Jicca is a New Zealander who loves being home. She also enjoys ballet, photography, seeing family, watching birds, furniture restoration and has not yet fully topped up her annual quota of kiwi sweet treats after twenty  years of missing them while being away.

March 22nd 2021
One year on from arriving back here in New Zealand after many years away and I am in a journaling class. Fretting about not having recorded more of my first-year impressions after such a huge life change. But today is the official start of the second year and there is a balance of some sort in being here now. One year of experiencing what NZ is in reality, not just my impressions from short visits. And one year of emotional distance away from a traumatic personal exit from a UK battered by the cold winds of Brexit and Covid-19 and a harsh winter.

That first flight home London to Vancouver to Auckland, the sounds of border doors clanking shut all around me reminding me of the opening scene in the Get Smart tv series I watched as a kid. The agent steps through one metal door after another and they bang hard behind him, sealing off any opportunity to return.  I stood stock still at Heathrow airport terminal with my oversize bag holding twenty years of memories trimmed to the essentials. The Air Canada representative was saying I couldn’t transit Canada. (Air New Zealand had suddenly upped sticks and vacated their London base three days before) So I argued. I even pleaded.  She let me through. 

She had to.  I had needed to be home for some time, cried on leaving on each of my return trips home. I won’t return to the UK to live.  But this dissonance between the reality of my friends’ lives there and the safety of our lives here feels like a very jagged edge. Like the sharp spine of mountains we flew over on our way back from Fiordland last week. While we two are immersed in glorious adventuring, New Zealanders I love are trapped, anxious and very far away. Their trips home cancelled. Those of us that do make it home have increasing numbers of hurdles to traverse. When we finally touch down, like the migrating godwits who also flapped and flapped to get here, we are beyond exhausted, coming home to a land that does love but also fears us as potential carriers of the virus, at least for awhile.

Meanwhile we two do our own version of the Grand Tour —  Wanaka, Queenstown, Hawea, Te Anau and Manapouri, our eyes collecting a sunshine bouquet of lake vistas of blue, purple, silver and gold.  I can’t even process all the beauty of the last week. I am transformed like the European poets who first saw the Matterhorn and termed it the essence of sublime.
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Piopiotahi (Milford Sound) was the moment of my sublime. From the immense carved rock bowls, deep green waters and stepped glacier valleys, I turned towards a shining sea and saw where the Alpine Fault exits the land. Suddenly I was really here, touching the electrifying backbone of this land I love so much. Nothing about my love of Aotearoa is surface anymore. I would physically hug her everyday if I could. Nothing about living here is ordinary. It’s an extraordinary place. So I plant my feet firmly in Aotearoa, arms wide open, balanced on the edge, seeing both sides, feeling the trembling earth of a constantly shifting world.  Maybe I just wasn’t ready to write before now.  Now my journaling can begin.

​Catherine is part of a loving family and community. She is part of a caring profession. Over the past several years she has experienced significant grief and loss in these integral parts of her life. These challenges have left her exhausted and in pieces. Catherine writes to unpack and reframe this experience. She writes to be. She writes to return herself to a whole being, to being her whole self. Writing accompanies and supports her journey.
 
I wake in the garden, feet planted. Water trickles gently down my arm, drips from my elbow. Morning weighs heavy with sunrise - soft pink to the west, yellow with intent to the east. Bees vibrate Om in middle “C” in my ears as I wander; out from sleep, beyond perception, through imagination and past creativity to memory.

This garden and its house arrived in our lives during a time of need, a desperate need, for rest and replenishment.  It was delivered as expected, in a packed auction room, alighting on raised hands, ours, the successful bidders.

An opportunity to breathe again but not for long. Pandemic locks down, trapping us between two lives, unable to leave the pain of one or enter with hope into the other. 
Four, three, two, we level down, safe passage is confirmed.
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Time and space expand allowing us to rest and replenish. Earth turns a full rotation through the four seasons as we stretch out our tendrils toward each other in this place of hope and possibility.
Om in middle “C” echoes in my mind. Here in the garden, I am awakened to life and move to greet it, bathed in the warm yellow intent of each sunrise.

​Roger Horrocks is an Emeritus Professor of the University of Auckland. He has been a biographer, film-maker and poet and has helped to establish many media and arts organizations.

We are living through major historical changes. I want to focus on one aspect – how the media have changed. That is less important than the tragic human cost of the pandemic, but it is something that influences my working life. The pandemic has thrown us more deeply into the internet age. Celluloid film had already been eclipsed, and other media were under serious financial pressure, including printed newspapers, magazines and books, broadcast television and radio, etc. The lockdown condensed years of change into a few months. I know there have been exceptions – some renewed interest in printed books and broadcast news – but all analogue forms of culture have been battered by the combination of the lockdown and the accompanying recession. Writers have seen publishers go out of business. Music and theatre people have lost venues for live performance. At present, every arts organization and every individual artist I know has financial worries, more so than usual. There will need to be a major effort to rebuild (or rethink) much of our culture. That will involve the perennial struggle of our small, marginal country to deal with offshore owners and large corporations – the corporations in control of the digital world, which have been strengthened by the lockdown.
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Of course, the internet has many wonderful capabilities, and our society will innovate and adapt to this new age. But we need to remember that the technology also has problematic aspects, described by Shoshana Zuboff in her book Surveillance Capitalism and by documentaries such as The Social Dilemma. One of the strengths of the internet is its global scope, but we need to avoid being smothered by the flood of material from sources which seek to manipulate or profit from us. I grew up in the 1940s and ‘50s and remember the banal atmosphere of a New Zealand that was still colonial and other-directed.

I hope that our country’s remarkable experience in escaping the worst of the pandemic can help strengthen our desire to remain a unique, independent, diverse society. COVID-19 has emphasised our sense of community and reminded us we can do things differently from other countries. Not that we can’t also be citizens of the world, which will be crucial in dealing with the on-going crisis of climate change.

​Dr Cathie Koa Dunsford taught English Literature and Creative Writing at Auckland University for 25 years. She has 26 books in print/translation globally.
 
Covid 2020 continues to be a process of painful letting go. The death of my dear mother. Not being able to grieve or be hugged by whanau. Getting my partner here from Orkney, borders closing everywhere, car stranded. Eighteen airfares dropped. Deadline to get whanau home. Finally, Quatar. 3,600 one way. Strange sights at Heathrow. My partner wakes, surrounded by astronauts and beekeepers, passengers masked. Beginning of covid. We knew so little then. Our meeting masked up and in isolation.
 
I’ve been playing in five bands, riffing, solo concerts and gigs. One by one, our work gets cancelled. Musicians thrive on playing together. We try to meet on zoom. Not the same.
 
Twenty one years of touring Europe, USA, Canada as an author and performing with my translator, culminating in NZ as Guest at Frankfurt Book Fair. Then eight years of joint elder care in different countries. Culminating in Covid.
 
We isolate in my bay. Eat from our forest garden and support local veg stands. No supermarkets for us oldies! A brief time of celebration. Then clearing house. 21 years of book tours, disastrous tenants, leaky home lead to a massive clearing. As best as I can muster on joints waiting knee replacement. 13 months now. Delayed by Covid. Terrible pain, especially at night.
 
Then I am reminded to give thanks for life BC. Before Covid. For all those suffering  job losses, family disintegration, struggling to survive on  meagre or no wages; discrimination everywhere; trying to avoid conspiracy theories flying at us from all sides my mother would say, like the Dalai Lama, Never Give Up. And she did not. Until the very end. She loved the daily broadcasts. Reminded her of the war. And the vital need to work together.
 
When I consider this time, still feeling pain and loss, I am reminded. Never Give Up. No matter what is happening. Never Give Up. Covid is a time of letting go. Hold onto what matters, let go of the rest.
 
He aha te mea nui? What is most important in life?
He tangata, he tangata, he tangata. It is people, people, people.

​David Arrowsmith is a history teacher and writer who lives in Auckland. He is married to Hilary, a librarian, and they have three daughters: Charlotte in Manchester, Penny in Wellington, and Kim in Tamaki Makaurau. David has published one novel, Wesley Jones, a coming-of-age story set in rural South Auckland in the sixties. He is currently working on a memoir based on his father’s Kodachrome slides of life in a farming community in the 1960s.
 
In late February 2020, I accepted a full-time teaching offer at a South Auckland secondary school. I was already two years into semi-retirement when at the age of 67 a new teaching experience began. Little did I know then that my decision to return to teaching would be impacted by Covid-19.   I was in the process of getting to know staff and students and learning the system at my new school when, within a month and with minimal preparation, we were thrown into lockdown.
 
Suddenly I had to learn how to navigate ‘Google Meets’ with my classes — taking the roll and chasing up the other half of the class who'd become disengaged from learning. I was required to makes notes on every online communication on a spreadsheet, be they phone calls, emails, or text messages, with every student in each of my six classes. The Ministry of Education wanted the data to analyse the Covid-19 education experience. Tracking students and data entry began to supersede teaching.
 
On weekly online sessions on ‘Google Classroom’ I quickly learned how to scroll down documents and YouTube clips about Julius Caesar or Adolf Hitler to motivate the kids from a distance. I learnt to close my laptop 5pm Friday and not open it until 8am Monday knowing there would be umpteen emails from students with drafts of assessments to check, or asking for assistance. There’d be a Google Meet code for the principal's briefing with eighty staff at 8.30am. I'd ring disengaged students at two in the afternoon only to be told by their parent they were asleep. I'd email students who weren't producing any work on Google Classroom and learn that after a month of lockdown they were still waiting for the promised laptop from the Ministry. I'd discover students working full-time to help put food on the table for their family.
 
I tried to create a work/life balance at home. This meant daily bike rides or walks, meditation, reading great authors like Hilary Mantel or rereading classics like The Wind in the Willows. Keeping in touch with my daughters by social media became crucial. The 1pm 'Jacinda and Ashley Show' on TV One became a daily ritual with Hilary to learn the latest development in the virus crisis. I learnt to play the Gold Card game at the supermarket to avoid the queues until Countdown banned it and I had to shop at New World who still allowed the privilege. It meant the ongoing quest for engaging TV drama on Netflix and discovering great productions like The Crown.
 
One of the frustrating aspects of the new teaching load in the time of Covid-19 was its impact on a new writing project I’d started in January. With Deborah Shepard as mentor, I had started work on a memoir of my father based around his wonderful Kodachrome slides of 1960s rural South Auckland that he'd taken as a newly arrived English immigrant. As the themes from the photos emerged, and the writing became more focused, and the family research proved surprising and enthralling, the pressure from my teaching job increased. Students' NCEA assessments were pouring in. Marking was time-consuming. I was also required to write very detailed reports on students' progress for parents. By the end of a school term that effectively lasted from February to July, I was exhausted and in need of a break in Taupo. With Deborah's support, the memoir is still on track as we experience a second unexpected and unwanted lockdown for Auckland in August. Whoever would have thought my year would unfold in this way.

​1
 
A Tuesday twilight in the middle of August: we’re on the point of sleeping, the panorama from our languorous home stretching out across dark estuary water to faint lights on opposite shores, when our phones tremble. We stir to discover our screens are ripe with an unexpected offering:
 
 
COVID 19 ALL OF GOVERNMENT RESPONSE: ….
 
 
2
 
What we read stuns us. In the moment of scanning it, of beginning to process it, the news that there are new Covid-19 positive cases in our Auckland community feels as if it belongs elsewhere: to a half-forgotten time perhaps; to an era thought eliminated; a trauma exorcised; an ailment cured. Perhaps this reaction, instinctive and not entirely rationale, is to be expected; perhaps, at some point in the future when I will return to this moment to reflect upon it, my response will seem illogical, naïve. But the mind and heart too often process the unusual and unexpected in ways which aren’t always reasonable or impartial. So often too, their instinctive riposte appeals to the self. So there it is: a late night awakening, a blurry sense of déjà vu, a sudden emotional and psychological unsettlement, a disruption to our everyday already stealing through the darkness outside... 
 
 
3
 
As a displaced person exiled by whanau and ancestry, dislocation is an experience and a feeling I know too well. I’ve long grown used to expecting it, encountering it and adapting my routines to contain it. Still the spectral slumber which besets me becomes an articulation about displacement: fractured recollections of the Lockdown conjoined by distortions of the Level 3 at the edge of its materialisation …
 
4
 
In the morning, when I wake, I turn to transformation; or is it regression? I re-establish my son’s online schooling, recreate the technological delivery of my under- and postgraduate teaching and reorder my writing life into snatches of creative time. The hidden stresses of those who work and have school-age children, who are asked to simultaneously supervise education of their offspring and their workload: these become my familiars once again ….  

​Cynthia and her family live in the lee of Mt Atkinson, the first hill you meet as you approach the Waitakere Ranges from Auckland. The sides of the hill are clad in the olive greens of kauri, rimu and tall kanaka with a spattering of houses set in amidst the trees, whose warm lights shine out from the mists which wrap around the peak in winter. There is a clearing at the top and from there you can see all of Auckland, out to the seas and to the horizons, beyond which lie Chile on one side and Australia on the other.
 
The kitchen of our house was where I ministered to others during lockdown. I over-filled my family and the freezer with the results of slow, time laden cooking; with red wine reductions, miso butter, Lebanese garlic pastes, pâtés, soups, elaborate meals, fragrant loaves of warm ciabatta and baking fresh from the oven. And, despite what was happening to us all, I was happy. I was serving up care for those I loved.
 
If being confined to this space was a restriction, a yoke, then it inexplicably sat lightly upon my shoulders. I had a contribution to make.
 
Those sunny lockdown weeks seem an age ago now. For some time, as winter approached, we have gone about our lives at alert level 1. The risks of the virus here are very low. Restrictions on domestic movement and interactions have been relaxed.
 
And yet I am not.
 
I have become hypervigilant. Over alert. It turns out that, for me, lockdown has a long, restless tail. I am unable to relax, perpetually aware that, as we go about our unfettered lives, our islands sit in a blessed, calm pool, while the rest of the world is battened down in the midst of a hurricane. Below the horizon, life looks normal, yet illness has touched the lives of us all, and uncaged, is frantically beating her dirty wings in the storm, spreading droplets and fear.
 
Even in my sleep I mine the minutiae of my days for any anomaly which indicates something hidden, something buried just beneath the surface. I have developed a crepuscular habit of wide-awake worry. My ears are pinned back, and my tail is tucked between my legs. This is not my way. But the virus is a threat I don’t know how to fight.
 
So, as there is nothing I can contribute now, I am trying to be still and to breathe slowly as life gets busy and demanding again. I seek a pause, a moment, an opportunity to rub balm on a perpetual itch, a subcutaneous state of concern for our world. 
 
I find these moments in the eyes of my dog; in the shine on the back of an emerald ladybird resting briefly on the leaves of the rhododendron; in bird song from high in the trees; and in the tilt of a blackbird’s head as she listens intently to the industry of worms beneath her feet. The winter snowdrops, little silent white bells rung by the breeze, bring quiet moments of delight.
 
It is to the lessons of nature, not escitalopram that I turn to calm myself. I want to be able to look our new future in the face without fear, allow myself to contribute again and help build something different and better after the storm passes. And it will. That is one of nature’s lessons.

Faith Cleverley is a journalist in Tamaki Makaurau. She graduated from the AUT Postgraduate Journalism course in 2019 with the top journalism diploma and the deans award in communications.  She has a Bachelor of Arts from Victoria University in Criminology and Social Policy. Faith is invested in diversifying the types of stories we see and read in Aotearoa. She lives above the Zoo with her sister and friend. 

The days of quarantine are now a faint recollection. The constant assimilation required to survive these massive changes in our lives has dulled my memory.
 
I have been thinking about Covid-19 and the tragedy it has inflicted on our global community. The scale of this my mind cannot make sense of, particularly as we live in a haven that has (so far) avoided the suffering seen in other countries. Lives are becoming the collateral of greedy leadership.  
 
I have been thinking about the Black Lives Matter movement. It is from this abundance of time as people stay indoors that a grass roots political movement could take hold in the USA and worldwide. Capitalism has consistently insured against revolt through monopolising our time. The social revolution happening now has been made possible because people have had time to organise, protest and imagine. The speed in which our lives have drastically changed is hopeful, we are capable of rapid transformation when needs must…  and needs must.
 
I see empathy seeping into our collective consciousness. Most of my friends are receiving government support; job seekers benefits, unemployment cheques and artist’s subsidies, perhaps nurturing a generation of people who see no shame in needing. 
 
Coronavirus has exposed the innate neediness of being human. I see true freedom in knowing how much we need each other; to feel loved, to experience joy, to survive and succeed. To embrace needing completely is to know how to give and to love. 
 
I spent ‘lockdown’ at my home in Tamaki Makaurau. Our neighbour’s cat became part of our unit as we took joy in caring for her. We don’t know what her real name is but we called her Esthy. She is waiting outside my door when I come home from work most days. I imagine she wonders where we have gone. The hours of lounging on our front porch are over as “free” time leaks away into “productivity”. I am grateful I live now without fear of Covid-19. I feel lucky to spend more time with friends and family. I miss having time laid out endlessly before me.