an informed choice about education. It’s like asking a five year old if he wants to wear underpants or if if he’d like to cut all vegetables out of his diet. Let him steer that waka and the problems of personal hygiene and nutritional health will sink it.

But then I had to ask myself: are underpants and vegetables really good analogies? When I hear from despairing parents about rampant bullying and what I can only describe as a culture of exclusion…it makes me wonder. Maybe to some of these youth (and their parents), education looks a lot more like arsenic on the plate than broccoli. I suspect many of them choose to take their chances on their own (and without education) because the vehicle for receiving it is so…I would say unpalatable, but…might it even be toxic? In Dunedin, there are close to 60 seats in the various alternative education centres offered to youth between the ages of 12 and 16. And those seats are in high demand. But why? How can the solution be to continue to expand the programming for alternative education, rather than to address the problem at its source? Why are there so many youth for whom mainstream school isn’t working? Do you know that over 23,000 kids, from early childhood to year 13, are currently being educated online with our country’s biggest online education provider, Te Aho o Te Kura Pounamu? Parents seem desperate for alternatives to what is being offered in our mainstream settings.

Ask any of my prospective students if they want to learn in a classroom, and the answer will be a resounding no. They have yet to understand education as their right. And, in fact, most of their parents are not there yet either. They might like the idea of their child becoming educated, but they don’t believe in it enough to fight for it. It’s far too easy for them to be convinced that, like they were often told as young people, education, especially higher education, is “just not for them”. This messaging to their children is simply a reinforcement of the messaging they got when they themselves were children, and it bolsters a core belief that lives deep down, whether they are conscious of it or not: I don’t deserve a proper education. We don’t deserve it. This is what is meant by colonisation, but we should know: it doesn’t only affect the colonised cultural group. Anyone who is not born into a financially secure situation, whose inheritance is less than stability and the fulfilment of basic needs, is a victim of this System in which those who don’t have continue not to have. We are talking about food and shelter and clothing, yes, but we’re also talking about knowledge. We’re talking about access.

The social workers and youth workers with whom I interact on a daily basis seem resigned to the idea that while education, in a perfect world, is a right, one that youth should be encouraged to demand for themselves, it is simply not available to kids like the ones we deal with. I am regularly treated like a naive do-gooder for insisting on the right of our rangatahi to education, and I’m beginning to understand why. By the time we get them, these youth have fully absorbed and assimilated the messaging that they probably got from their earliest moments in a classroom: you’re not suited to this space, you can’t sit still and focus and are therefore not a good student, you’re disruptive, a nuisance, and you will do best to make your exit as soon as you can. And by the time they’re a bit older, If you don’t volunteer to make that exit, we’ll make it for you. This message, when fully integrated into their sense of self, often manifests as behaviour that is surly, oppositional, and resistant to anything that even remotely looks or feels like a classroom.

So it’s our job (in our roles as social service providers) to get these youth sorted with a training or activity centre where they might be able to grow and gain some valuable skills. Typically, our youth are already known by multiple centres like these, because they have cycled through, each time failing to keep their impulsive behaviours under wraps, each time responding aggressively to words and actions that trigger their trauma around being in a classroom and looking “stupid”. It’s a vicious cycle. They’re not wanted in these spaces, because they detract from the learning of the others who have come there, many of them after plucking up the courage to surmount a previously traumatic educational experience of their own. I don’t blame these providers for prioritising that latter group. But why is our System producing so many of the former?

It’s become clear to me that we have to go back further. How does a kid get here? To this place where they are offending and being incarcerated as a youth and rejecting those things that might empower them? Well, trauma, for starters. Yes, it often starts in the home. That’s what cycles of poverty and violence (and by extension trauma) look like. When systems are in place that keep those cycles rolling, not allowing the inertia to be disrupted by a new force acting on it (like early intervention programmes, which are dismally funded in comparison with those that react when the problem has already escalated to extreme heights—you wouldn’t believe how much money is wrapped around a youth who is already in the youth justice system because they have offended. Add the services that are needed for that same child to be cared for outside of their home—because their home has been deemed unsafe—and given the psychological services needed to address their traumas…it’s expensive, to say the least). Where is the money to support whānau trying to keep their children from resorting to these negative pathways?

Down the rabbit hole, right? Yes and no. It can be done. Our educational system, from its inception at teacher training right on through to the nurturing of an educational community, must support teachers to be able to deliver learning for ALL of their students. Is it easier to remove the 10 out of 30 kids who are “trouble makers” or who require more from the educator? Of course it is. But what of those 10? And you may have guessed it, but a disproportionate number of those 10 are Māori and Pacific Islander—and it’s not because they’re inherently less suited to the classroom. And what is lost for the remaining 20 whose homogenised experience of life in the classroom is a poor reflection of the diversity they will actually encounter in the world?

An inclusive system doesn’t just mean the absence of racism and classism, though this is essential. It asks the school to support the teacher to integrate those 10 kids effectively into the learning environment. And why are we talking about 10 and 20 anyway? How about 5 and 15? A lot of the success of elite private schools has to do with the fact that they have funding to guarantee a smaller class size. It is in those settings that teachers have a chance at success in truly caring for their young charges (not just performing triage in an unmanageably overpopulated setting). I know because I have taught in them.

With 160 students on my roster at the last mainstream public school in which I taught (that one happened to be in the U.S.), it nearly killed me to deliver what I believed they deserved (exactly the same thing my students in the last posh private school in which I taught got). It’s too much to ask of our educators. I didn’t stay at that mainstream public school for long, because my commitment to delivering quality education to my students was at odds with the parameters of my job—so much so that delivering it was at the cost of my personal health and wellbeing.

If instead of focusing on reducing those numbers, we come at the problem with the reasoning of “We need to be able to teach the kids who want to learn”, our schools unwittingly perpetuate a system of colonisation whereby brown and poor kids are pushed out of pathways that involve higher learning before they ever even have a chance to discover their strengths. We laugh about the outdated rhetoric of “No child left behind”, but what would that really look like? What if our school system supported teachers to look at their roles in the classroom differently? With 160 kids on their rosters, most teachers have to just try to survive the year and drag as many youth across the finish line with them as they can; with 60 or 70, they could look at it this way: if any child is failing, I am failing. Full stop. It’s MY job to make sure each one is seen and heard and accommodated. And whatever strategies I have ever devised for struggling students has always and invariably benefitted ALL of my students, not just those whose challenges precipitated my efforts. Those students made me a better teacher.

It would require a major overhaul of the educational system. And it’s not just about numbers. It would require money, for sure. And time. Our teachers would have to be trained to move in a way that is trauma informed. Trained not to ask, “What’s wrong with you?” of the child who is disrupting the entire class with their bizarre behaviour but rather, “What happened to you?” They would need to spend as much time on learning effective classroom management as they do pedagogy. Not classroom punishment, classroom management…where an atmosphere of restorative justice is upheld. Kids can be taught to honour their classroom community and to take responsibility for its functioning as an inclusive, safe, edifying place for ALL. Young children, aged 5 to 11, for example, still thrive on positive attention and accolades, so there’s that. But they also, simply because they are human, thrive in an atmosphere of love. And if they believe that this atmosphere exists in large part because they personally contribute to it, there really is no limit to how that little community can grow and foster learning experiences for all those who are a part of it.

If we want ALL youth to be supported by our public school system, then we have to support all teachers and beyond that all SCHOOLS to provide what is needed to foster this kind of inclusiveness. With the relative “luxury” of a manageable-sized roster, a teacher would have the time and energy to actually care for the youth they engage. Not just deliver a product to those lucky enough to be able to survive in that space without any accommodation. Statistically, that’s 82% of New Zealand’s youth. So chances are, if you’re reading this and you have kids, yours fall into that category. But is it enough to raise kids who can thrive against the odds?

If you think that as long as your own children steer clear of these pathways, you’re good, doing your part, then take a look at local statistics. See how much of the local crime is perpetrated by these very youths who have not managed to steer clear of those paths. And each of their crimes has a victim, or a set of them. When one group in our society suffers, we all do. Figures obtained under the Official Information Act in 2016 revealed that Corrections assessed that “63 per cent [of New Zealand’s prisoners were] deemed to be below a basic standard of literacy.” Having a basic standard of literacy simply means that one can read and write to the limited extent it is required to function in their community. According to a 2018 study by the New Zealand Book Council, 40% of adults [in New Zealand] cannot read at a day-to-day functioning level. RNZ reported that when in 2017 New Zealand participated in a test which scores 10-year-olds on their reading ability, a test in which 50 countries participated, the results showed about 27 percent of New Zealand children did not meet the "intermediate benchmark" for reading compared to an international median figure of 18 percent.

Maybe your child will be an exception to the current trend. Maybe they will have the well within to transcend what is happening all around them. But it’s a bit of a crapshoot, and I don’t know many parents willing to gamble with their children’s lives. Beyond that, are your children—your well-adjusted ones whose achievements shine and are recognised by their teachers and peers—are they being guided to include the children who don’t share in that golden light? Are they taught to be KIND? Not just by you but by all of the adults in their school? Is it modelled to them every day that every life deserves to be recognised and honoured? That every mode of learning “fits”? This is the standard to which we need to hold our schools. It has to come from their leadership. It has to come from the very moments a teacher is trained in their craft, and it has to be sustained until a child crosses the threshold into their post-secondary life.

So, it’s pie in the sky kind of stuff, for sure. But why can’t we dream big? These are our children’s lives we’re talking about. And it’s not only Māori and Pasifika whānau who are kept in these cycles of un-education; it’s all of our whānau struggling with poverty. Yes, that’s the line. It happens to match a lot of cultural lines, as well, and that’s not unique to New Zealand. It’s across the board in colonised countries. That’s what’s meant by “System”, by the way.

Confession time: when I was a young, new teacher, fresh out of uni, I counselled the parents of a severely dyslexic student of mine to try a school for learners with challenges like his (even though it would require sending him away to boarding school; there was no such specialised school on our island). It just seemed like his needs were too great for me to handle. They went beyond my training at the time. Luckily for him, his parents dismissed my recommendation. His parents were themselves highly educated. They knew that education was the key to open pathways that would allow him to earn the life he hoped to have one day. They had money, so they hired tutors and supported his learning that way. He muddled through my class and many, many others on his way to completing his secondary education. That kid went on to become a Princeton Law School graduate.

And yes, privilege is a real thing. I would never shame that family. I love them. But if people like them are not aware of the difference between their situation and that of a kid who has grown up hungry, then they are blind to the System that people say keeps them down. It’s not the “Māori card” to say that that kid whose ancestors lost thousands of acres of land over the slow course of treaty-violating history and whose parents now squat in an abandoned house on the edge of town is set up to struggle in school; it’s the truth.

Teachers in New Zealand face the same challenges to delivering services that I did in California or in Colorado. It’s the same everywhere I’ve been. I don’t have the solution. I’m afraid it lies in the sector of finance, and that’s just not my forte. But I know this: given the autonomy to develop creative, relevant, meaningful curriculum for youth and given the tools with which to deliver it (books, school supplies, a building that is conducive to learning, and a manageable number of students), there is no limit to what a well trained teacher can do for our young people—including fostering a healthy, safe, and inclusive environment where bullying is just not a thing. I’ve seen it done.

And I also know this: it’s not right to counsel (or kick) kids out of school because they struggle. If they are not shamed and dismissed for their struggles, they won’t want to flee. Learning stuff is fun! School should be a place where kids feel comfortable, in their element, surrounded by people who care about them, youth and adults alike. So how do we stop marginalising those whose learning modalities don’t fit the mainstream? Those whose homes have left them a little broken, a little tentative? How do we stop making kids feel small for having intelligences that aren’t easily demonstrated in the classroom space? There’s got to be a way. We ask scientists to keep trying to find a cure for cancer. It seems impossible, but with support and funding, we believe it can be done. Our Systems are choking the life out of people. I see it every day in the youth that I serve. And I see it in their caregivers. Kids need to be given a chance, and not just the ones who are lucky enough to be born to parents who haven’t been traumatised by their educational experiences or who, against all odds, have come to understand the secret potency of learning.

I’m also not saying there’s anything wrong with a youth choosing the path of a brick and block layer or that of a builder. But give them the opportunity to gain the tools to own their own business. To be a leader in their industry. To run the show if they want to…and to earn the pay check that might break the cycles of poverty that keep so many of our whānau from exceeding the expectations set by a System that hurts us all. And maybe, just maybe, don’t give them the opportunity to opt out so young. In a perfect world, maybe they wouldn’t want to. Do you know how many kids I’ve taught who discovered that they were artists or philosophers or poets in those last two years before California law said they could quit (at 18) if they wanted to?

This is not to suggest that we should, in New Zealand, force kids to stay in mainstream schools until they are 18. Certainly not in mainstream schools as they look today. And, in fact, New Zealand has come up with a lot of viable options for youth who choose to leave school. It’s probably as good as it gets within this paradigm. But what if our mainstream schools looked different? What if teachers weren’t overworked and underpaid, and they were encouraged to find a way to MAKE school a positive place for learning, even for those whose learning styles and backgrounds don’t immediately lend themselves to success in traditional classroom assessment? We don’t have to ditch the activity and training centres…just introduce them later. Maybe 18 is the magic number. Maybe it’s not. But one day into a child’s sixteenth year of life seems awfully early to me.

Education doesn’t just give us literacy and numeracy. It gives us a new way to see ourselves. As capable of moving in our world with confidence and of communicating effectively with those around us. For many, it means understanding that we can make it…without resorting to crime. It gives us the means to lift ourselves out of limiting financial situations and dead end paths. It shows us what we can do. And it fosters in us a sense of our community and our own role within it.

We can do better than the System we’ve inherited by our colonising (and colonised) ancestors. It’s time we recognised how damaging it is for all of us, not just those suffering from a lack but also those who appear to benefit from the inequities. When all our people are not given the opportunity to excel, we all suffer. I’m not advocating more programmes for disadvantaged youth and their whānau. I’m saying the System itself needs revising, and what better place to start than with schools that are committed to delivering equitable, free, inclusive education for all?

Speaking of Joy…

So I’ve had the last two weeks off of work…I go back to school tomorrow. School holidays happen for two weeks each term here in New Zealand, so that means as soon as the pressure is built up to the point where you feel truly frazzled, you get a couple of weeks’ reprieve to reset and rejuvenate. It’s pretty rad. This time I was committed to cultivating joy. I didn’t have any obligations, except play practice, which is three times a week, but that’s totally fun. I picked it, you know? Plus, I have a minor character to play (though all characters are on stage for pretty much the whole of this one act play by Bertolt Brecht). It’s been a great first-time-acting kind of role, and I’m super excited about our upcoming shows. I figure, I’m 49 years old for a couple more months…might as well challenge myself and farewell my forties with a bang!

It’s also been beautiful weather. While most of my summer holidays were gray and a bit chilly, there have been mostly bluebird days this time. It feels a lot like October in Santa Cruz, where the tourists are gone and all that remains are glorious, warm days with a hint of autumn in the air. For these two weeks, I have spent as many hours as I could in the ocean. Learning to wing foil with Dwaine (he has the fantasy that we’ll do it side by side one day, so I try, but I haven’t gotten up on foil yet) and surfing with my sons. Yesterday was a big one. Rakai, his partner Angelina, his buddy Tom, and I piled into Rakai’s car and headed out to a semi-secret surf spot known both for its peeling, hollow waves, a little bit heavier than many of the breaks in Dunedin, and for its healthy population of territorial sea lions.

To start, it’s an arduous trek down a very steep (like nearly vertical) hill from the place you leave your car. This trek involves climbing under or over several electric fences, rambling through a large grove of macrocarpa tress, slipping and sliding down grassy, muddy, and sandy slopes, all with a view that pretty much takes your breath away and is punctuated by finally emerging at the top of a small rise that brings into view the swell lines roping into the aquamarine cove. Of course my Olympic athlete son, his collegiate athlete girlfriend, and their similarly freakishly fit friend wanted to run all the way down. By the time we hit the long grasses at the edge of the beach, my legs were like jelly. The whole way down I kept thinking, “I’m too old for this.” I was enjoying it, yes, but also wondering if at some point my legs might give out. I was also feeling a little flattered that none of my three companions ever considered that this might be a bit much for me. The last bit is a paddle across a fairly swiftly moving river to reach the actual beach. By this time the cool water felt lovely, and we paddled along in silence, taking in the million dazzling shades of blue and green that comprised the scene.

The session was divine. Smaller than we thought it would be, but still fun, and as we surfed, the fog and rain that had enveloped us on our way down lifted away and left us basking in the golden light of the day. The cove felt like a cradle, a magical mist sort of hovering in pockets, and the sunshine glistening over everything like a promise. The water itself was an aquamarine that is uniquely Aotearoa. The colour reminds me a little of the Rhone River in Switzerland with its milky blue-green that is other-worldly to say the least. And then our sea lion arrived. At first we weren’t alarmed. We were well versed in how to handle these young, zealous sea lions. Don’t make eye contact with them—they’re like dogs. If you engage them, they’ll feel encouraged and continue to approach you. Don’t talk to them or say anything. Keep doing your thing—paddle into position and take your waves. Try not to flinch if they come near.

Angelina was the first to see it. She made a little yelping noise and then clapped her hand over her mouth, eyes wide above her hand, and we knew we had company. This was a fairly young sea lion but by no means small. It started by swimming all around us—fast, coming quite near each of us, surfacing and breaching the water at intervals. We could see it clearly as it swam beneath us, coming quite close. It was difficult to focus on the waves with such a large animal showing such keen interest in us. With each pass it was getting closer and closer to us, until finally it was actually hitting our feet and surfacing within arm’s reach of us. When it surfaced right next to me with its mouth wide open and flapping its fins as if it would fight me, I decided it was perhaps less well-intentioned than I had thought. “Come closer to us, Mama,” Rakai said from the little huddle that was him, Angelina, and Tom. I quickly paddled into their group, but the proximity did not stop the sea lion from becoming even more aggressive. At this point, it made a beeline for Tom and lunged out of the water to mouth the nose of his board.

“Okay, that’s it,” I said.

“Yeah, time to go,” Rakai agreed, and we all started paddling toward shore.

“Just everybody catch this wave on your belly,” I said, as we all paddled in a cluster, the sea lion hot on Rakai and Angelina’s trail. It was alternately diving into the tangle of their leashes and then seeming to attempt to climb up onto Angelina’s feet, all with its mouth wide open. Somehow only Rakai caught the wave fully; I was next behind him, and then Angelina and Tom were well back, having just missed it. The sea lion stayed with Rakai, riding the wave alongside him. When Rakai stood in the shallows, it challenged him, lunging at him with this teeth bared. The rest of us kept paddling to come up beside them, and Rakai lifted his board into the air to place it between him and the aggro sea lion. Once all of us were together, we began struggling through the shallows, which are expansive in this spot, because of the river mouth. With the sea lion chasing us, our fast walk became a sprint, and I manoeuvred (to what end I have no idea) to place myself between Angelina and the sea lion as we ran. With my legs burning, completely winded, it occurred to me again, “I’m nearly 50 years old…what if I just can’t anymore? What if I stop?”

Just as I was beginning to feel like I couldn’t do it anymore, another sea lion, this one much bigger, appeared out of nowhere, just off to my left. “Fuck!” My voice full of breath. In my heart I think I thought it was the end. I mean, I don’t know what I really thought would happen. To be mauled to death by two enormous sea lions is improbable. And yet the advance of the original sea lion with its mouth wide open, the water swelling like a wave around what I can only describe as its shoulders as it propelled itself after us at great speed, made it seem more than likely. And then it all stopped. Immediately. As if someone had flipped a switch, when the sea lions came into contact with one another, they forgot us instantly. It was like we weren’t even there anymore. I thought of the dog Doug in the movie Up. “Squirrel!”

Just like that, we could stop our mad sprint and catch our breath, though of course we kept going. When we had finally reached the shore, we all looked back and could see the two of those magnificent, slick beasts frolicking and riding the waves that were beginning to shape up beautifully. The tide was changing, and we knew that the surf was just going to get better and better, but none of us had the heart to face those sea lions again.Wistfully we bid farewell to a gorgeous morning and to a delicious-looking lineup.

I’d like to say that it ended there, but no. These three charged up that hill so fast I thought I would die. I was huffing and puffing behind them, marvelling at their ability to make this trek while maintaining a conversation. I could barely breathe! My legs felt like they were full of the sand that slipped beneath my feet as I climbed in my 5 millimetre wetsuit, and I wondered again what would happen if I just stopped. I’m telling you, it was too much. I feel quite fit, really…especially for a woman of my age. But this day, I wondered if I might simply collapse and kind of wished I could.

Eventually we made it to the top. I’m guessing my scramble beneath the last electric fence was significantly less graceful this time around, but nobody said anything as they waited and watched. Back in the car I drank almost an entire litre of water at one go, and I’d never been so happy to be back in my clothes and sitting inside of Rakai’s car. I doled out the little snacks I had thought to pack—oaty cake bars and trail mix with chocolate—and we were happy. The drive back was epic, our little car slinking along the ridge of the Otago Peninsula and dropping down onto the harbour side with the sun warming our faces and drying the rain-soaked land. I had a coffee date with a paddling friend still ahead of me, plus picking up Taiaroa from work, making a meal for my family, and then evening play practice. Life felt perfect. Full of joy.

I have a house full of loved ones. There is joy here. And light. I grow old, a little bit at a time, and it is good. I keep surfing and playing and pushing my limits because I can. And I keep being the mother of these boys who fill my cup to overflowing. Seeing them happy…growing and living and loving—it makes me happier than I could ever have imagined I could be. And Dwaine. My rock. I am unspeakably grateful.

I gush, I know. But I really am grateful. Not only for all of these blessings but also for the wherewithal to turn the rest off for a bit. It’s out there, floating on the airwaves and the Internet. The truth of the world right now. The suffering. But I am allowed to retreat from it sometimes and just be. It is a privilege, I know, but I can give myself over to it. Not forever but for now. For my mental health. And for my loved ones. There is a way to cultivate joy even in these times. It has to do with nature and with family. It has to do with giving oneself permission, letting go of guilt, which actually serves no purpose at all. It has to do with light.

How to Joy

Photo by @dtait_photography

If you’re like me, you feel like you’re swimming in an emotional soup, being lifted on crests of golden broth, then borne down again, snagged on some indistinct leafy green. It’s confusing and strange, and it has me on the verge of tears most days. Yesterday my family (me, my husband Dwaine, our two grown sons, and our older son’s partner) were out on the water, taking turns playing with Dwaine’s new toy: a wing foil setup. We walked down from our home and set off from the boathouse at the bottom of our road. Those of us not foiling (or rather boarding—we’re still learning how to get up on the foil) could walk along the harbour and watch, calling out to the rider little encouragements and corrections. The sun was warm on our faces, though the season has turned to autumn and the temperatures are dropping. The light on the water was alive and glittering, and I noticed that the hills rising above the harbour, which is nestled between the mainland and peninsula, give the sky the shape of a giant god’s eye.

Standing there in my wetsuit on the path next to the water, dripping wet but warm from my efforts, I couldn’t help but feel humbled and grateful. It’s hard to believe we made it here sometimes—all of us. Where life feels kind of normal, and we are relatively free to move and enjoy our environs. The feeling I had yesterday can only be described as utter contentment. But there is also a very intense winding of my inner coils. A spring-like dis-ease that is nearly imperceptible except that it manifests itself in my body. The simultaneity of these conflicting sensations may be the most disconcerting part.

I have of late returned to an old habit of tension where I bite on the sides of my tongue. It’s kind of disgusting really and totally neurotic. It’s obsessive and subconscious, and even as I notice I’m doing it and attempt to relax my jaw and take a deep breath, it begins again. I cast about, looking for the source of this anxiety, but it’s buried so deeply that I can’t at first discern it. On the surface of my own life, there is calm. Peacefulness even. A happy recognition that at least in this moment, all is well. So what is causing me to feel like I might actually implode?

On Sunday I had a Zoom meet-up with three of my dearest friends in the world. We are spread across the globe in New Zealand, Vermont, Scotland, and Hawaii. These women, I have decided, must be a part of my soul family, because the way we support each other is like that—epic and total in each of our lives. We span over 30 years in age, and ethnically, we nearly cover the gamut. Our shared experience of working in a little school in the Swiss Alps many years ago links us; there we began a meditation circle…the four of us met every Tuesday evening for an hour, sometimes two. It was a delicious time of learning and growing into our spiritual selves, and we have nurtured those selves and each other for these many years since. Again after that Zoom meeting, I felt awash in gratitude and unafraid about what comes next, even though there are many unknowns. So why can’t I just be in that? Exist in the space where it feels like love wraps around me and where the decisions I have made buoy me up, along with my whānau?

Dwaine says I should cut out the social media. It is there that I am apprised daily of each new case where an unarmed African American man/woman/child is shot and killed by a police officer in the U.S. It is there where the reality-check I used to share with my U.S. History students is playing out with alarming accuracy. I used to teach in a wealthy prep school in the High Rockies, a little pocket of American privilege where whiteness is the norm and teachers are appreciated but treated like beloved house servants more than anything else. There I would teach about how America has never been “great” if you were a woman or a minority, and certainly not if you were poor. And I would teach about the bubbling morass of racial tension that is brewing beyond the lovely vistas of the “American dream” narrative. I remember saying, before Trump was elected, that I couldn’t imagine what it might be that could tip the scales, but that I believed civil war was not out of the question. The students looked at me like I was crazy. Wild brown lady teaching liberal craziness to the wrong crowd. And then it began…

Of course it didn’t begin with Trump. It was always there. What I mean is the unraveling. That’s what began. The unraveling of the tight corset that was containing America’s nasty rolls of elitist, classist, racist, xenophobic sentiment. That it was predictable is of no comfort. My mom and dad live there. My brother and his beautiful family. Dwaine’s family and so many of our friends. The metaphor for us emigrating can’t be jumping a sinking ship, because I can’t have that ship sinking and quite frankly, neither can the rest of the world. For all its contradictions, the U.S. is a kind of rock upon which we depend. Economically. Politically. Even socially. The world can handle a hiccup. One ridiculous president in a long line of contradictory and questionable but at least sensible-sounding ones. But America unraveling? Its seams coming undone and letting spill its unruly corpus of lies and corruption and, quite frankly, hate? We don’t know what to do with that.

I don’t know what to do with that. It’s not like I thought it would truly right itself…not in my lifetime. I mean, I left after all. And how can I even consider just shutting it out? Turning a blind eye? What do I owe my self? And what do I owe the world? I always come back to the fact that I am, in every legitimate sense of the word, serving my community. The one in which I live now and which has embraced me with kindness. Here in New Zealand, I give myself every day to youth who have been abandoned by almost everyone; I teach them, though they don’t and can’t begin to see the value of what I am offering them. They are not shy about expressing this either. But you all know about this.

My resolve is to just keep doing the best that I can because it is all I have and therefore enough. I haven’t abandoned that belief. But it doesn’t always convince the emotional body. I can feel even in my physical body that not all of my layers are talking to each other. While I can assess and make sense of things on an intellectual level, there are still my emotional self, my physical body, to convince. And I write this one anticipating the closure, a crescendo that might be reached as has happened in so many of my blog posts. They just arrive, and I feel a sense of relief as, I know, my readers do. Yes, it is all worthwhile. There is meaning here, even if I have to create it myself. We’re going to be okay.

As I sift through it all, there is, first and foremost, the leaving. The simple fact that I have left America for good. Not that I’ll never go back there, but I will never live there again. And for that I must turn to James Baldwin, whose discourse often offers up the answers to my questions. Here is what he says on the subject: “I think that it is a spiritual disaster to pretend that one doesn’t love one’s country. You may disapprove of it, you may be forced to leave it, you may live your whole life as a battle, yet I don’t think you can escape it… If you try to pretend you don’t see the immediate reality that formed you I think you’ll go blind.”

Yes, that’s a truth that calms the swishing a bit; I throw an arm up over the top of a floating crust of bread and consider. I have chosen to live apart from my roots. That is a very straightforward fact. I’m able to draw in a stuttering breath. Even to say it has a calming effect. I do love America. It is where my roots are. Leaving doesn’t negate that, nor does it mean I won’t continue to struggle with the ways America disappoints me. Okay. Okay. I can be here, where my heart and my children have chosen to be, and I can love the place and people that grew me. These are not mutually exclusive sentiments.

I can keep writing and I can keep living. There is guilt, yes. But there was also guilt when I was living in California. Or Colorado or Vermont. And that guilt was even more absurd, because it grew out of something that was completely arbitrary: the fact that I was not and never would be a black man or woman. Straight up. I typically never feared the cops. I didn’t anticipate, upon being pulled over, being abused or even murdered. That’s not to say it couldn’t happen. But whether or not my sense of safety was reflective of the reality, it did exist. And I functioned according to it. And yes, that is privilege. I suppose it is impossible to escape the guilt completely.

E.M. Forster once said, “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” I quote him often because the question is so resonant, and I will sometimes add, “Indeed, and how do I know what I feel until I see what I say?” Admittedly, I am hoping for an answer as I type. I know what my feeling looks like: my face screwed up as I bite on the side of my tongue (very unattractive), tears, deer-in-headlights stillness. What I don’t know is how to define it. I suspect it has to do with the leaving. And with the uncertainty of my older son’s situation (loving a California girl who is currently on a 6-month visa to New Zealand). The way Covid seems to have forever altered the global landscape and our pathways along it. How as each problem is confronted a new one arises. People who refuse to take the vaccine (how can I be sure they’re wrong?), difficulties and delays in rolling out vaccinations, heightened racial tensions and greater socio-economic disparities. Yeah, as I type these things, my heart in my chest contracts. There it is again. I can’t deny it.

And I also can’t watch any more body-cam footage of people dying. There’s got to be a middle ground between hiding your head in the sand and over-exposing yourself to content that does nothing but send your heart skittering off its pace. Sit down and write, Kim. Sending your words and your truth into the world can be done from anywhere. And keep teaching those whom love has abandoned. Those kids need you. This is the injunction I breathe into my own living. But it can be tailored to just about anyone’s life. Keep making beautiful cakes that light up people’s special occasions and make them smile. Keep taking soil samples for study in the lab, so that we can better understand the impact of our practices on the earth and its water. Keep designing buildings for people to live in and in which they may conduct their businesses. Keep selling your vegetables at the farmers market, so that the people of your town can be nourished by the food you grow. Keep doing stand-up, so that the people will see the humour in what breaks them. So that we can all laugh and stay alive through the hurting.

What I’ve found is that one of the most important things to guard in this life is joy. It will not remove the grief. Of course it won’t. But there is always someone grieving while another is celebrating. There is always someone thanking god for a small miracle, while another is lamenting a loss. Thank goodness. That is what life is like. Like in Bruegel’s painting of The Fall of Icarus, which has already been written about more beautifully than I will ever write anything, by W.H. Auden himself (in his poem “Musee Des Beaux Arts”). Auden said, “About suffering they were never wrong, / The old Masters: how well they understood / Its human position: how it takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.” In Bruegel’s painting, a scene is presented—a farmer plodding along, plowing his field behind a horse; a tall ship on the sea, sails full of air; a village shimmering in the distance. And there, almost ‘out of frame”: a pair of white legs disappearing into the ocean, the last glimpse of Icarus, having tumbled from the sky with his homemade wings aflame.

I can’t live all of the stories at once. And I certainly can’t suffer for them all. That would be the end of me (and my tongue). I am not a lawmaker, but I can push for change in my writing. Perhaps the lawmakers will heed the call of the artists and historians to shift policy. I can also contribute to the collective joy that must exist in the world if we are all to stay afloat on this chaotic bisque. If my actions are contributing to the general joy and not detracting from it, then I’m going to call it good. That is my best, and I give it willingly. What is your best? It’s not a challenge. I’m certainly in no position to challenge anyone. It’s an invitation…to realise what you can do (instead of fighting, fleeing, or freezing, as is our wont in situations this frightening). In the meantime, I’m leaving social media for a bit. I will still post the links to my blogposts, because I know that’s where most of my readers come from. But no more scrolling. My heart is too heavy. My inner springs wound up too tight.

May we find the ways to create and spread joy. May we know joy in our own lives. And may we protect the joy of others with our love, our conviction, and most of all, our actions.

Wing foiling. This isn’t one of us (haha), but here it is in case you were wondering. : )

More Than a Narrative

Buck Nin, Banner Protest, 1977, Acrylic on board, 1335 x 1221mm.

Recently an article was published in the local newspaper. Just an essay in the Opinion section written by, from what I can gather, a kind of local celebrity among the reading crowd. I had never picked up a physical copy of that paper before, just happened to see it on the newsstand as I was checking out with my groceries. I don’t know what possessed me to toss the paper onto the pile of fresh produce and ground coffee there on the conveyor belt, but I did.

Later that evening, I perused the paper. Again, just curious, I guess. It had been so long since I held a newspaper in hand, so habituated have I become to getting my news online. When I got to the Opinion section, I sort of couldn’t believe my eyes. The article was headlined like this: “‘Colonisation’ Narrative Dangerous for New Zealand”…with the word colonisation in single quotation marks, just like that. I felt that it was likely this writer, a Dr. Philip Temple, felt like his opinion would be received well in this community, and perhaps it was. I also decided that someone should respond. To their credit, the Otago Daily Times ran my essay a day after I submitted it. All opinions matter, right? Here’s what I said:

Kia ora koutou katoa. I must start with an admission: I am not Māori, nor even a New Zealand Pakeha. I am the partner of a Ngati Porou/Scottish man and am mostly just grateful that I have been received in Aotearoa during such a turbulent time for the world. Of mixed ancestry myself, I too carry the blood of the colonised, along with that of the coloniser. Though it may sound harsh to say it like that, there is no avoiding the truth of it. And honestly, language does matter.

  Colonisation is a fact. And it doesn’t only refer to the moment of contact between a colonising entity and the indigenous population. There is no “sweet spot” in that process, because it is an ongoing phenomenon. The “colonisation narrative” refers to a much larger sort of matrix that undeniably permeates the entire structure of society and is derived from a history of colonising acts...ones that typically attempt to mute, if not eradicate, the indigenous population because it seems to threaten the expansion of the colonising population’s objectives. It refers to continuously introduced legislation with euphemistic names like the Māori Representation Act (1867), the Māori Affairs Act (1953) and the Treaty of Waitangi (Removal of Conflict of Interest) Amendment Bill (2007).  All of this legislation has effectively diminished Māori autonomy and freedom to own and manage their land the way they choose, as well as limited the Māori voice in New Zealand government. In the space of time between 1840 and 1975, Māori-owned land was reduced from 66,400,000 acres to a mere 3,000,000.

  People don’t know about these things. It’s not their fault. The current effort of the Ministry of Education to revamp the national History curriculum in public schools is a reflection of their acknowledgement that denying such truths of one’s history is (at best) undesirable. It represents an effort to make reparation for the ways that such omissions have, not necessarily intentionally, imposed and reinforced barriers to Māori progress. The call for decolonisation then is not, as this dismissive article says, “a lazy way of throwing rocks at Pakeha or ‘Western’ culture” but rather an emphatic plea for the recognition of the inequity that exists as a result of a history of colonising acts.

  The fact is that colonisation itself is dangerous, not the perpetuation of its narrative. Colonisation violates all parties, the members of the colonising culture included. Kudos to the New Zealand Ministry of Education for taking a step in the direction of addressing these omissions with a revised History curriculum. Again, the effort itself supports the argument that colonisation is an issue that exists and must be examined. Not reacted to in a violent way (as in the perhaps misguided efforts of the single Māori activist group that in their desperation burned down the Rangiatea Church at Otaki 26 years ago) but addressed in a way that offers a corrective experience in shaping not just the view of the Māori people but of their relationship to the tauiwi. The word tauiwi is used to distinguish the group of New Zealand tangata who do not come from and have never identified with a Māori tribe. I do believe one would be hard pressed to find anyone of European descent who identifies with their own tribe, so far removed are they from the period of their tribal existence. But if one did, I do believe every Māori I know would be interested and happy to acknowledge that tribe. Tribal affiliation is at the heart of whanaungatanga. I have seen this in the interest and respect paid to me and my own First Nations affiliation.

  To appeal to the readers of the ODT with the fact that “Pakeha have whakapapa too” is almost akin to responding to the rally cry that “Black Lives Matter” with the statement that “All Lives Matter.” They do. It’s true. But all lives are not under fire. All lives are not being violated and brutalised by the police force in the United States. Black lives are. The statement that “Black Lives Matter” does not preclude the “mattering” of other lives. And to say that Māori lives, Māori concerns, must be honoured (say when we look at the statistics around the disproportionate number of Māori and Pacific Islander inmates in New Zealand prisons or the shockingly disproportionate number of Māori and Pacific Islander people living in poverty and losing their youth to suicide) is not to suggest that Pakeha lives and concerns shouldn’t. It just means that Māori concerns should not be ignored and swept into the shadow of the concerns of the overculture, as they have been too often and for too long.

  I must agree with Dr. Temple when he states that “We need to celebrate all our whakapapa, all of the values and cultures that form this special nation.” Nothing could be truer. But this in no way negates the importance of acknowledging that colonisation has played, and continues to play, a huge role in shaping this nation, as it has so many nations around the globe. “Kaua e rangiruatia te ha o te hoe e kore to tatou waka e u ki uta.” Indeed, “Do not lift the paddle out of unison or our waka will never reach the shore.” We just need to make sure that everyone’s got a paddle.

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE ARTICLE AS IT APPEARS IN THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES.

Enough

There’s a lot going on right now. For all of us. For the world, for individual countries, for families, and for each individual human. It’s just been a lot, you know? To process it all. And then to find ourselves swirling around in this wild recovery/re-entry into living. But for all that transformation, it’s amid a great deal of political turmoil. And violence. On the South island of New Zealand, I feel like people don’t fully get it about Covid. They locked down for six weeks and then things sort of went back to normal. Like kind of quickly. I remember arriving last September and being in the period of still adjusting to being able to walk down the street like normal, shake the hands of people I met, teach mask free, and enter/hang out in indoor spaces with strangers without utter trepidation. At that time I heard a woman in the bank say something about “when all this Covid nonsense ends.”

I suppose she was referring to the fact that there were still hand sanitiser stations in every business, still signs with QR codes encouraging people to sign in to each place they visited in order to track potential outbreaks. Maybe she was talking about the tape still on the floor to encourage social distancing, or the ban on gatherings over, I think it was, 100 at that time; that restriction was reinstated for a couple of weeks in September because of a handful of community cases in Auckland after a sustained period of not even one. I’m sure she thought it was all a bit excessive. All that really struck me in that moment was the relativity of everything. Like yeah, this was some ‘nonsense’ to her. Covid felt far away. She probably didn’t (and maybe never will if we’re all lucky) know anyone who had even had Covid, let alone who died from it. With only 26 deaths in the entire country, only two in the Otago region, it probably just felt like a blip on her radar. A very small one.

For me (and perhaps for the 60,000 or so others who had entered the country since the borders closed in April—mind you, more than double that number had left during that time), it was different. I had been locked down in California for about four months when I flew to New Zealand. I was well and truly radicalised to the ways of the mask (and the social distancing and the hiding away from everything and everyone). I had watched (from a distance) in terror as the Covid cases and deaths in Italy rose well beyond the capacity of its healthcare system. I then watched the same thing happen in New York City (also from a distance). I feared it was only a matter of time before my own hometown was inundated with Covid-19 cases and we too were having to store the bodies of our deceased in refrigerator containers lined up in empty lots. I had no reason to believe otherwise. Our flight to Auckland was cancelled twice in the interim between booking and boarding; one of those times was after I had completed our within-twenty-four-hours-of-departure check-in. We found out about that one standing at the United counter in the San Francisco airport, all of our earthly possessions in slightly overweight suitcases and duffels sprawled around our feet and the keys to our surrendered rental home securely lodged with our former landlord.

In April of 2020, my nuclear family was separated on two different continents, and we were torn: do we bring our younger son back from New Zealand where they seem to be managing the virus better than almost any other country in the world and risk him having to quit university because he can’t get back into the country? Or, we reasoned, was it time for our family to reunite in New Zealand, the country of my husband’s birth, where we would be likely to escape a long, drawn out battle to manage not just the virus but the restive, resistant, and politically polarised people of America? Notice I don’t even mention the option of being separated from our baby for an indeterminate amount of time while the world sorted the pandemic. It just wasn’t even an option. And then there was the president of the United States. I mean, do I really even have to say it? There was a man in charge of the country who not only fell short of embodying our own moral values but whose every word and every action was like acid thrown on the face of my moral compass. It wasn’t an easy choice because of our extended families and friends still residing in the U.S., but every other consideration was a no brainer.

So the lady in the bank. Honestly, I was too grateful to be in a place where people are so sheltered from the ravages of Covid-19 and saying shit like this to be annoyed by her in any way. I had been received here with kindness and generosity. I had sought refuge, and I had been allowed, with my New Zealand citizen husband and older son, to enter the country. My brother-in-law had housed us until we could get on our feet and find our bearings. I remember feeling terrified that somehow I would’t make it onto the plane, or that I’d be turned away at the border. I felt this all the way until we had arrived in our managed isolation hotel for our mandatory 14-day stay. Never have I been so happy to be told I couldn’t go anywhere or do anything (okay, the last time that happened I was 16, but you get the picture). We came with clothes and shoes, important documents and keepsakes, photos, my grandmother’s china, and my mother-in-law’s quilts. That was it. And the relief upon getting here with even those few things was tremendous.

Since then I have watched with wide eyes the incredible changes taking place in the U.S. and across the globe. The sudden and immediate fall of Donald Trump from ‘grace’ with almost everyone I know who was still holding out in support of him. The shift of power and the inconceivable attack on the U.S. Capitol, which I watched live on my computer, mouth agape, for several solid hours. The murder of George Floyd and now the trial of his killer (I hold my breath even as I type this). The thinly veiled Jim Crow activity and new legislation, not just in the South. The unabashedly racist and seemingly hateful legislative activities in France. The horrors of second and third waves of Covid-19 with its new variants…in Europe, in Central and South America and now, in the U.S. where the waves seem to have merged into a single set: talk of a fourth. Outrageous and violent suppression of protesters in Myanmar. Horrific attacks against elderly Chinese in the U.S.—scrolling through my Instagram feed yesterday I stumbled unexpectedly upon security footage of a racially motivated attack on a 65-year old Asian woman near Times Square. It happened so fast; suddenly I was seeing it with my own eyes. I nearly vomited, my reaction was that violent. And then I just felt despondent. Do I even talk about the attack on the officers at the Capitol yesterday?

But I also see good. I see a kind of resilience I have not seen before…in people close to me and in ones I’ve never even met. And I see a kind of joy that is also new. I see my friends reuniting with their parents and grandparents after an entire year of separation, because they are all, at last, vaccinated. I see children returning to school, happier than they’ve ever been to do so. I see friends exploring new opportunities and emerging from long-held patterns that do not serve them…patterns held, in some cases, much longer than the year that Covid has held them hostage. I see people having hope for the first time in many moons, and I see companies and organisations uniting to oppose racist and bigoted legislation being proposed and passed in many American states. I see the galvanisation of many people from many different sectors in the name of justice…all of them fighting against what could easily consume us. Immolate. I see teachers rejoicing in the progress made by pupils who persevered and now approach summer with all its promises. I see people coming together and supporting one another in ways they never have. I see light.

But I don’t know where we go from here. It seems we are still very much hanging in the balance. Will the testimony of a police chief mean sanction to declare guilty one of the people who have for so long been shielded from accountability while they perpetrated crimes against humanity? Yeah, I said that. And I don’t say it lightly. There is no other way to describe abusing, indeed killing, those whom you are sworn to protect and serve. It’s like child abuse. Only in the family of humanity and with repercussions that extend far beyond a single generational bloodline. Will there be justice for George Floyd and his family? For Americans—all of them, that is: every colour, every persuasion, every political alignment? All are violated when such violence and betrayal are tolerated, even the perpetrators. And I’m truly afraid of what might happen if the verdict comes back as “innocent.”

So I am here at the bottom of the world. Or the top, right? Who made it the bottom anyway? Not God. But that’s a question for another post. I am here and I have my ear to the earth, like so many others in these delicate moments. 550 civilians dead in Myanmar in the past two months. 213 people shot to death by police in the U.S. in the first three months of 2021. 3,800 racist incidents in the U.S., mostly against women, in the past year. And the mass shooters of America are back at it: 126 mass shootings already this year. There is a lot of work to be done. And I pray. My prayer is a bit unconventional, but prayer is what it amounts to. And also, I keep doing what I do to make the world better. We all do these things in different ways. I’m pretty sure that teaching kids in the New Zealand equivalent of juvenile hall is not going to help anyone in Myanmar. It won’t affect the justice system in the U.S. And it certainly won’t shield my Asian-American friends from the hatred of their racist and cowardly neighbours. But it’s what I do. It’s where I am. I am also still raising my sons, even though they are pretty well grown. And so many of you are too. Many of yours are little. You are teaching them not to hate. Teaching them to share and to be indignant when something unjust happens. Not just to be indignant but to speak up. To act. In the name of humanity.

There is injustice here, where I live. And there is injustice, in varying degrees, everywhere. I don’t have to be in the spotlight in my fight to know that I am affecting the collective push for more love and less hate in the world. I am loving up those who have broken the law. I am showing kindness to youth who have been so hurt by others as to want to hurt someone else or even themselves. I am teaching them that knowledge is power (shoutout to Schoolhouse Rock). I am giving what I can where I am, and I am writing these little missives. Sending them out into the world, hoping they reach someone who wants them. Needs them in some way. That is all. We are all doing the best that we can. I really believe that. In these trying times, we may very well be faced with some difficult choices. But Don Juan Castaneda once wrote that Yacqui wisdom tells us this: a warrior does not regret. S/he acts. Then s/he looks around and sees where the action has landed her. If s/he doesn’t like it—if it doesn’t make her proud and also happy—then s/he forms a new action to land her in a new place. Full stop. Regret about the previous action is a useless sentiment. I am who I am, and I do what I do. I care about all of it. And I can’t fix it. I like where I have landed, and I believe it is making a difference in the world. It is changing lives. They are few, but I would do this work for even one of them.

I guess I write this because if you are like me, you feel guilty. In one way or another you think you should be doing more. Let me tell you this. You will know when it is time to do more. And if it is in your heart to do it, and you can do it without compromising the very important work you are already engaged in (for many, that is raising a family of strong, compassionate, generous humans), you will. You will use your gifts, your own strengths, to fight for the things that matter. Many fights are small. But they add up. Would I feel like I was making a bigger difference if I were a photojournalist exposing the atrocities in Myanmar right now? Maybe. If I were fighting the injustices against minorities in the American legal system? Sure I would. But I am not trained for either of these things. I have words, which I use. I am an educator, and I show up every day for kids no one shows up for. Like to spend time with them and share with them and tolerate the expressions of their woundedness, though they sometimes hurt me. And I do my best. It is enough. I am enough.

This is certainly an affirmation for myself. How could it not be? But it is also my encouragement to you. All of you. Yes, I do believe there are more than ten people reading these blog posts these days. Not a ton, but enough to say “all of you.” And besides, one of you is enough for me to want to extol the virtues of the work we do. Let us be vigilant. Let us know our worth. Let us send our perfect intention into the ether as we do our work each day. Whether that is to teach or to test soil or to practice law or to create art or... Let us know the value of our loving acts. Of our brave acts. And let us keep fighting, in all the ways that we do, for a world that is better and kinder than it is today.

Rise

“Honour the Dead, Fight for the living, Honour the Living, Fight for the Dead” by Angela Sterritt. 3.5ft x 4.5ft. Acrylic on canvas.

Last weekend I attended a one-day workshop about the Treaty of Waitangi, where I cried in front of ten of my colleagues. It’s not like I didn’t know. Of course I knew. What I think it was? I think it was having the history of my new home laid over the history of my old home in a way that illuminated (again) the parallels not just between the two stories but among all the stories of the treatment of indigenous people at the hands of colonisers throughout time.

It’s not even like the people on the ground in New Zealand, the Pākeha, as the New Zealanders of European descent are called, came with the intention to subjugate the native population. I don’t think that was what was on the mind of the passengers aboard the Mayflower either. And yet… again and again it’s what happens. It’s a reflection of a core (and largely subconscious) belief that goes back further than anyone can even imagine, I think, but which was defined with terrifying lucidity in a papal decree known as the Doctrine of Discovery (1493). It stated unequivocally that any land not inhabited by Christians was available to be "discovered" (and claimed and exploited) by Christian rulers. It stated the goal that "the Catholic faith and the Christian religion be exalted and be everywhere increased and spread, that the health of souls be cared for and that barbarous nations be overthrown and brought to the faith itself."

The very next year, the Pope issued the Treaty of Tordesillas which, together with the Doctrine of Discovery, arguably sealed the fate of the indigenous inhabitants of the “New World” by dividing the right to conquer the Western Hemisphere between Spain and Portugal. Of course such a decree wholly dismissed the very idea that indigenous people might have any claim whatsoever to the land they inhabited (and often had for generations) and helped to shape the way people of European descent (and specifically of the Christian faith) saw themselves in relation to the “barbarous” peoples they would encounter in that New World, including, though significantly later, those in the Pacific.

So when I look at the multiple histories laid out side by side, it appears that New Zealand is in the infancy of its waking to the travesty of colonisation. Not all the people. Of course those who have been directly subjugated know. And there have been activists and educators working to reverse its insidious impact for decades. But the population at large is in danger of losing its cognisance of just what is at stake…the same way Americans, for the most part, have forgotten. Again, I have to proceed with the following caveat: those who experienced colonisation in an overt way (were marched from one part of the continent to another, for example, by military personnel ordered to collect them on a reservation; who were, as another example, ripped from their families and beaten for speaking their native language; and what litany of colonised Americans would be complete without the mention of those who, if they were lucky enough to survive the harrowing and shackled journey across 3,000 miles of sea, ended up in a foreign land and owned, like livestock, by people who looked like no one they had ever seen before)—they remember. I’m talking about your everyday American—and not just the white ones. We are all in the process of forgetting. At least we were.

The height of the Civil Rights Movement was, in the grand scheme of things, a moment of waking. Of course it was. But many white Americans went back to sleep after that and quite honestly, they have never been ‘woke’ to the subjugation of First Nations people (that population was reduced to numbers that are a shadow of what they once were, or else bred out of visibility—though everyone’s got a grandma who was an Indian princess). And where do we go for our impressions if we don’t see a specific cultural group walking among us? Hollywood. And over time, First Nations people have been transformed into ghosts by a film industry that at first liked to portray them as noble savages, or just savage savages. Since this obsession with the Hollywood Indian waned (thought it is still out there), Hollywood hasn’t really portrayed enough native people to undermine those stereotypes and make real, live people out of them again. And don’t get me wrong. I don’t blame Hollywood. No one made them the authority on the correct portrayal of indigenous cultures and peoples, and they certainly didn’t claim to be. They were just entertaining people and functioning, without even knowing it, under the Doctrine of Discovery. Who concerns themselves with the well-being and self-concept of members of “barbarous nations”, especially when there is a crap-ton of money to be made?

The great Spokane/Coeur D’Alene poet Sherman Alexie so aptly expressed that obsession (which Hollywood didn’t create but certainly cashed in on) in his satirical poem, “How to Write the Great American Indian Novel.” The poem ends with this: “In the Great American Indian Novel, when it is finally written, all of the white people will be Indians, and all of the Indians will be ghosts.” He alludes to America’s preoccupation with its favourite stereotypes of the “American Indian”: the noble savage and the Indian princess. Look at the “hippie” fashion (which is revisiting us with gusto at the moment); if nothing else it’s a complete ripoff of what people think is Native American “fashion”; the irony is that no tribal men ever wore headbands like that. That was a Hollywood hack for keeping wigs on white actors playing Natives. For real. But we don’t want real Indians. We want to be Indians (how many movies have storylines that play out the American fantasy of being made an honorary Indian by their adoring First Nations hosts?). But of course there is no room for the real Indian, who is just trying to get by (today he’s fighting Covid and taking note of the utter lack of difference between his Trump-administration life and his Biden-administration one). That would be unpalatable.

So yes, there have been moments of waking in our sleepy history, but they mostly punctuate a long hibernation that wasn’t interrupted on a large scale until the Trump administration took office. Honestly, that’s one positive thing I can say about that man. He shook many Americans awake. Those of us who had been happy under the smiling gaze of Obama, our Nobel-Peace-Prize-winning Democratic president while thousands of innocent people were being dusted by “surgical” drone strikes quietly authorised by him—the most articulate president we’d had since JFK—we got a jolt to the system. How could our beautiful country be taken over by this raucous, misogynistic, hate-mongering reality-TV-show personality? How are there 70 million people who would choose him to lead us? But did we even hear ourselves asking the question? It’s an absurd scenario. How indeed?

Now I was as dismayed by having Trump as the “leader of the Free World” as anybody. But I still have to ask myself this question: how were so many Americans willing to vote for him, not once but twice, the second time after he so blatantly fulfilled all of our fears about his disregard for the planet, for minorities, for women, and for truth? What makes decent people (because let’s face it, there aren’t 70 million white supremacists in the U.S., there just aren’t) so desperate that they will make such a (seemingly) rash choice? The craziest part (at least to me back in 2016)? I think that his original win (against Hillary) had a lot to do with the fact that an alarming number of those people who were hoping Bernie Sanders would become the Democratic candidate for president, swung not back to Hillary but, gaining momentum and hollering as they went, right on over to Donald Trump. I remember a friend predicting this, and I remember being horrified at the prospect. But he was right. Many of those people were looking for a demagogue…someone pushing extreme change. Someone advocating for the total revision of the establishment. For them, Bernie and Trump were two sides of the same coin.

I can’t pretend to have a full understanding of what ravelled out after that first Trump win. Quite frankly that’s when I began planning my escape. But there are a few things that have come into sharp focus since it happened. One is that America is awake right now, and it’s uncomfortable. In California as a teen, I really did think that racism was a thing of the past. I wore a ragged path between my mid-town Santa Cruz home, Harbor High School and Pleasure Point, making forays to other beaches and occasionally the “Pacific Garden Mall” (that’s “downtown” for all you youngsters). I didn’t see the racial strife that most certainly existed at that time. I am a woman of colour, but no one can ever tell what my ethnic background is, and with no obvious cultural identity to attack, the average American will reserve their bad behaviour with me.

As a high school kid in Santa Cruz, I went to Watsonville precisely twice, both times for the State Fair. I had friends (and dated) all colours and kinds of people, but even I was unable to see the cultural gulf that separated us in many ways. It never occurred to me that their lives were significantly different from mine. That they were often treated differently than I was. You could call me naive; I prefer the word “innocent.” I use it in the sense that James Baldwin used it. What I mean is that I didn’t know. But when I learned, and I did learn, I tried (and continue to try) not to forget. Baldwin addressed his young nephew in a letter that was published as “My Dungeon Shook” in a collection of essays called The Fire Next Time. In it he tells his nephew, “They [the racists] are in effect still trapped in a history they do not understand and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it…But these are your brothers, your lost younger brothers, and if the word ‘integration’ means anything, this is what it means: that we with love shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it, for this is your home, my friend.”

For all its beauty and longing and strength, even the Black Lives Matter Movement couldn’t wake the American people the way having Trump for a president did. But of course the power to wake is born in the contrast between the two forces. The greatest contrast perhaps came in the form of the police and military response to the armed and aggressive insurgents who stormed the U.S. Capitol on the 6th of January 2021 compared with that which met the unarmed Black Lives Matter protesters on the 1st of June 2020, a mere seven months earlier. I’m thinking some people are beginning to “understand their history.” If nothing else, there is awareness. There are a lot of people who would still deny the systemic racism that frets American policy and the American ‘experience.’ But there are a lot who suddenly get it. They’re not any better equipped to deal with it than they were before (arguably less, hit with a global pandemic and recession, and possibly profound personal loss, as we have been in the past 12 months), but at least they know. They are no longer “innocent,” and this state of being “woke”? It needs to stick.

So here I am in New Zealand, where the stories of the American struggle reach me on the evening news and online in the voices of my friends in waves. It is distant but real. It is about Covid-19—stories of illness and death but also of public unrest and protest around individual rights; the tangle of truth and lies that seems impossible to manage; protest and strife in the wake of an election that was, by those we should be able to trust, decried as stolen or highjacked somehow; it is about a change that can’t happen fast enough. And glimmers of hope: a man who speaks of unity and equity has moved into the White House with his lovely educator wife and two dogs. A relief plan was passed by both the House and the Senate—finally. Covid numbers are dropping off in some places, my beloved Santa Cruz among them. Vaccinations are rolling out in increments. There is sweet silence where before there was a constant assault of hateful, truth-less rhetoric on certain influential social media accounts. Glimmers. May they not lull us back to sleep but rather nourish us in our fight to stay awake. To shake ourselves into the kind of wakefulness that does make America great, if only for the first time.

Here in New Zealand, I learn more and more about an education system that has not served the Māori people, except to convince so many of them that they are less. Less intelligent. Less capable. Less civilised. And those not convinced? They choose to fight, not always in ways that serve them. When I lay the histories of colonisation alongside one another, I see that my Cherokee ancestors had barely landed in Oklahoma, the lands to which they were “relocated” under the Indian Removal Act of the brutal American president Andrew Jackson when a group of Māori chiefs signed their first (and, it turned out, the defining) treaty with the British crown. By this point in time, the Cherokee had already learned that there was nothing sacred in the word of the coloniser. That no matter what was agreed to or offered, the mindset of the people who came under the protection and sanction of the Doctrine of Discovery would forever direct their behaviours and mean one thing: that there is no such thing as an equal footing. And certainly no such thing as shared power.

And possibly the worst part is that many of the colonised, though they might never admit it or even realise it, believe and are guided by that doctrine as much as any coloniser believes and is guided by it. It has circumscribed the amount and quality of what they believe they deserve and it has limited what they believe they could ever become. And very few people, colonised or colonisers, could ever articulate it, but they have functioned under the assumptions of that doctrine for their entire lives, as did their parents, and their parents before them. That’s the power of colonisation. It blooms from the inside: a blood-red stain that expands like ink dropped in a solution of water. We don’t see it land. It’s like it’s been there forever. But it’s there, and it grows, and it controls. There are efforts to address this force. Valiant efforts to decolonise Aotearoa. I myself am a part of this, working as I do in a kaupapa Māori organisation to pull at-risk youth into the light of their own beauty and worth through education that starts simply with love. But man is it a big job.

And I guess my fear is this: what if the waking is still to come here? What if I have left one place where the waking is manifesting as civil unrest and a gross mismanagement of a deadly virus to come to a place that has yet to experience its own Donald Trump? Not that I think Kiwis would ever elect such a nincompoop, but I do wonder what it would take. You know, for all of these non-Māori, or tauiwi, New Zealanders, to feel the struggle of the Māori people and their Islander counterparts, as their own. For it most certainly is their own. The struggle belongs to all of us for as long as we let this whenua (land) embrace and nurture us. And for as long as young people, specifically Māori and Pacific Islanders, are taking their lives in such staggering numbers. So this was the source of my tears last weekend, I think. Just the “matching picture” of the recent Māori history and the less recent history of the indigenous people of my own land. And that of the Hawaiians and of the Tahitians and of the Australian Natives…I could go on and on. It overwhelms. It causes one to languish.

And what is there to do? I realise that the answer is simple, though not very satisfying. I do what I am already doing. And I keep doing it. I am one, but one is mighty when it is part of a larger whole. I am not alone (there are many other ‘ones’, and I am doing what I can with the gifts that are mine. I show up every day to love up these kids who need loving. They need to see themselves in all their perfection (and all their flaws) and know that there is a way forward. I will keep teaching them, giving them education in tiny doses wrapped in communication, kōrero, ease. The way I gave my yellow lab Bella her medicine wrapped in bologna. They won’t even taste it at first, and when they finally do, it will be too late. They will have swallowed whole just enough of the medicine of learning and of being seen to feel its effects. Maybe even to want a little more.

I have one right now who is writing poetry and sending it to me in little missives from her home. I have one who is building a pizza oven for our organisation and knows himself as capable in a work space. I have another who, after one week of breaking down barriers, gently, gently, is willing to read to me…aloud. These are enough. I am enough. We carry within us the history of colonisation. I brought my own story from far across the sea, and though they are staggered by a couple hundred years, our stories echo the same burden, the same longing, and yes, the same healing through the canyon of our living. I may very well cry again. In front of my colleagues even. But I will also contribute to the decolonisation of this land that has received me and which sings back to me my own history and the history of every other colonised place. In the end, the land becomes me, and I have nothing to do but be the thing that I am. My own language rises in my heart again: What can I be but this thing that remains? What can I be but this?

Embodying the Crone

The Maiden, The Mother, and The Crone by Dawn Of the Shed

Last week I wrote a post for this blog. It was like pulling teeth, but I did it. There is an expression that I’m sure you’ve heard: If you don’t have anything nice to say….Well, I didn’t. Like, I couldn’t. And instead of writing something not nice, I wrote about not having anything nice to say. It ended up going in a bit of a circle. And I didn’t publish it. How could I? When so much of the rest of the world has seen such loss and is experiencing so much division? In the midst of political upheaval and a global pandemic that rages on while vaccine roll-outs of various designs strike both fear and hope in the public? I live in Aotearoa, where life is relatively ‘normal’ and buffered from the racially charged tumult of, well, the U.S. for one. My own complaints peaked with having been told a few weeks ago that I can’t paddle anymore. Like for the rest of my life. Oh, and aging. Something that surfaces at intervals as you near the half-century mark of your life quite naturally, I’m sure. Big deal. Long story short? Eventually I put on my big girl pants and hit delete.

I can’t say for sure why I felt like that last week, but I have been following the Maramataka, the Māori lunar calendar, and tracking my own rhythms alongside the shifting moon, and I have to say, I kind of blame the moon. It sounds pretty wacky, I’m sure, especially to the colonised mind, which has had its profound connection to the natural world and the mystical pretty much shamed out of it, but it’s true. The moon was (and still is) in its first quarter, Tamateo Āio, which according to the Maramataka is “a time to draw near and to uncover risk in your life.” We are meant to “be aware of things beneath the surface and use expertise to navigate difficult situations.” It’s an average energy moon, but it’s one that can make you feel kind of stuck (if you resist it). Mostly that is my M.O….to resist being still. Even now, at 49, I prefer to move and groove—not rest and be still. So yeah, I felt stuck.

Now I’ve been tracking my own rhythms and comparing them to those of the moon phases for almost a month—since the last full moon, Te Rākaunui (which is upon us once again and will happen in two days). At first I noticed that I felt very different from what the Maramataka suggested. So different that I consulted an app I still have on my phone which shows the moon phases in the northern hemisphere (just a couple of days off from ours). I was thinking maybe my body was still attuned to the northern hemisphere moon; I was born there and did live within the moon’s rhythms from that vantage point for most of my 49 years of life. But somewhere along the way, perhaps in efforting myself to connect with the moon from this new vantage point…seeking it out every night and often in the early mornings, reading about it and learning its impact on the tides and the rhythms of the people here in Aotearoa, I think I must have flipped. Like my personal compass just adjusted itself for this whenua. This beautiful land.

So on Tuesday of this week, the 23rd of February, I felt firmly situated within Ōtepoti, firmly rooted in Aotearoa, and under the spell of the moon as it is seen from the southern hemisphere. Marama, he is called. Man, is he powerful. Yeah, in New Zealand, the Moon is seen as male. In Māori lore we are told that Marama took to wife two daughters of Tangaroa, atua (god) of the sea, lakes, and rivers (and all the creatures that live within them). He is said to be the spouse of all women in the sense that he affects our bodies every month. So this week the Maramataka told me that on Friday things would get better. We would burst into one of the most productive days/nights of the year: Mawharu. According to the Maramataka, under this moon, “everything is available.” It is a time of abundance and sharing. A time to be generous and move without fear. So even though I was feeling so terrible on Tuesday…and then again on Wednesday…I thought, Well, maybe I am aligned with this moon. Maybe on Friday something will shake loose and open into the flow that I have felt with such clarity and in so much of the time since I’ve been here.

On Tuesday I forgot my phone. On Wednesday I forgot my lunch. On Thursday I got a huge parking ticket (at my job, no less). All week I felt low and ineffective. I trudged through my work and pretty much fielded conflicts all week long. On Thursday I missed calling my dad for his birthday. Because the week was so wonky, I had set an alarm to make my birthday post to him on Facebook. This I did on Wednesday night, knowing he would wake up to it. But somehow on Thursday I got mixed up about the time difference. At work I thought about my dad all day. I remember midday thinking about my mother’s birthday, only a month prior, and wondering why I hadn’t waited to call her when we were all home, so that my husband and son could also wish her a happy birthday and sing to her like we’d done almost every other year. Weird. But I would definitely do that for my dad tonight. When 7:30pm came and everyone was present, I realised, midway to rallying everybody, that he would of course be asleep by now. Right. Hence the solo call to my mom in the middle of the day on her birthday. It was seriously that kind of week. It’s not like the time difference between North America and New Zealand has changed in the last three months.

So I went to bed feeling bluer than ever. I sent my dad a pathetic little video message that I knew he would wake up to and in it a promise to call him upon waking myself. Since I moved here I haven’t gotten to talk to him much. He’s not much of a phone guy, and plus my mom is happy to talk with me and then pass on the juicy bits. But that still leaves me missing him terribly. I can’t help but think there’s also still some tension around my departure in the first place. I think my parents both hoped, when we moved to my hometown almost three years ago, that we were home to stay. Our announcement, coming up on one full year ago, that we would be leaving California to reunite with our younger son within a couple of months, came as quite a shock. So missing my window to call on my dad’s birthday was terrible. For so many reasons.

And then the moon shifted into Mawharu. This is seriously my favourite moon (based on this one day, I’ll admit). I set my alarm early, to call before work, but when I called, Dad was not there. “Your dad’s out golfing, hon,” said my mom. “He’ll probably be home any minute, but…” It felt for a moment like I’d missed him again, but I jumped in the shower and got ready for work and tried him one more time before leaving. When he answered, my dad was outside in the sunlight and hanging out under a bright yellow sunshade. He was smiling and happy and had just gotten home from golfing. He showed me a project he was working on in the yard, and we chatted without any tension at all. He told me about the many puzzles he’s done since lockdown and of his impending vaccination that will hopefully set a course for “normal” some time in the not-so-distant future. He wasn’t mad that I hadn’t called the day before. He seemed completely unfazed by it, in fact, and I felt a wash of warmth and what I can only describe as joy. It felt like more than one-moon-phase-worth of change, and I received it with profound gratitude.

That’s how Friday began. I got to work and there was a fairly grim email (cc’ed to everyone and their dog) waiting in my inbox. I took a deep breath and responded (to all those people) with grace and generosity and with an utter lack of ego (I find it just doesn’t serve me these days). Within moments, I’d received a reply that was equally generous; the fear and tension that had so driven the original email had been easily diffused. Two disasters averted. With a bit of a stutter start, my Friday was off and running. I softened into the beautiful harbour view on my way to and from work. I had an opportunity to appear as a guest author in my friend’s online classroom. I was able to speak with genuine inspiration and clarity and, best of all, hopefulness. Thank you, Mawharu Moon! And yes, I say that somewhat facetiously…of course I don’t relinquish my own autonomy, my power to steer my own course. But energetically, there’s something to it—connecting with the land and the sky and the elements. I’ve always known this, and here, in this whenua, surrounded by the tupuna (ancestors) of a mighty people who have survived in the same way my own colonised ancestors survived…there is power and grace in learning. In growing within what surrounds me and has, without equivocation, embraced me.

This morning, I find myself with some nice things to say. Plus just two weeks ago, on a new moon (Whiro), I wrote about embracing our brokenness and about Spirit and about hope, and I did publish that. I’m allowed to waver a bit, I suppose, but I think I won’t publish the lowest bits just now. I want to be “impeccable with [my] word,” as Don Miguel Ruiz instructs, and I want to accept the social responsibility of a writer as outlined by Albert Camus. I know that I can.

I’m not raising babies anymore, but I remember when my boys were little, I used to constantly remind myself that no new inclination/behaviour/habit is the new way of being with your baby. It’s just how they’re being right now…today, this week, or maybe even this month. But things change so quickly with babies. Just when you become totally exasperated by some particular thing (or even enamoured of it), it changes. For better or for worse, baby rearing is a state of flux.

I’ve decided I’m going to treat menopause like that. Like I’m a baby again. I can’t say for sure that I’m in menopause, but my fluctuating emotions, body temperature, and metabolism (not to mention my age) seem to suggest it. It’s a period of transition. From Mother to Crone. The same way I once transitioned from Maiden to Mother. That word ‘crone’ gets a bad wrap. It has somehow gotten reduced to mean ‘an ugly old woman, a hag.” But the Crone is an archetypal figure, a Wise Woman. There is immense beauty in this idea alone. It is an honour and an accomplishment to embody her. Being a Crone is hard earned, and it is powerful. The Crone carries all of the wisdom of her years, and her spirit is textured and coloured by the richness of her experience.

It hurt to become a Mother. Physically, my pregnancies were really difficult, and of course giving birth is a new variety and intensity of pain for most of us. And there were things we gave up. Activities, yes, but also things about ourselves. Ways of being. That hurt too, though we did it willingly and wouldn’t change it back for anything. There is likely to be pain in becoming a Crone, as well. That is the way of growing. It hurts. And the faster it happens, the more dramatic the change, the greater the pain. Transitioning from Mother to Crone is going to hurt. Let’s face it. But there doesn’t have to be so much resistance. There doesn’t have to be fear.

In my life I have always been ready for the next thing when it finally happened. Thinking far ahead it’s frightening. I remember wondering, as a young girl, how it would be to ever fall in love, truly in love, and get married. I wondered as a young wife how I would ever know how to be a mother. I wondered as a high school student how I would ever be ready to be a university student; as a university student I wondered how I would know how to be a teacher. I could go on and on. But the older I get, the less I have these wonderings. Because I have seen the pattern now. Somehow, some way, I have been ready for each of these new ventures, new phases of life, as they arrived.

As a girl, I remember thinking I never wanted to grow old. I thought it would be terrible to be, for example, prevented by the state of my own body from doing the active, extreme things I loved to do. And yet here I am at 49. I’m not happy about quitting paddling, but I can give it up without losing all of the things I love to do. I still surf and do yoga and swim. If my husband gets his way, I’ll soon be trying wing foiling too. I’m still me. And I begin to understand how I might one day be content with stillness. How one day, as I come to the twilight of my life, I might be content with the richness of my own thoughts and memories and by the youth and pulsing energy of all the other lives around me. I don’t feel afraid about that anymore either.

Just like having teeth is (from a baby’s perspective) no better or worse than not having them (how can that baby begin to imagine what will be opened to her by having teeth with which to enjoy it?), being a Crone doesn’t seem better or worse than being a Mother (though again, how can I imagine what will be opened to me in this new phase of life, not having tasted it in my Maiden- or Motherhood?). It is just different. New. And it hurts, like the cutting of those teeth. There are tears, and there is fussiness. Fluctuation. These are allowed. I will treat myself like a baby. I will be patient with my growing, and I will know that some phases will only last a week or even a day, like the phases of the moon. I will love myself up and ride out the less pleasant phases with patience. Sssshhhhhhh…

In the same way that I know the newborn is inside of the toddler, the toddler inside of the child, the child inside of the teenager, and so on, I know that I am still Maiden and Mother. Of course. Of course. I will always be a Mother especially. Maybe first and foremost. It’s just such an important thing. But as I embrace becoming a Crone, I will look to the loveliness of this new way of being in the world too. I have pictures and memories and even writings that chronicle this journey, those two younger and, perhaps in our society, more appreciated phases of life, but I will also embrace the now. I am moving, with grace and with the Moon pulling at my energy, with my partner at my side, into this loveliness. I will continue studying the Maramataka, learning the phases of the Moon and its influence on every living thing. And in gratitude, I will watch the Moon closely for a reflection of my Wise Woman self as she rises.

Risk It

Photo credit: @ttaitphoto

This song came up the other day as my iTunes was cycling through my library of music. It does this when I don’t tell it what I want to listen to in the car, or even connect my phone, which is a complete mystery to me, but on a warm, sunny Friday, there it was: Nahko and Medicine for the People singing out this song from several years ago. Out of nowhere, it gave me this wild gush of energy that felt like it was maybe three parts gratitude and one part hope. It made me feel like my actual cells were blooming, sending stardust into the air, and then pulsing with an incredible energy while it all sprinkled down onto my shoulders, my lap, the interior of my VW wagon.

I first heard “Risk It” in Vermont, where our family (me, my husband, and our two sons) were living at the time…I was teaching yoga at the inaugural Stratton Mountain Wanderlust Festival (just two little classes I got to teach as a local instructor, but they were accompanied by my dear musician friends Veena and Devesh Chandra, and they were magic). Nahko and Medicine for the People were playing in the evening, maybe Saturday of the long weekend event. I had never heard their music before, but I was eager to take advantage of the full weekend pass that was my “payment” for teaching at the festival, and my friend Marissa was keen to check them out.

It was an amazing evening, full of joy and dancing, and imbibing—of beer, yes, but also of a vibe of love and inclusivity that has never been truer. And at the end of the concert, when the entire set list had been played, and then some, this: I remember Little Bear (Nahko), the lead singer of this fabulous band, holding up his cell phone to capture the crowd’s wild approbation on video. I remember seeing the elated and grateful expressions on the faces of the members of the band as they exchanged glances and held hands together, lifted them over their heads, as our applause filled the air and rained down on the half circle arrangement of their glistening bodies on the stage.

That night I felt that I (and the other few hundred people in attendance) were sharing a moment with this beautiful group of humans…a moment in which they had somehow arrived. Who is to say what constitutes arrival or even how it looks when it happens, but this—this was most definitely an arrival. Of course they weren’t aware of me sharing in it, but I was part of the collective voice that affirmed their vision as artists and the undeniable truth of the power of their musical offering. They saw us moved—as a whole—by their music and especially, at least for me, their lyrics. They sang of beauty and gratitude, of personal power and cultural connection. They sang of healing and of forgiveness, and they sang of fighting—for what one considers to be of value and worthy of sacrifice.

After that night, I listened to their album Dark as Night endlessly. It made me feel so good—whole somehow. And it was soon after that our family heeded our own “call of the wild” and moved to Colorado. I listened to that album, and later On the Verge, driving up and down the I-70 corridor between Vail and Eagle, for ages. In 2015 Nahko and Medicine for the People appeared in the Vail Valley’s Hot Summer Nights free concert series, and my family and I saw them there again. My children witnessed their mother dancing and singing with total abandon in the otherwise fairly tame Vail crowd (this wasn’t the first time), and we all enjoyed their music together. There was something holy in their gift to their audience, to their listeners. And there was beauty in all of it.

The move from Vermont to Colorado was not our last. Our entire life together, my partner Dwaine and I, has been a long, slow migration toward New Zealand, I realise, because we have landed here with a sense, for the first time, that we have actually arrived. I have wanted this feeling for a long time, and I have looked for it, but this is the first time I have ever felt it. I have even tried the word on in different places: Home. But that word is an oversimplification, and perhaps even an injustice to the turtle shell of our marriage and family nest that we carry with us wherever we live on the globe, because it’s more than that. Or at least different. What I do know is this: we have arrived.

We’re not finished traveling. Of course we’re not. The world is temporarily closed off to itself, but our extended family are spread all over North America, and we will go there again to be with them. I have no doubt about that. And they will travel here to be with us, too. But having arrived in this whenua, this beautiful land, and begun to give back to it, to share our selves with the people and their place, Aotearoa, there is a kind of peace that is indescribable. And a jubilation that is captured perfectly in this song…”Risk It.” Moving from Vermont to Colorado was a risk. And it proved to be our most challenging move in a financial sense. There were moments that first year in Eagle County I wondered if we’d done the right thing. But then it was clear—we were exactly where we needed to be. For so many reasons.

Then, in the blink of an eye that was four years, it was time to leave. I felt it fiercely. And I was ready to go. Trump was elected president, and for me that was a last straw. I applied for a visa to move to New Zealand. It turned out our timing was not right, and I actually had the whole, laboriously collected set of documents returned to me. One critical piece had expired waiting for the next, and the whole thing was invalidated. That was in 2018. I was confused and discouraged and didn’t have the heart to resubmit it. I have been on the planet long enough to know that when something is right, all the doors leading to it swing open. There is ease in the rightness. This was not how I was feeling about the path to New Zealand that year.

I had a rising sense that we would be arriving in New Zealand as refugees somehow. Dwaine is used to some pretty out-there ideas from me, but this was almost too far fetched. He didn’t deny what I was saying, but he certainly couldn’t say he agreed or saw it too. When things are ‘normal,’ it’s hard to imagine them otherwise. But I could see that his job was wearing on him…too much time spent in the underbelly of our little county, too much energy spent trying to lift a very heavy darkness. And I myself was jaded, having spent too many years, it felt, doing what was easy—serving the children of the privileged, who were happy to recognise me and my gifts. Over 120 people had lined up to apply for that job. There was work, I knew, that was less attractive to the many and which utilised my unique gifts. Specifically, I wanted to work with underrepresented populations. People society forgets or discards—kids who have been given a raw deal. If you can do that sort of work, I have always thought, you should.

At the same time that these feelings began to grow in me, I began exploring what seemed like a new ability but which I quickly learned was something I’d had some spiritual understanding of for most of my life. This exploration was of what it means to serve as a medium. Yeah, I know. It sounds crazy. Sometimes I still feel that. But then someone else who is hurting asks me to help them connect with a loved one who has passed, and I can’t say no to them. In fact it’s a commitment I’ve made to myself and to the Universe. When asked, I will say yes. There were two years in Vail that I got to just practice—thank you to the many friends who trusted me to practice opening what in those days felt very much like a bad telephone connection—you know who you are! They were two years that overlapped with our exit from the place that had served its purpose in my evolution as an individual and in our family’s journey.

After a short burst of energy around moving to Hawai’i, which also did not manifest, we ended up back in Santa Cruz, my childhood hometown and the home of my parents and my brother with his sweet family. I took my first true alternative education position and was tested and tried in ways I’d never imagined. I was also more deeply rewarded than I’d ever been for any work I’d ever done. Personally, I felt it as a lovely pause, where I got to host “family dinners” for my mom and dad and my brother’s family. Where I could stop by my parents’ house and enjoy chatting over a glass of wine on their back patio on a Friday evening after work. Where we got to attend nephews’ baseball games and my sister-in-law’s chorale group performances. Where time seemed to stand still for a bit.

While I never felt like moving to Santa Cruz was forever, even I was surprised when the time for our exit from there arrived with such haste. The political climate was rising, beginning to burn us with its inequity and its inanity, and then Covid fell upon us all like a predator. Two months into Covid in California, with our younger son at university in New Zealand and our older one on his way back there to train on snow, we did the unthinkable. We planned and executed an overseas move in the middle of a global pandemic. It was crazy, for sure. Selling or giving away all of our stuff on Facebook (there was no way to have a garage sale or to even drop things off at a donation station). We had to coordinate the selling of three vehicles and the surrender of our rental home with our international flight. There could be no interim accommodation (hotels weren’t open, and we were too afraid to stay in one anyway). The list of crazy details goes on and on and paints a picture that is an awful lot like fleeing. Refugees indeed.

In short, two cancelled flights later and after a delay that put us in a hotel for four days in a different departure city anyway—we boarded a plane for New Zealand. It was surreal and absurd to watch the explosions of colour along the darkening skyline of Los Angeles as our airplane lifted off. The irony was not lost on us that the Fourth of July fireworks, prohibited because of the pandemic, went on long after they were no longer visible from our chiclet-shaped windows. Finally we dropped our masked heads back onto the headrests of our seats and closed our eyes. The three of us were on our way across the sea to our baby bird.

Managed isolation and the transition itself is a story for another day, but suffice it to say, we finally landed on solid ground. Every door opened to us, too, the way doors do when you are moving with the flow of the Universe instead of against it—from finding a good vehicle to landing a home and jobs with lightning speed. We were received with love by our New Zealand family and by our new community. And all of it was a risk. A huge risk we took to follow our hearts and souls. To be near our baby. To be far from the strife we saw enveloping American politics and society. To be in a place that has called to us since we were so, so young—the place where I heard for the first time that I was a healer. Auntie Sylvia said those words to me in Nelson when I was only 24 years old (I remember wondering then if I should have gone to medical school!).

Today I answered the call from one friend to help another and did a mediumship reading by Zoom. The distance between us was over 8,000 miles, and we had never met before today. I didn’t know a single thing about this person, except that we had this lovely friend in common and that she had a deceased loved one she longed to hear from. As always I had no idea what to expect as we opened ourselves to hearing from Spirit, but also as always, the result was an incredible gift to me and to the woman. For me it was an affirmation—that this gift needs to keep being offered, because it is so natural. So real and easy, really, because it is aligns with what I can only understand now as my purpose: to help people heal.

And it was a gift to her, because I could see on her face, feel in her affect, that she had, in the space of about 40 minutes, received all the confirmation she needed to know that her love still exists and still sees her. Is still accessible to her. Oh! What an important gift to be able to give someone! Grief is not something that I can dissipate. It’s real and it’s important and it’s a legitimate response to losing the physical form of the people we love. But I can apply a salve so soothing and so healing just by opening my heart and mind—listening to the messages given to me to share with loved ones who are still here on Earth and who long for such reassurance.

So as I listened to the chorus of that song in my car on Friday, it was all I could do to contain the joy (and also the tears) that rose in my heart like waves. Nahko sang: “I never thought I needed medicine / but I was spiritually dying, I needed some healing / so I opened my mouth and took a dose of the music / then I sat and prayed for guidance, now, teach me to use it / I pray for guidance now, teach me to use it.” The medicine was more than the music, of course. For Little Bear it must have been literal. The music is his medicine. It’s also his gift to wield among the people—the way he helps them heal themselves. For me it is metaphoric. The music is the expression of this thing that I knew I needed to do—this distance I needed to travel. It is also the expression of this thing that I know I need to keep doing—keep saying yes to. I need to keep listening to the souls of the departed. I still marvel that I can say that without fear. I never would have believed it.

When I heard this song those many years ago, it was like the little sailing canoe I boarded for the long, slow journey here to New Zealand. It represented the fearlessness I would need to embody in order to keep going. And today it shows me the truth of our migration. Of my bravery. I keep going—offering my gifts in the healing of others, whether that’s through teaching them or through providing a reading for them, helping them hear from their loved ones who have made their crossing—and I keep giving. Aotearoa has opened her heart to me; she is the whenua of my husband’s ancestors and she is the piko (the navel) of my spiritual life. I know this now.

And there is another line in this song that is important to me. It is for all of the people I have had to say goodbye to along the way. All those who keep going too, living far from where I am today. In Vermont and California, in Europe and Asia, in Hawai’i and Colorado, in Alaska and even the British Isles. We’re scattered like so many seeds. But we are together in that we share the planet, this air, this beautiful moon. Nahko says, “Well if I could give to my people, yeah / well a piece of my peace would be with you always.” He says it again: “If I could give to my people, yeah / well a piece of my peace would be with you always.” Yes and please. May it be so.

Soul Bonsai

"The Little White Plum Blossom Tree"
(n.d., shikishiban )

Healing. It’s something I keep thinking about. How much of it we all need to do. And how important it is that we participate in our own (not just by seeking treatment or solutions but with our hearts and with our faith). The way we are so hurt in so many ways, broken and trembling and prostrate in our grieving. We have lost loved ones, and we have become estranged from people we care about. We have sustained injury and disease and sundry ailments that come and then go and then arrive again when we least expect them. We have done things and said things injurious to others and to ourselves, and we have been bruised by the words and actions of the many others in (and barely brushing up against) our own lives.

I have pulled my car off the road and wept, no sobbed (ugly-crying-face-sobbing) after someone flexed on me in their road rage (this was a few weeks ago). I have done the same when someone flexed on someone else in their road rage (when I was 17). The sentiment behind these two moments, over 20 years apart, was identical. It wasn’t about me in either case. It was about being witness to one human wanting to be unkind to another…with great vigour. And for no clear or legitimate reason. I hate that shit, man. It makes me feel so sad. It’s something I can’t understand. Even the people who make me angriest (people who hurt their own children, for example, or who espouse racists or sexist views, or—you get the idea)—I can’t wish them ill. I have realised in my life that I could seriously wreck someone’s day with my words. I can wield language in a way that exposes faults and castigates—a way that seethes and scalds and shames. But I vowed long ago, maybe 12 years, that I wouldn’t do it.

When Don Miguel Ruiz said to “be impeccable with [my] word,” I took it to heart. Kind of the way I took it to heart, at 12 years old, when I was told by leaders of my church youth group that I should “be like Mary.” I was actually a virgin when I became engaged to my husband a decade later. Yeah, mull that one around for a bit. And the way that, when my first baby was crowning during my labour, I asked my midwife if I pushed really hard, would he come out on the next contraction. When she answered, “That’s up to you,” I blasted him out with the next contraction and then required a twenty-seven-stitch repair job… Really, lady? How about, “Well, you could, you’re strong enough, but if you do you’ll explode your perineum.” Yeah, that would have been good. Instead I heard a challenge and, knowing my physical body at 27 years of age as weirdly strong, I wrecked myself trying (and succeeding, I suppose). I wouldn’t say I’m a literal thinker, but a challenge that is worthwhile is one worth meeting.

So yeah, I don’t write tirades or rants about people. I don’t write exposēs or shame people with angry censure and blaming. I just try to write as thoughtfully and objectively about what I see and hear and invite people to think with me—about the hard stuff. I’m not saying I’m perfect at this (I did make a joke in one recent post about Trump’s “flaccid [metaphoric] pole,” but it was in good fun, I thought). Mostly though, I just internalise this stuff. Let it ache inside for a long time until it bubbles upward and leaves me in a puddle of tears. Not super effective, really…in healing my wounds or righting the capsized ship of my sense of humanity and its goodness. So there’s some healing that I need to do. Maybe it’s that I need to be less sensitive (my family of origin have always said so). Or maybe it’s that I need to pay less attention to the way people care (or don’t) about each other; what do these things have to do with me anyway? But if I guage it by how I feel when I move through a place crowded with people, the question inverts itself: what do they not have to do with me? It is all within me as well as without.

But it’s not just that. I feel broken inside for so many reasons, and to describe some of them would be to break the hearts of people I love and who find their way to these blog posts each week (but maybe not to me). I feel alive and happy and vibrant, too, but it’s all part of the whole…I can’t deny the darkness. I feel I have failed in some ways…professionally and as a writer. Even academically. And I feel that there are people I have let down. In ways I never meant to or would have wanted. I feel small at times. And in the words of Bon Iver, “not magnificent.” These are the wounds. They’re not the truths. The truth is that I am full of love and can honestly say I’ve done the best that I could…my whole life. I have raised two beautiful young men whose kindness and love and intelligence humble me daily. I am the partner of a wonderful man whom I seem to make happy despite my flaws. And I have educated thousands of youth, given them my heart and my mind and helped them to cultivate the best versions of themselves…and to heal themselves through their creativity.

So there it is. My greatest worth, it seems, is in my ability to help people heal. I have fostered profound healing in my students through the written word and even through choreographed dance. I’ve taken on healing energy work (most recently Reiki), and I have learned (unbelievably) to speak with the dead (yes, I did just write that). All of these things lay a thick salve on the wounds of my imperfection, my faults, and they show me that I am powerful beyond words. That in my ability to help other people find their strength, I myself am strong. Never mind the crying jag on the corner of 17th Avenue and Capitola Road. There is strength in that too. In allowing myself to grieve what is egregious and full of despair for me. I know what those things are, and they are real. To me, you know? And I am also healing myself. By continuing to care for myself, even when things at work or in my general life get hectic. Prioritising my wellbeing is the beginning of that kind of healing.

So there it is. There’s a lot of talk out there about forgiveness and lessons and even spiritual growth, but the bottom line is healing. I read a satirical excerpt the other day from an author named Jeff Brown. It started with this: “The next time you have a terrible thing happen to you and someone says, ‘You choose your every experience,’ knock them unconscious. When they wake up again, ask them to thank you for actualising their dream.” It was funny, for sure. I definitely laughed. And the passage goes on for a long while satirising the most common of aphorisms in modern (and ancient) spiritual teachings, and it gives us an opportunity to laugh at our own tendency to attempt to reduce vast truths to short, pithy maxims. But that’s just it; it’s only the reduction that is reprovable here, not the actual sentiment of “choos[ing] your every experience.”

I actually do believe that in spirit we choose our challenges for this lifetime, however horrific and far from what we might cognitively elect to undergo. I believe the suffering and struggle we experience in this lifetime are a direct result of how we want to grow in spirit. The more extreme the challenge, the braver the choice and the more powerful the growth. But I wouldn’t say that to someone in the moment of crisis. I wouldn’t say it to someone tangled in their own trauma after, say, a lifetime of abuse. I would say, “Let’s figure out how you can heal.” That is all. Healing is all. It doesn’t make that bigger picture untrue; it just means that speaking of those “lessons” is insensitive and not helpful in the heat of the healing. I do believe that discerning the choice, not to suffer but to grow, which might ultimately involve some suffering, can empower an individual and can even constitute some part of the healing, but it’s not where you start, you know?

I don’t even think I’m disagreeing with Mr. Brown…just feeling a need to clarify, because taken out of context, the quote seems to negate the idea that we have great autonomy as spiritual beings and, indeed, do agree to ways this life will challenge us (before we even take bodies and enter a lifetime on this earth), and I don’t think that’s what he’s trying to do. Perhaps, and this is an educated guess based on some other excerpts that appear on his Facebook page, Mr. Brown wants to make the distinction between the idea that “traumas were caused by mistakes that require a lesson to avoid repeating them” and the concept of shaping and nurturing one’s own spiritual path, like a beautiful bonsai tree. The former, I agree, is rubbish, but the latter…it’s at the core of my belief system.

Of course, we can’t begin to see the beauty or even the shape of that soul bonsai until we can begin to heal, and healing is a lot easier said than done. It requires love and attentiveness and faith…in the power of our own thoughts. Of prayer. Of connection to others. And it requires corrective emotional experiences. Ones of beauty and divinity and peace…to replace the ones that have razed us and filled us with fear. Fear, it seems, must be replaced with love. These are, in many ways, opposites. And all this takes time. So we begin with our intention. To see ourselves and allow ourselves to be seen, and to embrace what we see (and allow others to do the same). It’s by stopping resisting what we are and how we hurt that we can begin to heal.

We have to stop being so shocked at our brokenness and instead let our selves be broken. It’s not easy. Please don’t misunderstand me. But know that we are powerful beyond measure. And there is beauty in our brokenness. My favourite Leonard Cohen lyric says this: “Ring the bells that still can ring / Forget your perfect offering / There is a crack…in everything / That's how the light gets in.” The wisdom here breaks my heart open afresh. It’s so good. So I’m going to keep ringing the bells. I show up each day to teach kids that society has all but forgotten. Kids in whose lives a small handful of people are working day and night to help heal after their wounds have manifest in criminal activities. I keep writing this little blog with its 10 readers (man, I love you guys) and engaging in other creative projects. And I keep loving up and supporting and showing up for my little family and for the people who need me.

That is the best I can do, and I know that it is enough. It’s more than enough. It’s beautiful. “We are amazed how hurt we are,” said the brilliant poet Tony Hoagland, “We would give anything for what we have.” And we do.

Permutations

photo: @dtait_photography

This week I had a weird health scare. I had a blood clot in my arm over twenty years ago; it was a freak thing. I was only twenty-seven, and I had a fairly rare condition called thoracic outlet syndrome. It’s where the space between your top rib and your clavicle is too small, and the vein that runs through there (the subclavian vein) gets clamped a little each time you lift your arm over your head. I think it’s less rare than we think; it’s just that people don’t often do such intense and repetitive overhead arm movement so as to discover it. A little clamping here and there probably never hurt anyone, but clamping again and again with all the shoulder and arm muscles firing—for a five hour surf session—that’ll cause a problem. For me it was an eight-inch long clot that ran through my brachial, axillary, and subclavian veins. It was sitting four inches from my heart.

I remember the surf being ridiculous that day. I was out at a place called Peaks on the island of Hawai’i. It was SO good. I also remember the crowd thinning to three people whom I knew had been out a long time. I remember being pleased with the idea that if I could just outlast them, I could report to everyone that I’d had Peaks by myself on one of the best days of the year (it was only January, but no matter). My arms were so tired, and I do remember wondering if I could do any damage by exerting myself to this extent. It felt like the bones in my humerus could just snap as I dragged my hands through the water, scratching for wave after wave, but I felt pretty confident that this was not actually a possibility. Your vascular system is not really something you consider when you’re in your twenties.

When I got out of the water, my whole upper body was pumped up (as it will be after a taxing surf session), but even after the 15 minute drive home and a warm shower, the swelling in my left side (upper arm, shoulder, even upper chest) had not subsided, whereas the right side was back to normal. When my husband came home from work that evening and had a look, he simply said, “Uh, we’re going to the ER. That’s not right.” I have to admit I resisted a bit. It just didn’t hurt that much (a little shifting kind of ache and the discomfort of the swelling was all I could identify as symptoms), and I felt normal otherwise. But he was insistent. That night in the ER, which was deserted except for us, a young doctor was inclined to send me home with a couple of ibuprofen (which could have had a deadly impact), but, he said, he’d had an experience the week before that gave him pause. He had treated an elderly ocean fly fisherman down in the South of the island with a rare condition—yep, thoracic outlet syndrome.

On the off chance that what I had was the same, he chose to call in the emergency on-call radiologist who happened to live in Hilo, a three hour drive away. He was apologetic and kept reassuring himself and us with truisms like “better safe than sorry, right?” Close to four hours later, I was in the dusky room listening to my own blood flow in the echo of the ultrasound, finding out that I had a deep vein thrombosis. “What does that mean?” I asked.

“Well,” said the doctor, who happened to be the father of one of my students, “it means you’ll have to be admitted.” My mind rummaged through the different applications of this particular bit of vocabulary and landed on the only one that fit this context, as improbable as it sounded.

“You mean I have to spend the night here tonight?” At this point it was already close to 1am.

“Yes. And the next night, and the next night—” He wasn’t trying to be flip. Just real. It was pretty hard to get my head around. That was the beginning of seven days on the ward at North Hawai’i Community Hospital, which was followed, shortly after my discharge, by an emergency (unconscious) trip back to the hospital and a five-day sojourn in the intensive care unit there. That was brought on by sepsis that nearly cost me my life and then my arm. Clearly I held onto both, but just barely.

The experience of nearly dying did not feel like a very big deal to me in the moment. It’s the same as everyone says. I was super peaceful. I could see everything happening in the room, even though I was unconscious and flatlining in the hospital’s ER. I was simply heading out…kind of up and away. No fanfare. It was the sight of my poor husband, only five years into our marriage, weeping, that brought me to my senses (literally—to my senses, like a sudden memory of having a body: Oh right, that’s mine, I should stay in it. Stay here. For Dwaine). So I did. It was a long, slow recovery, made slower by the fact that we’d just decided we were ready to try for a baby. You can’t be pregnant while you’re on blood -thinning medications, and I was on coumadin for nearly that whole year.

It was over 11 months of treatment, a TON of blood drawn and thinned, and a surgery to resect my top rib (yeah, that means saw it off—the clot had hardened and become part of the vessels, so the doc thought he’d open up some space in there for the collaterals to pick up the slack). I wasn’t finished being active yet. I wouldn’t be having any more five-hour sessions, but I definitely didn’t plan to give up surfing, and my doctor was committed to making sure I didn’t have to. Finally, in December of 1997 with only a sweet little scar along my clavicle (through which no one would guess 2/3 of the existing muscle and my top rib had been dragged), I was taken off of coumadin and told that we could try for our baby. I will forever be grateful for the speed with which we conceived; by March I was pregnant with our first son. The care I’d received at Stanford Medical Center was top notch, and I had a healthy, full-term pregnancy with no fear of thrombosis. A 1998 baby (only just…he is a Sagitarius) intead of a 1997 one.

That blood clot was the reason I started doing yoga (some time in the fall of 1997, still being treated for the clot, I actually popped in a VHS cassette—my mom’s Sports Illustrated exercise video that had Elle McPherson doing some yoga-based stretching). I still remember the way Elle McPherson said “happy baby” and also thinking, “I guess this is the kind of thing you do now.” It seemed boring and bland compared with the extreme sports I was used to pursuing, but it was about my speed at that time, and there was no denying this.

A lot of things were pushed around by that experience actually. It dictated the timing of our first child’s arrival in the world. It forced me to explore yoga and, naturally thereafter, meditation. In fact, my time in and out of the hospital in Hawai’i included stints with energy healers, lomilomi and la’au lapa’au practictioners, and a Hawaiian healer named Papa Henry Auwae. These experiences also started me on my own path to practicing energy healing. I remember being in the hospital that first time on a heparin drip (I hadn’t even had my near-death experience yet) and saying to my dear friend, “You know, when I get out of here, I’m going to be different. How could I ever go back to being the same?” She had rather sweetly (though cynnically) said, “But you will.” She was clearly speaking from some experience that was her own, and I remember being a little disheartened. But her experience was not my experience, and sure enough, nothing was ever the same for me again. I was still challenged by some of the same things and still fell short in some of the same ways (I wasn’t miraculously advanced to spiritual sage), but nothing—truly nothing—was as it had been.

I think we choose the challenges and hardships that we face in this life—based on how our spirit wants to grow. Things don’t just happen to us—we choose them. Even the worst ones. It’s not a cognitive decision but an agreement made out in the ether…before we take our bodies in this lifetime. We agree to the things that will grow us, and as we know, all growth comes with some degree of pain—and the faster it is, the more intensely it hurts. Being pregnant and giving birth is a perfect example of this.

I experienced a loss at the age of 18 that nearly undid me. I would never have chosen it on a conscious level. But that loss informs my love for my husband and my children to this day. It is so intertwined with who I am, so much a part of how I love, I can’t imagine who I would be had I not experienced it. That boy who died my freshman year in college, whose love was hard and fleeting—he must have agreed to teach me about losing in that way. And I must have agreed to learn it…and to teach him whatever thing it was he had it in his spiritual heart to learn from me. That’s a core belief of mine.

Similarly, this year of fear and health challenges and intermittent pain…it was a year of growing and shifting. One that changed me on a profound level. One that, alongside that 18-year-old-girl loss, forever informs the way I love and the way I see my life. It showed me how we can participate in our own healing…or not. And it unlocked something in me that has to do with Spirit. I don’t know any other way to describe it.

So this week we went on a long paddle, my surf lifesaving team and I. Four women in a canoe and paddling as hard as we could. We were aiming for a tiny, sea-lion inhabited island I was eager to see from the water and close up, but the wind kicked up, and we had to turn back. We weren’t in danger, but there was no time for resting. I could feel my arm swelling a bit, but it wasn’t a time to be carried by the other women in the boat. We just had to keep paddling. Plus, my mind was firmly set on blood clotting being a thing of my distant past. To make a long story short, my symptoms that evening and the next day were quite similar to those of twenty-two years ago, though not as extreme. Six hours in the ER resulted in blood tests that revealed I did not have a new clot. Just the old one and a lot of very tired collateral veins. But the conclusion was that I would no longer be able to paddle.

I was loving doing that. It was making me feel so alive, so invigorated, and stronger than I had felt in a long time. I was connecting with other women here in New Zealand, where I am only beginning to know people. And I was competing again…something I hadn’t done for many, many years. I realise, now that I am 49 years old, that I was never a competitive person. My family used to say I was extremely competitive, and because they said it, I believed them. But it wasn’t beating people that I enjoyed. It was doing my best. Yes, I liked to win (who doesn’t?), but the competition was always with myself. In the surf canoe, I was competing against my self…my own fitness and endurance and strength were what was on the line. That and coming through for my team.

So it’s done. No more paddling for me. I’m old enough that I don’t feel the need to resist the situation. I can give up this thing without too much agony. Just a little disappointment. Giving up surf canoe paddling is different than it would have been to give up surfing when I was 27. For so many reasons. I like to think, though, that the wisdom of age is not least among them. I am old enough to know that a “setback” is completely relative. It might even be a misnomer. Perhaps I’ve simply been “set over.” Shifted slightly in my course. Not by anything outside of me, but by my own plans for my spiritual self. It wouldn’t be the first time.

How like a handful of wet sand this thing must actually be—the way the space from which it is removed immediately fills in with more and other water and sand. It is impossible to say what new permutations will present themselves in this new set of conditions, different only (so far) in the absence of this one activity. Who knows what this rearrangement of elements will actually yield. It’s exciting to think about. And I know from experience that I have only to keep living, keep being open to the knowing, to find out.

My Girl

photo: @dtait_photography

Today a “memory” came up on the Facebook feed, and it brought me to my knees. It’s hard for some people to believe that a dog can have such a profound impact on one’s life, and yet here was Bella, my beautiful yellow lab who passed away last summer, and along with her the truth: I loved her with a fierce kind of love not unlike the love I feel for my children…and her love for me was perfect. Like no human love can probably ever be. A dog’s devotion is peerless, as is her patience. She doesn’t judge you or get angry with you about your choices. She just loves. Bella would lie on my feet while I Zoom-taught my students and Zoom-met with administrators, and called parents, and, all the while, made our plans for our move to New Zealand. She knew that pretty much every day, I would eventually take her outside for her walk, and that there would be considerable snuggling when that was done.

As we prepared to make our move, I didn’t know exactly what was going to happen with Bella, but I knew that it was time for my family to go. I called pet transport company after pet transport company, and it wasn’t looking good. Bella Patrice was twelve years old and ailing; while most of the time she seemed fine, she would have these attacks that would leave her gasping for air and even foaming at the mouth. They came on when she got excited and behaved too energetically (which happened almost every time we walked her down to the beach from our Aptos home). The news from pet transport companies was grim. There was hardly anyone flying pets to New Zealand just then, because there were hardly any people going there since the borders had closed—the best quote I got was $9,000 for her one-way flight. Beyond that was the hard truth that such a long flight would be very hard on Bella. I knew in my heart of heart, that she might not even make it if I chose to subject her to it. Still I went through the motions of sorting out her rabies vaccinations and preparing her for a journey. As we have seen a lot during this pandemic, we have to just keep behaving like things are happening…all the way up until they don’t.

We just kept on preparing for our migration, which was pretty challenging with nothing open (this was before we sort of worked out curb side service and in the middle of Governor Newsom’s first strict lockdown—even Salvation Army and Goodwill couldn’t help us offload all of the things we were not bringing with us). Bella moved (and napped) around us as we gave away and sold almost everything we owned via Facebook marketplace, leaving items on the doorstep to be picked up by people who had paid by Venmo or agreed to leave money on the chair placed there for that purpose. The smaller items went when I announced one day on Facebook that all the rest of our household items could be picked up from our driveway for free. Bella and I watched out the window as a slow parade of families came to sort through our belongings and pack them into their cars for use in their own homes. I still didn’t know how things were going to shake out with Bella then, but our family friend Dave had said he’d keep her “until she could fly to join us.” This was the charade we were playing.

During this time, there was a particularly horrendous episode for Bella, where I was certain that she was dying. We were down at the beach and she had just been splashing happily in the water. One minute she was barking for me to throw a stick, and the next her bowels had let go, and we were lying on the beach together, her tongue lolling out of her mouth, gray and lifeless. My husband and I had called our son Rakai to drive the car down, so that we could somehow bring her home. “Bring a blanket,” I heard Dwaine say, anticipating how difficult it would be to carry our 75 pound fur baby up the long beach. When Rakai arrived and walked out to where he could see us, I know his heart sank, because what he saw could only mean the end of his lifelong friend (we got Bella in New Zealand when Rakai was only 9—now he was 21). It was his mother draped over the lifeless body of his yellow lab on the sand, weeping. I was telling her, “It’s okay, Bella. It’s okay to go. We’ll be okay now.” I wanted her to stop fighting and stop suffering. I wanted her to stop trying to take care of me and be at peace. Her body had clearly failed her. But when Rakai came down to where we lay, Bella perked up. She got to her feet and, though a little unsteady at first, started to walked toward him. I couldn’t believe it. She wagged her tail and looked looked back at me and my husband as if to say, “Are you guys coming?” When we got to the car, she hopped into the hatchback.

That was the last beach walk. I was too afraid to brave the very steep hill down to the beach any more. Walks were now limited to the gardens around our home and neighbourhood. Bella would still get excited and winded and go into her wheezing a bit, but she was so happy being outside and rolling in the grass. It made me think about how I will feel as a very old woman (which is less and less of a stretch these days!) and how I think I won’t want to be deprived of the things I love just to lengthen my days on the planet. What good are more days without the sun on my face and the ocean air on my skin? Even if I only get to experience these things from, say, a wheelchair one day, I believe I will long for them with every cell in my body. So, projecting my own thoughts in this way and having them affirmed by her delight each time we walked in the gardens, I continued to take Bella out and about, trying to keep her from exerting herself too much.

Meanwhile, the date of our departure was approaching. Inwardly I knew that Bella would never come to New Zealand, and that grieved me acutely, but we continued to plan on bringing her down to “Uncle Dave.” Each night she would curl up next to me for bed, and I would stoke her fur and love her up. She didn’t seem worried or agitated about all the changes in her environment…just happy to be by my side and close. She got lots of treats in those days, even though we had been scolded by a vet for overfeeding her. She didn’t seem to be holding the weight the same way anymore anyway; the bones of her hips were just visible…like a little old lady. Three days before we were to drive her down to L.A., we took Bella to a park where we were meeting my parents for a picnic. We had been incredibly stringent about non-contact. It was early on when we thought that any little touch could transmit the dreaded virus, and so we had hardly even seen my family, even though they lived very nearby. This seemed like a way we could manage to spend time together without fear of transmitting the virus to one another. Our departure date was approaching, after all, and the good bye, which was long and difficult, had already begun.

We hadn’t been at the park for 10 minutes when Bella had her final attack. She was so happy to be out there on the grassy field, in the sunshine, with so many of her favourite people around her (she had a special affinity for my parents who loved her and always treated her like a canine queen). The rest of the story is too hard to tell. There was a frantic and tearful race to the veterinary hospital, where of course we couldn’t go in with her, hours of waiting for test results, the somber phone consultation with the vet, and finally, our acquiescence to the difficult truth that Bella’s time had come. My mom came with me into the little room that was set aside for sending pets into the ever after. I knelt on the floor of that room and held Bella’s face in my hands as she softened into her final farewell. There was a lot of sobbing. A lot of snot. So many tears. I had known for many years that it would be hard to say goodbye to Bella, but I never imagined it would hurt quite so much.

These moments in the veterinary hospital with my mom, and the hours with my mom and dad waiting with us for the news…these were Bella’s last gifts to me. My parents, struggling to accept my decision to leave the country yet again (it could only have felt like their vagabond daughter once again disappointing them with her wanderlust) didn’t know how to be around me. The bitterness and hurt were overwhelming, and the picnic lunch we had arranged was likely to be awkward at best. Perhaps it was the trauma of seeing Bella collapse as she did, the vision of their daughter sobbing into her dog’s ears—but something shifted. Something broke loose. We hung out together (masked, of course) in our back yard. My dad held my gaze, though I know it pained him. He brought out his golf clubs and taught me with a whiffle ball how to swing (I had made a reservation to go golfing with him for the upcoming Father’s Day, and I had never even touched a club before). He did his best to distract me and to show me his love, and he and my mom both stuck around, even though our impending departure hung in the air around our ears and was heavy on their hearts. My dad also made it clear what he would do in our situation (even though the vet had not even called yet with our options). “I would never let her suffer like that again,” he said gravely, and I knew that, even if she recovered today, it would be selfish if our actions put Bella in the position to have another such attack.

Ultimately, we decided to put her down. Even typing that brings a flood of tears. I still can’t believe how much it aches. My mom stayed in that little room with me, listening to my mask-muffled sobs and stroking Bella’s shoulders, her ears. It was a moment of healing between me and my mom. Perhaps it reminded her of my vulnerability. That no matter how I move on the earth, I am still just her little girl. I am, too. Still just my parents’ little girl most of the time. She let me take as much time as I needed. Bella was long gone by the time we finally left the room with Bella’s pink collar hanging in my hand. Out in the parking lot, we rejoined the rest of the family. Our masked nurse wanted to know if we wanted Bella’s ashes, but they wouldn’t arrive to us until we were already gone (our flight was in a mere week). We were so forlorn, so paralysed. It was a profound moment of letting go. “No,” we told her. And, “Thank you.”

I have Bella’s pink collar in the bottom drawer of my dresser here in New Zealand. My heart contracts every time I see it, but I can’t put it away-away. Not yet. I still don’t know what to do with it, but I can’t part with it. It seems stupid to bury it, but “stupid” has really undergone a revision in my mind. These days, I find almost nothing done in earnest “stupid.” Perhaps that is what I will do. Gather my little family, whom I know grieves her as intensely as I do, and have ceremony. Say goodbye as a unit…it’s the only way Bella ever knew us. Even when Taiaroa was off at university or Rakai at snowboarding competitions and training, our little “chuther” always came back together, as it still always does…but now with the addition of our beautiful “Joe” (Angelina), who has grown and enlivened and enriched our family in ways we never imagined. Yes, we will all be together soon. I’m trying not to hold my breath until then, but it’s hard. Together we will say goodbye to Bella and speak our love into the ether: We love you, Bella. You were perfect in your little yellow lab body, all love and light, and we know you still exist somewhere out there. You healed us and you gave yourself to us, again and again. We are humbled and so grateful, my beautiful girl. Thank you.

*”chuther” refers to what Rakai and Taiaroa used to say when they were very small: “Let’s just hang out with our chuther,” they would say. It stuck. : )

The Sum of Wills

Image by Myriams-Fotos on Pixabay

Today I am tired of reading the news and making conjectures as to how things will turn out…around the pandemic. Around the inauguration. Around people’s understanding of what’s really going on. But something I read this week made me take pause in my wondering. It made me change tack a little bit too. It was Mike Pence’s letter to Nancy Pelosi explaining why he would not be invoking the 25th Amendment against President Trump.

Like most of the people who are (still) friends with me on social media, after watching live the insurrection and attack on the American Capitol for an entire day (it was like a train wreck—I couldn’t look away—plus, I knew that history was unfolding before my horrified eyes, and that seemed like something I didn’t want to read in the past tense), my impulse was to demand that Donald Trump be removed from office immediately. I mean, I wanted him to be removed from presidential candidacy immediately after the recording broke of him bragging that he can grab women “by the pussy” with impunity, so what do I know? Still, holding him accountable for inciting this nefarious business at the Capitol, it seemed like something even the misogynists in the country could get behind. How could we tolerate a sitting president so clearly inciting and encouraging an actual attack, an attempted coup, on the nation’s Capitol?

And then I read the letter. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all about the impeachment. Let’s not reward an essential enemy of the State with lifelong income, personal protection, travel budgets, and my favourite: the freedom to run for office again. And let’s make sure there is no equivocation around prosecuting him, to the full extent of the law, for crimes now known and to be uncovered as the protections of being a sitting president are stripped away from him. But Pence speaks in this letter in such a level-headed way about two things: first, he points out that “under [the American] Constitution, the 25th Amendment is not a means of punishment or usurpation” but rather a means to “address Presidential incapacity or disability.” Indeed. Fast forward to two weeks from now when Joe Biden is the sitting president and his enemies in Congress (I know, it’s strong language, but I think recent events have warranted it) decide to call him unfit for office, make it a “judgment based on a comment or behaviour that they don’t like,” rather than on a “medical decision.” Okay, okay, so right now the Democrats have the majority in both the House and the Senate, but as we have also seen, as evidenced by recent events, such power can swing in an instant (or with a single state’s Senate race, as it were). And then what? And what about the next president that elected officials don’t like? What is to stop them from making a similar decision based on lesser offences with the removal of Trump from office as the precedent?

Pence also points out that “last week [he himself] did not yield to pressure to exert power beyond [his] constitutional authority to determine the outcome of the election” and declares that he will “not now yield to efforts in the House of Representatives to play political games at a time so serious in the time of our Nation.” Okay, so I don’t know that I’d call invoking the 25th “playing games,” and of course I don’t trust the purity of his intentions when he says, “I do not believe that such a course of action is in the best interest of our Nation” (he would be the only politician I trusted to tell the unmitigated truth if I did). Still, I believe he is right when he says that invoking the 25th against Trump right now would “set a terrible precedent.” Always, when you flip perspectives, put your own ideals in the opposite corner, the receiving end, of the action being considered, you have to cool your jets a bit. I don’t think this is what Pence is up to in saying this, but it’s the truth that is revealed by his words.

Plus, will the final outcome of invoking the 25th be so very different from that of a successful impeachment? And why the rush? He’s been utterly emasculated through the removal of his platform, his megaphone, as it were. And don’t kid yourself that he is being censored. Right now it’s looking like he may be charged with treason. This isn’t someone we invite to address his followers en masse, and yet it remains: the man has access to the media and could address the nation—and the world—in an appropriate way if he were to choose to take the high road for once in his life. That’s not what censorship looks like. But I’ll tell you what is oppressive and fascist-leaning: removing a president from office without due process. Plus, which will be more damaging? Having Trump in the presidency for the final 12 days of his term, or dousing his irrational, radicalized, riotous followers with new fuel for their vitriol in the remaining days before the inauguration of the new, incoming president? It’s a fine line. Make no mistake: I am not now and never have been a Trump fan. I was mortified when he won his first election. But I am a fan of democracy, and that of the U.S. is on the line even as I type these words.

And this got me thinking about all of these people storming the Capitol, of the man shouting in one viral video: “We were invited here! We were invited by the president!” You know, he believes that. That’s the bottom line. All judgments aside—of how he arrived at that, of his level of intelligence for following someone like Trump—you can’t fight against a core belief. Fights against core beliefs are often to the death. Hence the stark fact that the greatest number of deaths inflicted for a single cause historically reflects those deaths that have been perpetrated in the name of God (I choose the English word for that entity here, but of course there are many others). We’re not looking at a simple fix. Of course we want one. And one that is expeditious. We’ve had a long haul. It’s why so many of us are willing to receive a vaccine that has been rushed in its preparation and approval for mass use. I will probably get it when it becomes available, but it’s only because I don’t know what else to do. It seems, with all things considered, to be our best option. Of course we want swift justice, too, when it comes to the president. But what is justice in this case? Donald Trump does not exist in a vacuum. Whatever is done to him in retaliation for his ineptitude, his inability to put others before his fragile ego, his deceit and bigotry—it will have lasting and far-reaching effects, not all of them desirable.

Tolstoy wrote, in his behemoth work War and Peace, “The movement of [hu]mankind, proceeding from a countless number of human wills, occurs continuously.” He goes on to say, “To comprehend the laws of this movement is the goal of history. But in order to comprehend the laws of the continuous movement of the sum of all individual wills, human reason allows for arbitrary, discrete units.” Tolstoy refers here to the error of attributing any historic action to the will of a single leader (or to any individual at all). The context is a discussion about how people often attribute the French “loss” at the Battle of Borodino (and the subsequent burning of Moscow) under Napoleon to Napoleon having a cold on that day and therefore not giving good “instructions.” He posits that not only did Napoleon’s cold not have anything to do with the outcome of that battle, Napoleon himself had nothing to do with it. Tolstoy says that in response to Napoleon’s orders, his very hungry soldiers “had nothing left to do but cry ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ and go to fight, in order to find food and rest as victors in Moscow. Which meant it was not as a result of Napoleon’s order that they killed their own kind. And it was not Napoleon who ordained the course of the battle, because nothing of his disposition was carried out and during the battle he did not know what was happening in front of him. Which meant also that the way these people were killing each other occurred not by the will of Napoleon, but went on independently of him, by the will of the hundreds of thousands of people who took part in the common action. To Napoleon it only seemed that the whole thing happened by his will.”

The parallel between what is being said here about Napoleon and what is clearly true of Trump today is striking. It’s satisfying to take some of the “credit” away from him, I admit. You’re not that powerful, Donald, I want to say. But it’s more than that. What has been unleashed is well beyond his control and whereas he might share some of the values of this rabble, they are not in any way taking their ideological direction from him. That is not to take away culpability either. It is undeniable that Trump’s words to the people assembled at that rally on January 6th were inflammatory and obviously responsible for the entitlement those people felt as they stormed the Capitol, vandalized its sacred halls, and perpetrated violence that resulted in the deaths of five people. And yet…how much control does he really have over their movement? And how much of what has been unleashed will actually disappear with his fall from “grace” and removal from power. I’m afraid the answer is quite simply, not that much. We are a collective (the American public) that includes, for better or worse, the collective Trump extremists…all of us individuals, arbitrary, discrete units with no greater power, alone, to change the course of history than any other.

While I know that Tolstoy is arguing for a deterministic view of life and suggesting that all individual power to direct the course of history is illusory, even in those like Napoleon, because “the course of the world is predestined from on high,” I begin to turn this over in my head a bit differently. I think that the course of the world, and the U.S. as a microcosm of that world, is determined by that collective whole that is propelled not by something outside itself but by an energy that is derived from the sum and coordination of that arbitrary, discrete many. Tolstoy wrote, in that same work, that

to every administrator, in peaceful, unstormy times, it seems that the entire population entrusted to him moves only by his efforts, and in this consciousness of his necessity every administrator finds the chief reward for his labors and efforts. It is understandable that, as long as the historical sea is calm, it must seem to the ruler-administrator in his frail little bark, resting his pole against the ship of people and moving along with it, that his efforts are moving the ship. But once a storm arises, the sea churns up, and the ship begins to move by itself, and then the delusion is no longer possible. The ship follows its own enormous, independent course, the pole does not reach the moving ship, and the ruler suddenly, from his position of power, from being a source of strength, becomes an insignificant, useless, and feeble human being.

So Trump is left with his flaccid pole (sorry, I couldn’t resist that one), and the truth is, our ship is moving along. We’re in a storm. And it can’t be said, now or in any future moment, that he is wholly to blame for this predicament. The most beautiful thing to come out of the debacle of his presidency is perhaps the fact that to the same extent that white supremacists have been emboldened to speak and indeed to act, black and brown people and their allies have been emboldened to speak and act to oppose the racially oppressive climate of the country that surrounds them. They have been empowered to point out unabashedly that things have, in fact, never been great in America if you’re a minority or a woman. They are speaking out and with a much more diverse audience that is primed to receive their message and their demands for change. It’s powerful. It’s real. This ship is moving. The seas are high, and there’s not a lot of control over our movements as yet, but we are definitely rolling.

And here’s something: I see posts of Kamala Harris’ unmistakably brown and black family members—her as a child in goofy little dresses and braids surrounded by the adult women in her life who look like her too. These are popping up on screens everywhere, and there are little girls all over the country, all over the world, seeing a Vice President who looks like them. Yes, we have another old, white, male president with some shady personal/familial history. What’s new? But he has a long history of bipartisanship, and he has chosen Kamala. She’s not perfect either, but here’s the thing: no leader is going to be. And if you ask Leo Tolstoy, perfection in one human, even a leader, won’t help us (conversely, depravity in one, even a leader, won’t end us either).

It is our collective energy that propels this ship, so the time is now to look inward and to decide what our personal contribution to that powerful whole will be. Will we send out a contagious lovingkindness while standing our ground, insisting that all lives matter and that today the ones that have been clearly undervalued in our country for so long must come first in our efforts to assert this fact? Or will we continue to “build walls” and allow our fledgling alliances to be destroyed by hateful rhetoric and ingrained habits of exerting power over others? It’s also the time to look outward and recognise that all of these other views and voices, not just our own and not just those of the downtrodden—they are part of the collective thing that comprises us. We’re going to have to figure out how to make some sort of sense in the great noise we are making, in the chaotic and divergent actions we have been taking. We all have some choices to make, I reckon. It’s time.

The inauguration of the new leader of the United States of America will happen this week. Right in the middle of the storm. There is change afoot, and we are surely moving, if not yet in a clear direction. As we cling to the decks and get washed over with the waves of this wild moment, may we understand that we are still afloat…all of us, together. May we also know the value of our own positive, loving, inclusive contribution to the sum of individual wills. May we send that contribution into the universe with words and actions that will, in time, right our ship and bring us HOME.

Losing Sleep

photo: @dtait_photography

I’ve been having trouble sleeping lately…not gonna lie. And feeling ill at ease. Not out of the ordinary, all things considered, I suppose, but there are times when I am better at shaking it off. I feel nervous about what’s happening in the U.S., even though I am miles and miles away. I feel anxious that my son is there, not to mention all of my extended family and much of my husband’s. While the political landscape seems to be imploding (it might be more accurate to say the Republican party is imploding, but we all know it will affect the entire country and its democracy)—while all this is happening, I am watching the news of hospital after hospital filling up with patients who have Covid (and losing staff because they, too, are falling ill). I am also watching people continue to deny the validity of the virus itself. It often takes rock bottom for those people who resist changing to take note of the destructive nature of their habits/beliefs, but how many people have to die before the people who are resisting these realities hit their rock bottom and change their tune?

I recently had a friend (a DEAR friend, by the way, one I respect and adore and in whose kindness I would rest my soul) send me a quote from a fitness expert/public figure. Here’s what it said: “The infection to survival rate for COVID is 99.96%. That means the public have been tricked into giving their freedom, liberties, and rights away for a 0.04% chance that they won’t die.” So I’m going to ignore the grammar here and assume what he’s saying is that people are being asked to wear masks and cease gathering indoors with people not in their immediate bubbles and essentially stop engaging in activities that would perpetuate and accelerate the spread of the virus on the 0.04% chance that such behaviour should kill them. First of all, I’m no statistician, but I can tell you that when it’s you, it’s 100% every time. “Statistics, shmatistics,” a very wise friend once said to me. It doesn’t matter if the odds of dying from a disease are 0.04% or 99%, if it’s your mother or father or, God forbid, your child, it’s 100% for you, and that’s that. Also, no one is being asked to do anything forever. And no one is being asked to “give up their freedom.” They are being asked to behave responsibly…to protect those people (the elderly, the immunocompromised, etc.) for whom the chances of dying from this disease are far greater than 0.04%. They are being asked to think like a community. Like a tribe. I know that most people of European descent are so far removed from their roots that they have no memory (epigenetic or otherwise) of being part of a tribe, but maybe it’s time for all of us to re-learn. To remember, as it were, how to care about others as much as we do about ourselves. To be the people.

What we have with this quote is someone who thinks he lives in a vacuum. You don’t. We don’t. What we have here is a voice of privilege. If you are privileged (and many of us are), it’s not your fault. You are lucky. Blessed. But we have a responsibility to think about the underprivileged among us. Like those who live in a 700 square foot house with 9 family members (for my metric system readers, that’s about 65 square metres for 10 people). Yes, I have a former student, let’s call her Leticia, doing this in Watsonville, and her situation is typical in her neighbourhood. Of those 10 family members, four are “essential workers.” One cares for the elderly in a home—God forbid they should contract the virus. One is out bagging groceries and two are picking fruit so that we can continue to have our organic berries (delivered to our homes by another essential worker, because we can afford the delivery fees and appropriate tip) in our breakfast as the pandemic rages beyond our doors.

When someone in Leticia’s household gets ill, there is no isolating. They will be on top of each other, as they always are, and if Abuela (Grandmother) gets sick, there may or may not be room at the hospital for her to receive care (because so many people are ‘exercising their rights’ in California—to gather, to ditch the mask, to disregard public health guidelines—and have fallen ill with Covid-19). Not to mention the fact that no one in the house has health insurance. Who will pay if one of them does need care? And will they be first served if they are in line among countless others with varying abilities to pay, with a range of skin colours, with and without “papers” to be in the country at all? While the privileged exercise their ‘right’ to resist wearing a mask, Leticia’s family is left vulnerable and naked. They have lost one uncle so far. They brace themselves for the next wave of Covid in the wake of all those who wouldn’t be ‘controlled’ so much as to miss a single holiday with loved ones, all the while openly and shamelessly risking the lives of people like Leticia and her loved ones.

I can’t say that the voice of privilege, though it is sometimes mine, is one I can listen to right now…or perhaps ever again. Once you have seen your privilege, you can’t unsee it. But if you haven’t yet seen it, now, when so much is on the line, might be a good time. When hospitals threaten to overflow with patients so that even those with issues unrelated to Covid won’t be treated—that’s a good time. And the disparity between poverty and wealth is the bottom line. Yes, of course race is a factor—our broken systems have perpetuated an incredibly inequitable “playing field,” that is no secret. And it is for this reason that the lines of poverty and wealth are so frequently and clearly drawn along the lines of race in our communities. And yes, the poor are suffering disproportionately from shut-downs, too. Restaurant staff and retail workers—they’re out of jobs, too, and many of them don’t have a savings to fall back on. They are starting to go hungry. Until those with greater positions of privilege start thinking about someone other than themselves, about something greater than their own convenience and “rights,” this won’t change.

So yes, I’m losing sleep. I watch the news and see that people who can’t stand the thought of losing the support of the 70+ million constituents who actually cast their vote to keep Trump are STILL pretending that Trump was robbed in the election that so clearly ended his term in office. They know that no change can come of their actions, but they want to come out the other side with the support of that rabble. I get it, and yet the unrest, the actual violence, that is being fomented by its continuation is a cost I can’t get my head around willingly accruing. And I’m not there. Maybe that is actually worse. Maybe if I was there it would be like the frog in the pot of boiling water thing—I wouldn’t feel the heat as it rises. But here in New Zealand, the virus continues to be under control not just because of level-headed, compassionate leadership but also because of a citizenry that is capable of thinking about their community. Because of people who don’t see participating in protecting the vulnerable as a violation of their rights. Why does this not speak to more Americans? I know we’re an island country, so the U.S. probably couldn’t achieve the total eradication of community cases of Covid the way New Zealand has, but they could be SO, SO much closer.

And when I think about the bigger picture, I am physically sickened. It’s a purge really. And it’s already well underway. 350,000+ people that were just not valued enough to protect. If you bristle at this, if it makes you angry because you lost a loved one, you SHOULD bristle at it. We know too much now. We know better. To say that Covid is a hoax, a non-threat, a 0.04% chance of dying (such a woefully misleading and limited statistic) in the face of even one of those lost people is profoundly disrespectful. To say it to the family of even one person who lost his/her fight with this disease—it’s cruel. I don’t know what’s happening in the U.S., but it scares me. I resolve not to watch American news, not to keep such close tabs on American politics and public health—but I can’t help it. I love my family and friends there. I want to see my parents and my brother again…in their homes. I want my son and his partner to make it out of there unscathed. And I want them all to be safe in the interim.

I’ve stopped using Melatonin to help me sleep. One shouldn’t cultivate such a dependence (it’s the same reason I quit caffeine). Now I’m on to tonics of chamomile and Californian poppy. I keep breathing, and I keep living. I keep in touch with family and friends, and I keep writing. My blog followers probably think I have a split personality—one minute a hopeful, uplifting message, the next a despondent, woeful rant. But that’s how it is right now. We’re all over the place. We’re allowed to be. I can only embrace all the feels, pleasant and painful. That’s what being human is like, especially during a crisis. These parts of me, they’re not the ALL of me. They’re my parts. And they all matter. Here’s hoping and praying that the tribe of America can embrace all its parts. That people can step outside of themselves for enough of a moment to see those less fortunate than themselves. Here’s hoping and praying that we can take care of each other by making some changes in our lives, even changes that constitute restriction. It’s only for now. It’s for the people.

A Promise About Grieving

    Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about grieving. What a year for it, right? There’s the loss that would happen anyway, just as we go along in life: the shock of an old friend stricken with disease, an accident that happens far away but close to the heart, an aged loved one slipping into the next life. Each year we can’t begin to imagine to whom and what…but they happen, and they are the “slings and arrows of [not so] outrageous fortune” that no human can anticipate but which we somehow survive from year to year. And this year—my god. On top of the terror and the anxiety—the departures. Oh. And not just the regular lifting off but the kind that reveal deep systemic fractures in countries and systems that before we thought we might trust…that before we were under the illusion were improving, becoming less elitist, less discriminating somehow.

    The world is in such a tenuous position—on the verge of a vaccination that may or may not prove safe, if indeed it is wholly effective, even against new strains of a virus that is relentless. Because in our best estimation it seems safer than not taking it, we roll up our sleeves for the needle. Whole countries are on the verge of economic collapse and everyone holds their breath to see. Billionaires expand their wealth while the masses go without. It’s apocalyptic in many ways, and yet we continue to hope for change. Will a shift in American leadership now, for example, be enough to save Americans from certain demise? Will the world somehow collude to make sure that everyone, not just a select few, have food and shelter and, indeed, viral immunity? So many questions. So much waiting. To see. To see.

    And then there’s the kind of grieving that comes not from a shock but from a slow change over time…a child no longer living at home, which then precipitates awareness of another kind of loss (one I quail to acknowledge, so ungrateful do I feel in calling it so, and yet—)…the loss of the infant/toddler/child that lives only in memory now, though in spirit through the adult child one loved up and into the current version of himself. And there is the loss of friends who have made a slow (or fast) exit from one’s life, whether intentionally or unintentionally—and there are family members who do the same. This kind of grief is quite intense, particularly when it involves a choice. I have moved all over the world, so it is usually my (nuclear) family and I who are doing the exiting…this year has proven to be no exception.

    What I’ve been doing lately is missing, actually grieving, the living. I miss my dad so much it hurts my heart—like actual pain in the place where my heart lives in my body. I miss my mom—I miss pleasing her and having her say multiple times a month how happy she is that I’m living near her. I’m grieving missing this year and maybe next of the growing and becoming my nephews are doing (and of course would be doing with me nearby, as well—all out of my sight). But still. It’s what we’re all doing, I think. We have to allow ourselves this. And we have to allow that there is more suffering, arguably much greater than our own…and it’s all connected.

Certainly the common denominator is Covid. Without question, this disease, ushered in on a virus, is responsible for so much of the hurt. We have lost loved ones, and we have lost livelihoods—stability and predictability seem like distant memories for so many of us. And our loved ones have made their crossing to the spirit world alone, it seems. This hurts the worst of all. We picture them alone in a hospital bed (maybe a kind nurse wrapped head to toe in PPE has taken a moment to show us their faces on a screen). We have talked into our computer microphones and prayed to be heard, only to watch our loved ones fade away from the voices we lift to them. This is a unique kind of grief, I think to myself, but then again, aren’t they all? Unique, that is. Because each time it is a different configuration…different relationships to the dying or departing, different circumstances, different filters of past experiences of loss. And now this: losing during a global pandemic.

People are continuing to die. Families continue to suffer. Individuals continue to be alone. And more and more, they feel alienated in their effort to care for their community by abiding by such rules as are put in place to protect the vulnerable. Suddenly they are sycophants, liberals, radicals…for wearing a mask or staying home. It’s such a catch-22, because like everyone else, all they want to do is travel and meet up with friends and family, and yet for the benefit of this raging, suspicious, ungrateful rabble, they don’t. It must be so tempting to throw in the towel. “Fine,” they might say, “you win.” But what if that one moment of weakness resulted in someone’s grandmother, who maybe survived multiple wars while championing a Civil Rights Movement, dying of Covid. Having her light snuffed out because we couldn’t take it any more and let our guard down just so. It’s that arbitrary. And we’d never know it, but what if…

So there’s the grief around losing our way of being, too. So many, I am hearing, are finding the “silver lining,” as it were. Expressing gratitude for moments not sought but granted amid this shit storm…to spend quality time with those we are closest to. To focus on the things that matter: our spirituality, our gardens, our health, our children. But these sentiments are also the sentiments of privilege. They are not the things my friends who have lost their jobs and are struggling to keep the lights on are saying. They are not the things that women caught up in domestic violence with nowhere to go but “home” are saying. And what of the grief that they experience? Sometimes it’s too much to consider.

Here is what I do know. I have seen, time and again, evidence—straight up evidence—that our loved ones continue on beyond their earthly bodies. I don’t mean I think it’s a nice thing to say and that we should all try to imagine them in a ‘better place.’ I mean I have sat down with people, again and again, and invited their loved ones to show us that they are near, that they can see us and that they are not simply ‘gone.’ It sounds crazy, and God knows I never aimed to be a medium, but these things often land on us like so many butterflies, and they must be taken for the gifts that they are. Sometimes the evidence is a reference to something shared between only the person I am sitting with and the loved one in spirit. Sometimes it’s evidence that shows they can see them…in their homes or in their day to day lives. It’s never messaging for me. I don’t write it down or keep a recording. I just have the “sitter” take copious notes as I share whatever is shown to me in my mind’s eye. Most of the time it doesn’t mean much to me, and I don’t ask for detailed explanations. Seeing the faces of those I am ‘reading’ for wholly changed—transformed by the sudden certainty that their loved is near—that is enough.

I suspect some of you will judge me for this one. Yeah, it’s weird. Who would have thought? But it’s a gift I’ve learned to embrace, and desperate times call for desperate measures. When a person is dying, they are not fully confined to their body like when they are firmly rooted in the physical. They can travel, see things, actually BE with the people who are already grieving them. We are usually numb to such spiritual experience, unable to feel them when they are near, and even when we do we dismiss the feeling as wishful and “crazy.” But that doesn’t make it not so. First hand accounts of near death experience confirm this again and again, and indeed when I was dying on an E.R. gurney in the West Hawai’i Community Hospital over 20 years ago, I saw it too. I was not stuck inside my body, eyes closed and vitals flatlining. I was in the air around my body, I was with my husband, whose tears ultimately convinced me to stay—because I was young and strong and I could.

But these loved ones whose bodies have been wracked by Covid, who have let go—they have gone peacefully. Maybe they fought for a while. Maybe even fought hard—it’s the body’s desire to continue after all. But in the end, there was peace. I promise. Because death is only a portal. I saw it myself, and I’ve seen many who have crossed it. I’ve heard from them and shared their messages with their loved ones. I’m still learning, and most of the time it’s like a not-so-awesome phone connection, but every time, and I do mean every time, they manage to send something through that is a doozie. Something that flattens me and the person I’m reading for—shocks us into believing. Again and again it is confirmed.

For me, it’s become pretty normal. I don’t do it that much, because it’s tiring, and I do a lot of other things besides. But I almost never say no if I’m asked. It’s an honour to read for someone. It’s an honour that they ask me and an honour that their loved ones who have passed feel safe enough to communicate through me. It’s not scary (though I would have thought it would be) and it’s not bizarre. It just is. In a year that has shaken us out of so many of our normal ways of being and thinking, why not this? I write this because I know there are so many of us grieving right now, and we are struggling with departures that seem especially cruel. If I can say or write one thing to reassure even one of you, then I need to, right?

Also, it’s not such a risk, because there are not very many people reading my blog yet. You are one of my, like, ten readers. And a handful of you are ones who have given me a chance to practise this new gift (and yourselves become the recipients of the gift of communication from your departed loved ones). So I’m not THAT brave. But I am willing to share what I know if it means lessening the hurt for even one of you.

So yeah, we’re grieving. We’re grieving those who have died and those who still live but are far away from us. It’s where we are right now. But let us know that distance is a construct, and it only exists because we are in these bodies. I believe, along with those who follow the Sun Dance religion of the Sioux, the Cheyenne, and the Crow, that before we existed in these bodies, we were out in the ether…amazing, bright, light beings, perfect in every way except that we had no experience of limitation. For that reason, our imperfection, we took bodies on this planet for these lifetimes, so that we might experience limitation…the limitation of the body and the mind. Like how we can’t walk through a wall or fly, yes, but also like how we are sometimes misled by our own egos. How many times have I thought, “Really, Kim? Why would you ever say something like that out loud?” And yet I have said the thing out loud. It’s my limitation. I’m learning it. Embodying it. And when I’ve finished learning what it really means to be limited in these ways, I will pass back into that perfection from whence I came…the collective ALL that is so beautiful and serene, and I will be complete. Sound like heaven? Perhaps that is exactly what it is.

So here we are with so many of our loved ones becoming whole all around us, lifting off moment by moment for the perfection out of which they were first born. And it is our task to recognise that it is only our limitation that keeps us from celebrating their trajectory toward what is perfect and light and divine. No, we can’t fully grasp it. We’ll weep and mourn. It is in our human nature to do so. And it is justified, all things considered. But I promise you, we will see them again. I don’t know all the details. I only know what’s been shown to me. I actually exult in the fact that what I can imagine/conceive of is not all there is. So even though I don’t have all the answers, I have enough to ease me into a space that is more tranquil. More fearless. May we all soften into the experience of the divine, including the visitations of those who have gone before us. They are here. They are near. I promise.

Shakespeare Can Wait…and So Can My Ego

I’ve been reading The Body Keeps the Score again…by Bessel van der Kolk. I don’t think I got this far last time (p. 167 so far). That’s how I read non-fiction, at intervals. And also I know that things come back into my scope of awareness again for a reason, so I try to pay attention to that…when exposure to something begins to feel like a spiral. Like, Oh, there’s that book again, maybe I should grab it as it comes around this time. It’s a slow cyclone of things that I think my higher consciousness wants me to see or know. There are periods where I am busy, bogged down in the day to day, and I don’t see those things that are circling me in this way. But it’s been a while. 2020 has been a pretty conscious year for me and, I think, for others. It’s a waking up kind of year.

What’s been tugging at my consciousness more than anything else this go ‘round with The Body Keeps the Score is the enormity of the issue of childhood trauma. In New Zealand, the statistics on teen suicide are alarming to say the least. Of course, teen suicide is also a problem in other developed countries, but I found it shocking to learn that the rate of teen suicide (per 100 teens) is actually higher in New Zealand than in the U.S., where on the surface there seems to be a whole lot more to threaten one’s feelings of safety and security. That’s just the thing, though. It’s not about not feeling safe or secure in your community or your society at large. It’s about not feeling safe and secure in your home. Worse yet, it’s about having the people who are meant to provide care for you being the very ones who threaten your safety, who hurt you and who fail to protect you. That’s where childhood trauma comes from, and it affects so many more people than we ever knew.

Plus, it’s cyclical. People who are the victims of child abuse, whether it’s sexual, physical, emotional, or straight neglect, are much more likely to be involved with abuse as adults, either as perpetrators or as victims. Some of the statistics available in Van der Kolk’s book are incredibly eye opening, but the thing that maybe stands out the most to me (so far) is the concept of ACE scores and their broad implications. These are numbers that came out of a monumental investigation of Adverse Childhood Experiences, a collaboration between the CDC and Kaiser Permanente, with Robert Anda, MD, and Vincent Felitti, MD, as co-principal investigators. It was focused on the 17,421 Kaiser patients (out of 25,000 asked) who agreed to provide information about childhood events and whose responses to 10 carefully developed questions were then compared with the detailed medical records Kaiser kept on all patients. This was in 1990.

“The ACE study revealed that traumatic life experiences during childhood and adolescence are far more common than expected. The study respondents were mostly white, middle class, middle-aged, well educated, and financially secure enough to have good medical insurance, and yet only one-third of the respondents reported no adverse childhood experiences” (147). The questions were things like “Did a parent or other adult in the household often or very often swear at you, insult you, or put you down?” (one out of ten responded yes to this one). Also, “Did an adult or person at least 5 years older ever have you touch their body in a sexual way?” and “Did an adult or person at least 5 years older ever attempt oral, anal, or vaginal intercourse with you?” (over 25% said yes to each of these!). For each of ten questions, a positive answer equals one point. So, for example, two “yes” responses out of ten gives you an ACE score of 2. With ten questions in the study, the score is out of 10.

It was a pretty comprehensive study of a pretty homogenous group (imagine the impact of things like poverty, lack of access to education and healthcare, and systemic colonisation on these numbers; based on what I have seen in my classrooms, I’m guessing it would be staggering). What was perhaps most surprising to me was that in this study group, “87 percent scored two or more. One in six people had an ACE score of four or higher.” What was observed was that “when sorrows come, they come not as single spies but in battalions” (that’s Shakespeare, rather than Van der Kolk). Essentially, the sorts of abuse that our youth endure don’t happen in a vacuum. Most kids who experience trauma are experiencing multiple varieties of trauma at once. “And for each additional adverse experience reported, the toll in later damage increases.”

And guess where the effects of this childhood trauma first become evident? At school, of course. “More than half of those with ACE scores of four or higher reported having behavioural problems [at school], compared with 3 percent of those with a score of zero” (148). Of course. It is part and parcel of a trauma-informed approach that one does not start with the question, “What is wrong with this kid?” but rather with, “What has happened to this child?” And yet, in the classroom, where teachers are taxed with too-high rolls and not enough support, how often does this really happen? How often is it considered that the behaviours that are so disruptive to the learning of one’s class are incredibly accurate indicators of trauma? How often do teachers have the opportunity to truly consider this? And by opportunity, I mean the time, the wherewithal, the training, and the simple support of another adult to take over with the other children while s/he addresses the problematic behaviour in a compassionate, meaningful, trauma-informed way.

And then, how much opportunity is there for follow up? And how effective can that follow-up be? Our teachers are not trained therapists or clinicians. With these statistics, one teacher would be looking at having at least four kids (in a classroom of 24) who are experiencing FOUR OR MORE varieties of abuse. Take it to the middle and high school levels, where rolls are upwards of 30 to 35 kids in a classroom, we’re talking more like 5 or 6 individuals. Will she have the time and wherewithal to follow up on each one (remember, she has 5 classes, so make that 25 to 30 kids and their families)? And maybe most importantly, will she have the courage? How exactly does a teacher, trained to manage students and to teach specific curriculum, say English or Science, approach a family about the potential that their child is experiencing abuse? It’s daunting, to say the least, and at the risk of sounding repetitious, I don’t think it’s quite fair to simply relegate this responsibility to the teachers of the world. And yet, if it’s in the home that these abuses are being perpetrated, but time and again, research has shown that children do better left in their homes than taken out of them, even in cases of abuse…. Do you see what’s keeping me up at night?

And here’s what four or more varieties of abuse in childhood (an ACE score of 4 or higher) looks like in that child’s adulthood: a 66% prevalence of chronic depression for women (35% for men); a 7 times greater likelihood of becoming an alcoholic; a 33% percent likelihood of being the victim of rape (as opposed to 5 percent for those with an ACE score of zero). How about an ACE score of 6? For those with an ACE score of 6 or more, “the likelihood of IV drug use was 4,600% greater than for those with an ACE score of zero; they were also 5,000% more likely to attempt suicide than those who scored zero. And the list of high-risk behaviours associated with a high ACE score—you know, ones that can actually be predicted by the experience of a high level of trauma during childhood and adolescence?—it’s shocking: smoking, obesity, unintended pregnancies, multiple sexual partners, and STDs. And there are crazy correlations between high (6 or higher) ACE scores and straight-up health problems in adulthood (things like chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), ischemic heart disease , and liver disease): over 15% more than for those with an ACE score of zero. No pressure to identify and treat childhood abuse, but—-PRESSURE!

It’s overwhelming, really. Dr. Anda, in presenting the results of this study, declared that “the gravest and most costly public health issue in the U.S. is child abuse. He…calculated that its overall costs exceeded those of cancer or heart disease and that eradicating child abuse in America would reduce the overall rate of depression by more than half, alcoholism by two-thirds, and suicide, IV drug use, and domestic violence by three-quarters” (150). And here’s the kicker (that’s right, we haven’t even gotten to the kicker yet): there is NO DIAGNOSIS in the DSM-V ( The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) for childhood trauma. Such a diagnosis is what allows a patient to receive effective treatment, not to mention have their condition recognised and paid for by their health insurance, if they are lucky enough to have it.

This is why when I look at the referrals for my students on remand (caught up in the youth justice system and in the custody of the State) I see a laundry list of diagnoses that are really more explanations for (“surface phenomena" describing) the many behaviours that scream childhood trauma: ADHD, oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), intermittent explosive disorder, disruptive mood dysregulation disorder, and on and on and on. No child is born this way. Adults create this. And these are labels that the youth themselves have absorbed, and the language of these diagnoses punctuates the dialogue I have with them about their behaviours. Rather than address their victimisation, the best the mental health profession has been able to do (through no fault of individual practitioners but of the pervasive systems of which they are a part) is give these youth some labels that categorise their behaviours and indeed themselves. I would say these are band-aids, but it’s worse than that. They are obfuscations, veils laid over the fact of real hurt and real suffering that, if not addressed, will likely transmute itself into more violence in the world. It’s not their fault, but the risk is real.

And yet those who are not trauma-informed in their approach (which is simply a matter of a lack of training—everyone can learn this) insist that these youth are “getting away with something,” “not being held accountable for their actions,” or (and this is my favourite), “laughing at us.” I have to say, no one is laughing. And if there is laughter in this scenario, it is devoid of mirth. So I have come to realise, over my many years of working with kids in an educational setting, that what has to go is EGO. It just has no place in education, especially the education of at-risk youth. In my tiny educational space at the moment, progress is incremental. I am patient. I see some of the other adults in that space inwardly disagree and question my approach, which is one of infinite patience. It’s gentle. Compassionate. Soft. Could it be (and will it likely at first be) perceived as weakness by my students? Yes. Probably. But I can’t care about that. My job is to provide a corrective emotional experience (let’s call it a CEE). If such an experience, one of healing, comes, at least in the short term, with the cost of “respect”—the kind that silences a child or makes them behave a certain way—then so be it. Real respect, the kind that develops out of gratitude and understanding of one’s character—that comes in time. And if it happens that I never see it, So. Be. It. That’s not why I’m here.

I can’t erase what for some of my students are years of hurt and suffering. I can’t even provide therapy or direct mental health treatment. But I can acknowledge them. I can SEE them. For the individuals that they are (ones who sometimes lash out, sure, or who sometimes have trouble focusing, but as ones who are creative and sentient beings with infinite potential, too? Absolutely). Moment by moment, I can replace those experiences that have involved an adult who didn’t see them, who punished instead of investigated, who yelled instead of soothed, with experiences that build trust and ultimately confidence in a system that has largely failed them. Am I completely overwhelmed by the task? Of course I am. I’d be a fool if I wasn’t. But I have to keep trying. And this is the thing: I am undoing damage. What if this approach were taken (and supported) across the board in schools everywhere? I don’t know that it would be possible to eradicate the need for a role like the one I currently occupy (educating kids who have committed criminal acts and are now in the custody of the State), but it seems worth trying. I’d find another job. Seriously. We should try.

And in trying, I have to be honest. I don’t even know exactly where to start. The problem with the American Psychiatric Association rejecting a clear and well-supported proposal to include “Developmental Trauma Disorder” in its manual of legitimate diagnoses is one that is well beyond my scope of influence, and yet I know that “if you pay attention only to faulty biology and defective genes as a cause of mental problems and ignore abandonment, abuse, and deprivation, you are likely to run into as many dead ends as previous generations did blaming it all on terrible mothers” (167). So I don’t have control over the fact that young people are going to continue to arrive at my little school with multiple diagnoses that amount to a limiting set of observations about their behaviours and don’t allow the larger issue of their childhood trauma to be addressed. I have to, for now, let that go. What I do have control over is the inflection in my voice. My response to impulsive or even outrageous behaviour. My patience in moving toward more academic material. If I’m patient, we’ll get there. Shakespeare can wait. What is needed is slow progress facilitated by one corrective emotional experience at a time. What’s my rush? These are human lives we’re talking about. Someone’s babies. And quite frankly, someone’s future parents, too.

If I can help even one of them heal themselves enough to function “normally” in the world—that is, without hurting anyone else, including their own eventual offspring, who is to say how many people I can impact? Potential victims no longer potential recipients of behaviours that have grown out of abuse and neglect. Their families. The families of the youth themselves. It’s kind of endless. I always say in the classroom that we can’t know a shadow history. The strand of history that would have unfolded had one single thing (one act, one decision or word) been different. We can only know the history that is, the one that unwinds out of our actual actions and words. And yet, those shadows exist. We have to keep dragging each other out into the light. Away from the shadows of ignominy and suffering. This is one way to do it. Midwives and doulas who help babies to be birthed peacefully…they do it. Teachers who see their students as full of infinite possibility and who address “misbehaviour” with compassion and inquiry…they do it. Bosses who seek to understand undesirable behaviours rather than punish them…even they do it.

Every time we take a trauma-informed approach, whether it’s with a child or with an adult, we heal something in the universe. There is so much pain out there. People, youth, are taking their own lives. It’s a crazy time. We just have to do what we can. For each other. In the classroom, Shakespeare can wait. And so can my ego.

I recommend Van der Kolk’s book, for sure. I have learned so much by reading it. You could also start by checking out this Ted Talk by Dr. Nadine Burke Harris. It’s a good one. We just have to keep sharing these things, right? As they come into our scope of awareness. Pluck the things out of the air that seem to keep circling back on you. It could be it’s time to listen.

Living the Questions

“I want to beg you, as much as I can…to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” ~Rainer Maria Rilke

This is a quote I have carried in my heart for so many years. I remember writing a blog post back in 2011 that was called “Answering Year.” A little paper called the Raglan Chronicle published it and had just agreed to let me do a regular column for them when we found ourselves whisked back to California from New Zealand…for so many reasons, all of them right. There were so many answers that year. Everywhere I looked, answers to questions, and yet still more questions arrived to take the places of those answered and evaporated.

I suppose that’s what one’s thirties are often like. It’s a time that many of us become parents for the first time (I was actually 27 for the birth of my first and then 29 for my second son, but close enough). That put me in my early thirties for those wild few years where you’re trying to figure out how to be mother to these achingly beautiful creatures who have issued from your own body and also be the thing that you were before—and also the thing you want to become (for me, that was a writer and a yogi and a spiritually sound human). The fear of not being (or not having inside of me) any one of those three things (the mother, the before, the after) made me a little crazy, I have to admit. And the questions multiplied like rabbits. I worked so hard in those days—at everything. And I loved so fiercely the babies I had birthed and was lifting up with my partner Dwaine.

Then came my forties. These are not so easily characterized. I’d say the first half of the decade was a lot more of the same, only exponentially stressful, mostly because they were difficult years for us financially, but also because I needed to allow myself and my little family to be led by our sons’ passions, which in those days was snowboarding for both boys in equal measure. Rakai continued to learn bigger and bigger tricks that took my breath away, and he began traveling to New Zealand alone (at age 15) to follow the winters and compete for the country of his father’s birth. And then there was the shift for Taiaroa—away from snowboard competition and toward the arts. Music. Visual Art. Philosophy. Amazing and beautiful to behold, all of it, and a lot to hold up from beneath, like a strongman lifting a world over his head, his back arching and his legs straining with the weight of it all. Still, his curling moustache and mysterious grin meant he loved the job and was in it for the long haul. That was me under there. And Dwaine too in his way.

Today I am in the last year of my forties. Fifty is knocking at the door. And my older son Rakai is 22 today. He is a man, and Dwaine and I, we made him. We loved him up and guided him and, to the extent that we feel we still can, we continue to do both of those things. The love itself? It’s infinite and exponential. I look at this photo of him in his little yellow outfit—the one I chose for its gender neutrality while he still swam in the waters of my own body—and I love him so much it hurts. And it’s so difficult to describe. Love and grief are so intertwined. The grieving is for the baby I will never hold close to my face again to flutter my eyelashes against his cheek and call them “butterfly kisses.” Whose eyes will never drink me in with their You are my all messaging that I understood with my entire soul. But that grieving cannot be extricated from the powerful love and gratitude I feel as I look at and wrap my heart around the young man who stands before me today. There is love in his heart for a girl he wants to spend his life with, and their joy spills into the air around us, even in the midst of a worldwide pandemic that has pushed and pulled them into conversations and decisions that might have waited for years (or to have never even arisen) had the world not been so topsy-turvey. “It was the best of times. It was the worst of times,” wrote Dickens, and he could easily have been talking about this very year for our boy.

And Dwaine and I, we find ourselves on the South Island this year, our younger boy living with us in our home. How lucky we feel to have stolen back this lost time (I have always blamed the year he was allowed to burn through both the third and fourth grade curriculum in a single school year for his early exit from our home). Today we got our Christmas tree together and decorated it to Christmas music and with tea and holiday “biscuits.” I swoon to see the young man that he has also become, working so hard and only one year from graduating from his university. So different from his brother but so powerfully connected to him. My heart did little flips today to hear them laughing and talking over the phone as Taiaroa hung his laundry in the yard and chatted to his older brother on his 22nd birthday. There are no words to express how much I love these beautiful boys, these amazing men. And of course their father who has been my partner in helping to shape their loves, their beliefs, their lives…and then with me, stepping back to allow each of their lives to unfold in its own way, each of them led by their own heart’s compass.

I suppose there will always be questions, but nearing 50 and with two grown sons, I feel they are less urgent. It is a kind of contentment I have never known and for which I am unspeakably grateful. The questions are more an expression of curiosity than the kind of driving uncertainty that I used to feel in my thirties and even into my early forties. I remember my friend Nancy once said, upon turning 50, that she felt like she had earned something in reaching that age. That it felt good and right and that there should be a T-shirt for it or something…at least a club membership. I loved that. And now here I am. I am a good six months away from my 50th birthday, but my son’s 22nd precipitates my thinking around that milestone. I am nearly there. In the same way I have been ready for all of the other moments in my life that I thought I might never be ready for…I know I will be ready for this.

I have lived into so many answers, and the questions themselves become friends. The Rilke quote I scribbled in my journal all those years ago when I was 18 years old…it blooms in my heart and in my life. It becomes truth as I knew it would, but in a way I never could have imagined. Rakai, my son, my love. Happy 22nd birthday, my darling. May you live the questions now. Lean into them and even love them. They are a vital part of the growing, the breathing, the living. And may your love always, always multiply in your own heart and in the hearts of those you choose to draw near.

Crone in a Boat

Beaver Moon of November 2020

I remember being infinitely comforted by the idea, when I was a church-going 12 and 13-year old, that God will not give you more than you can handle. It’s scriptural. The verse is in I Corinthians, I believe (man, that’s going way back in my reading life)…and I think it talks specifically about “temptation,” which is a dubious concept at best. But still. As a youth memorizing bible verses at Awana to earn little patches like some acolytic girl scout, I remember thinking this was of some comfort.

Later in life, as a doula helping women to give birth, I provided similar comfort when I could assure them, unequivocally, that the moment during labor in which you believe you can’t go on, the one where you think you seriously cannot continue, is the one in which you don’t have to. That’s when it’s time to push. It’s uncanny. In an esoteric way, I think this felt like a spiritual truth to me—like some evidence of that biblical promise. I’m quite certain now that it’s simply evidence of the wisdom of the body, which is of itself a spiritual thing and as good evidence of the Divine as any I can see.

Pushing is, of course, its own variety of pain, but it’s the change you need at that point in your labor, and it means the baby is nearly in the world. Pushing means that the period of softening endlessly into the intense pain of the cervix dilating under the pressure of baby’s head and your contracting uterus is over. Now is the time to be active and to use your strength, rather than to continue passively enduring what feels, especially to a first time mother, like the highjacking of your body.

All of this also supports the idea that the way to go about facing a challenge, especially one that involves substantial pain, is to lean into it. What hurts the most in labour is the baby’s head pushing against the cervix—your uterus is doing this on purpose, to open a passageway from the womb to the air. It feels a bit counterintuitive not to resist pain, but the labouring mother who understands this knows to be that pain. To close her eyes, breathe, and lean into the thing that hurts the most, because it is the thing that is bringing her baby closer to her arms.

Why all this talk about limits? About pushing and trusting and enduring pain? Well, I have, rather unwittingly, joined a team of women who paddle surf canoes. It is with a surf/lifesaving club here in New Zealand. I have paddled canoe before…in Hawai’i. Waka ama it’s called here in Aotearoa. But this is different. It involves sprinting, just like regatta season on the long, six-paddler canoe with an ama (the outrigger part of the canoe that provides stability); only this is a double-hulled canoe, each side with only two seats, and we take off from the beach, vaulting into the boat and paddling our asses off through the breakers. We turn on a buoy, and we paddle in, trying to time it so that we ride a wave as far as we can (instead of getting smashed by it) and never, god forbid, letting our boat turn sideways to its propulsion.

This week, only my second week of paddling these boats, there was a large swell. One that made our 75-year old, hardcore lifesaving champion, triathlete coach Dave pause. Maybe he wouldn’t make us go out. The wind was howling, and the waves appeared to be building. This was on Tuesday. In the back of the boat, giving direction and in charge of steering, were two young women, Lily and Brooke, both teenagers. In the front were my new friend Pam and myself, both of us with adult children of our own. The entire time, I looked to Lily and Brooke for reassurance. And when I say “I looked,” I mean that I listened for their relaxed and happy chatter behind me, while I kept my head down and forward, just trying to keep breathing and paddling as hard as I could to Pam’s count. “One, two, three, four, five…” and so on.

We utterly exerted ourselves to get the boat out around a large rock and then continue to sprint toward the beach, swells lifting our canoe from behind and, if Lily timed it right, a good-sized one breaking, sending us skidding down its face. If Lily and Brooke weren’t afraid, I knew we would be okay. Just because I was terrified, it didn’t mean that we were actually in any danger, I reasoned. After our first go, which was pretty scary but successful, we waited on the beach while the younger crew of girls completed their circuit.

As they paddled toward the shore, their timing was a bit early and the canoe itself was turned slightly across the approaching wave, rather than aimed straight down it. Before we knew it, one hull jutted into the air and girls went flying as the boat capsized in the surf. The two men on the beach, both with rescue tubes trailing behind them, ran out into the water to help them, as they sputtered to the surface and tried not to get hit by the canoe being tossed around by the breaking waves. I just stood on the shore and watched with my mouth agape. I remembered thinking, “These people are hard core.”

The swell continued to build. Surely Dave would not send us out again. Dave took a moment to get the other girls sorted on the shore. Amelia’s foot had gotten stuck in the foot strap as the boat had flipped, and she was in a fair amount of pain, so her dad, the other guard, was checking that out. The next thing I knew, I heard shouting: “Okay, let’s go. Here’s a smooth!” It was to our crew that Dave was shouting. A smooth, it turns out, is a short window between sets of waves where it’s as safe as it’s going to get to paddle out. With only the faintest hesitation, Lily followed his command.

“Okay,” she said, let’s go.” We lifted the boat up on our forearms and started chugging toward the breaking waves. Pam and I exchanged nervous glances but did as we were instructed by our fearless young leader. Lily captains our boat with the certainty of an elder. She knows the sea and the equipment, and she doesn’t hesitate. Perhaps that is why I feel so safe with her steering and leading our little rig. As a lifelong surfer, I know that hesitating in the face of a big wave is the worst thing you can do. Never freeze! Lily never freezes. She seriously commands our craft, and she does it with confidence.

This time out the breakers were so hectic and large that we had to hide behind the large rock for a moment before continuing our trek, making our turn, and sprinting toward the shore. As the wave picked us up, Lily and Brooke took turns coaxing us, “Okay, pick it up,” one of them would say, and Pam’s counting would speed up. “Pick it up!” Their voices were a bight higher, more tense this time, and I’m pretty sure I heard someone say “Shit” and then “It’s okay,” which lit a fire under me even more. I didn’t feel I had much left, but I was propelled by fear, and I got somewhat of a second wind. As the boat lifted on the breaking wave, I heard Lily again.
“Lay back!” she shouted, so Pam and I leaned back, putting the blades of our paddles out into the water next to the boat on either side. “Lay right back!” Lily shouted again, her voice high and tight. We lay back, pretty much flat, our eyes squinting as whitewater surged up around us. We were screaming down the face of the wave, perfectly straight and with great speed. It was wild and fast and beyond exciting. The wash of emotion that came over me was of a variety I haven’t felt in many, many years.

“Waaaaahoooo!” I squealed as we began paddling again, very fast now upon our approach toward the sand. That squeal certainly had in it some gratitude for not being catapulted out of the boat as it buried its two bows into the water and went ass over end into the surf, but it was also celebratory…a wild exclamation of our victory. Over danger and over fear. It took all of our strength. All of our courage, and we had triumphed. Together. Waahoo indeed.

I think both girls and Pam were surprised when I swept them each into a hug and cheered us all on. I felt like a little girl, and they couldn’t help but laugh at my exhilaration. They too were thrilled and proud of us, but this wasn’t their first time at the rodeo. Plus, they probably had the wherewithal to wonder whether Dave was going to push our luck by sending us out a third time…he did not.

That was Tuesday. Let it suffice to say that Thursday was even bigger. The waves were actually breaking OVER the rock we could normally hide behind for protection if we needed it. On this day we practiced starts and while it was still terrifying, as we still moved (as quickly as humanly possible) through the danger zone, Dave didn’t make us paddle the normal distance, which was way too dangerous under such conditions. We did early turns and practiced our timing and riding in on the reforming waves. Afterwards, we carried the canoe up the beach, our legs wobbly from fear and also exertion, and someone mustered the one dollar coin it takes to have a warm shower instead of a cold one. We all enjoyed the fresh, hot water, chatting happily about our day, then piled on our warm, dry clothes, spilling out of the locker room and into our cars.

This week, as the Beaver Moon rose over the harbor, I reflected on my experience in that canoe. Just when I thought I couldn’t go any further, that I would expire or explode or languish in that boat, something shifted, and I found myself riding a wave with my teammates. Each time it was the same. One moment I was struggling to keep going, every muscle burning and my lungs heaving, and the next we were hurtling through space and water, digging our paddles into the sea to steady a careening boat. There was certainly fear, and a different kind of exertion as we lay back, tensing our feet against the foot straps and straining our cores to keep our seats, but there was also exuberance and joy.

I know I can handle this. I go back for more. This weekend I have my lifeguard refresher (my certification has expired—you have to be a certified lifeguard to compete—and yes, I have agreed to compete at this crazy sport). I have no idea how far I will have to swim tomorrow, or how fast, but I know I can do it. I am 49 years old, and I have been taking it easy for a long time. I have been yoga-ing it up, yes, but many years have passed since I pushed myself in this way. Since I asked my body to go its maximum distance. Since I faced fear and failure and even competition. I am no longer a Maiden, and Mother am I still but to men. I move with grace into my years as a Crone, and I do it without fear. This Crone is strong, and she is tenacious. Magic even.

I survey this business of my life. The ways in which I have challenged myself and continue to challenge myself. I have learned to lean into pain and to breathe through it. And I have learned to trust the rhythms that envelope me. I grow old. I grow in wisdom and in grace. ‘I’m a crone in a boat,’ I say. It gives me a giggle. ‘It is good,’ I think. ‘Very, very good.’

One Day

So there’s no way that the people in this video are actually all more beautiful than any other 3,000 strangers who might be invited to come together to sing a single song. They’re just people. Jews, Muslims, Christians, secular Israelis… And yet here, in this five-minute video, I am taken with their singular beauty. I don’t mean collectively (though of course that’s true too); I’m talking about every one of them. I’m in love with all of them. One at a time as the camera scans their faces, their bodies, their backlit hair. All ages and persuasions. What it is, if I had to name it (and if you know me at all, you know that I always try to name things), it would be joy.

The thing is, the woman with the red dot on her forehead, the one with the close-cropped hair and hands clasped at her heart as she sings with her eyes closed? I know the exact emotion that elicits that expression. That posture. I have felt it. Many times. The one with knitted brows and earnest fervor in her eyes as she sends her song into the air? I have been her. The older gentleman in the yamaka…the one with sadness in his face but who is buoyed up by the sound of the 2,999 voices surrounding him, embracing him? He sings in spite of the heaviness in his heart. I am he.

The young woman with long brown locks, shifting her weight from heel to heel with the beat, singing with eyes closed and face contracted with her intention—there is gentleness even there between her brows, in the softness of her throat as she contributes to the sea of voices wrapping themselves around her. I know that intent. It is so ardent. So pure. And the woman with the curly locks framing a face that speaks of bliss and adorned by a yellow dot on her third eye? When she throws her head back, it is the identical gesture as that of the Jewish man a couple of frames later, his long beard almost reaching his chest, his wire-rimmed glasses encircling eyes crinkled with his delight.

And there are several women and men around my own age (and older) sprinkled into the crowd. They could be me. They are. We understand, even as it is happening, the improbability of this moment; it is one in a lifetime of moments, one in which the fractures have healed themselves and the balm of like-mindedness have been allowed, miraculously, to seal with healing power what divides them outside of this sacred space. The musical director—his name is Ben Yaffet—his energy is wild and delicious as he springs into the air, waves his arms in sweeping motions, coaxes this song from the hearts of those assembled here. He knows the importance of his role in this momentous thing. He loves his light into this shared arena where the sound of faith (not in any divinity but in humanity) is being pushed out of bodies and between lips that are still smiling even through the effort.

And the children—my God, they are gorgeous. Perfect in their perfect intent, their gleaming eyes full of the peace of knowing that at least for this moment, their grown-ups are doing something better than safe or right. They are doing something beautiful. In a Keatsian sense, they have become truth. So it’s not their physical beauty, though certainly it is experienced with the eyes as well. It’s their all-ness. The whole of them. We love them because they are us, and because their exultation is an expression of our most profound desire. How can I name one thing as the “deepest desire” of us all? Easy. It’s love. That’s it. Nothing fancy.

We just want to experience love—the unconditional kind. It is what is promised of the divine in holy books, but those books only make those promises because they know that in the endeavor to touch the divine we will remember ourselves, and we are that love. We are light. And we are ourselves the divine. Someone not accustomed to my exultant language, my impassioned diatribes, might opt to just hit play on the video and experience it for themselves. I know they won’t be able to help but feel it too, watching these 3,000 people gathered together in Haifa for the sole purpose of breaking down barriers. Is it possible for laughter to be a song? If not a song, what else? This is the laughter of the joyful. It is the harmonious music of the all. The whole of us.

I can watch this video a million times, each time dreaming of being there myself. Singing out in English, Hebrew, Arabic. I too am beautiful in my effort. The reason for this is also simple: in seeing these people engaged in this effort, this collective summoning of what is perfect and light and divine in us all—we are seeing God. The Divine itself.

So what does it take to bring this effort, this wholeness out into the world? To the streets and the cities and the businesses and churches? To the masses and to the ivory-towered few? I wish I knew. More people like Ben Yaffet perhaps and his team of musicians and activists at Koolulam. More people willing to drop everything to learn a song with thousands of strangers, their own children on their shoulders and holding their hands. More of all of this.

I think of the quiet when they filed out into the streets of Haifa after the final rendition of the song…the one that resulted in this incredible video. I think of the hush and the shock of natural light and the incongruity of traffic sounds against the perfection still ringing in their ears. Did they want to turn around and go back inside? Did they shield their eyes from the real? Or did they pick up their children and forge ahead, resolving to be the music? How many does it take to tip the scales? How many willing singers and be-boppers? More than 3,000, I’m guessing. So that leaves us. No pressure.

As for myself, I won’t give up yet. As long as there are displays like this of the love that we really are (beneath everything that diminishes us, dulls our color and our sound), I will keep fighting the fight. I’ll keep teaching the “unteachable” and loving the “unloveable,” because they are extensions of myself and I of them. We are one and the same, so that the song’s title, “One Day,” refers to this space between sunrise and sunset, the today one, with all of us united. Day of being one. It refers to a moment in time. And all moments in the continuum. It means all of us. A single song. It means now.

"‘Koolulam’ is a gibberish word based on the Hebrew word for ‘everyone.’ It is also an initiative to bring people of different faiths and backgrounds together through song.”