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.