​Day 88 and the thing I thought might not happen for a very long time has occurred. I have returned to the island of my birth to visit loved ones, and to absorb the beauty of a very special landscape and thus replenish my spirit. I know I am very, very fortunate. Many people around the globe are still in lockdown and unable to cross borders and make their way home while still more cannot risk current job security in their country of residence to fly home for a visit as the exercise would entail spending two weeks in quarantine in the home country and then two weeks more in quarantine in the city of employment upon their return. My own son falls into this category living across the Tasman in Sydney. Unfortunately, because of recent lapses at our border, the Australian government is now reconsidering their plan to open up a trans-Tasman bubble soon.
Separation from offspring is something many parents across time have had to learn to accommodate but since the rise of globalisation it is an even more prevalent feature of family life — sometimes I wish we could return to a simpler age where we didn't travel and instead lived in closer proximity to our immediate family and wider community. Something critical has changed since the arrival of coronavirus. We’ve lost some of the civil liberties we took for granted and with this a sense of our own personal autonomy.
But I am here. My feet are on the ground in Canterbury for five blessed days. Once again I can enjoy the chill of its sharp winter air on my face, waking me up as it always does and sharpening my focus. I love this sensation, it’s something I yearn for when my brain turns sluggish on the sultry, sticky, humid days of late summer in Auckland. Yesterday I walked through the gardens of Mona Vale, along the river, admiring the impact of crisp temperatures on flowers and shrubs and trees, feasting on visual delights, on towering bushes of rhododendrons, the blood red flowers nestling amongst dark green foliage beneath the wintery tracery of a copper beech decorating a silver sky. The lily pond had disappeared in a carpet of nutmeg coloured oak leaves. Silver birches stripped of their leaves trailed fine, feather light branches downwards against a pale sky. Hellebores the ‘winter roses’ in two colour variations, antique cream speckled with green and a deeper pinky mauve plum nestled in a thick bed of autumn leaves. And what was that scent? I smelt it before I spotted it. 'Winter sweet' its glorious penetrating perfume a sensual delight like no other. Picking a twig I carried my scented perfume stick with me through the city.
It occurred to me today, on visiting my mother’s grave in Ellesmere, with my brother and my sixteen year old niece, that there couldn't be a finer way to spend a Saturday afternoon than this, communing with the dead in the company of the living. I took them to see the grave of our great-grandparents as well. ‘Have you seen the porcelain roses?’ They hadn't. My brother leant down and removed the coppery rusted wire covers so we could gain a better view of the porcelain shapes under the glass. Soft olive-grey lichen spores flecked the glass. Below were roses and a weeping angel, preserved like coral on an underwater reef. Miraculous. Pausing to consider the writing on our great-grandparents’ grave stone, my brother reflected on the young age of our great-grandfather when he died, 58 years, and then our grandfather, in the grave next to my mother, who died at 52. ‘I had the benefit of a stent and modern medication,' he remarked ruefully. Lucky, we all think.
The day was gentle. It had the feeling of my mother and her mother accompanying us, along with the fantails, the piwakawaka, softly looping round and round, as we meandered through the graveyard stopping to read names on weathered stones. Although cryptic often you find a brief, poignant passage of memoir encapsulated there. Everywhere we saw names we recognised. Speaking a thought aloud I said, ‘As I grow older, I find visiting this graveyard more and more enjoyable.’ My lovely niece looked surprised. What did I mean? The names reawaken memories of childhood, of people long forgotten who once belonged to families who lived down the road from you, or travelled alongside you on the country bus to school, or sat in church pews nearby, or were the pillars above you as you grew. They remind me we were part of something once, connected as a living organism, while living quite different lives of course, but living alongside one another nonetheless in a beautiful landscape with the Southern Alps, coated in pure white snow on one horizon, as they were today, and the soft mounds of the Port Hills, smudged mauve and grey on the other, and looking out for each other.

​Day 84 and some good news and a development that was inevitable, now that we have opened up the borders, two new cases brought in from the UK. I don’t want to write about that here. It would only whip up further agitation and the news channels are doing a good job of that, along with Todd Mueller, when actually the damage is done and I think we have learned from it. Maybe we’re even safer because the new measures in response are stringent with more checks and balances in place. The good news is that doctors in the UK have discovered that a low-cost steroid drug, dexamethasone, is helping prevent the deaths of some of the sickest coronavirus patients. The finding, was made in the ‘Recovery trial’, the biggest randomised, controlled trial of coronavirus treatments in the world and it has shown that the drug eases inflammation in the lungs and has reduced deaths among patients on ventilators by up to one-third and those on oxygen support by one-fifth. It is the one drug, at this moment, that reduces the risk of dying in the sickest patients and as such is being hailed as a breakthrough. This is really the news of the day, I think.

Increasingly in these troubled times I have found myself searching more consciously for soothing and uplifting activities that counteract the stresses. I’ve figured that if I can glide through problems and perplexities rather than get snagged on stuff then I think I will do better. My mother often talked about the Waimakariri river in Canterbury with its braided streams and tributaries seeing it as a metaphor for how to live one’s life. She used to say ‘life is like this braided river.’ She loved the big river that flowed down from the Southern Alps bringing the blue alpine waters with it. She loved its striations, the way tributaries break off again and again into streams of veins highlighted bright aqua against greywacke river stones. She would say look at the places where the water knocks up against huge trees that have hurtled downstream in storms, and see how the flotsam and jetsam collects around them. If you can imagine yourself in that moving current and see yourself flowing round the obstacle, not getting caught but staying mid-stream, gently turning and tilting and moving on through, that's the way.

I like this parable for living and have been thinking about the things that help me in the time of coronavirus to glide on through. In my day I like to make time for walking in nature and tuning in to its rhythms and beauties; meditating in the quiet of morning is a good way to begin; sharing a meal and watching a film with a friend warms the night; and then there is the joy and solace of being in the presence of a child, seeing the world through their eyes, moving at their pace which is often slow and thoughtful and attentive. My three year old grandson is the beam of lightness in the shadow of this virus.

Recently we spent part of a day together. We went to the library first in his mama’s car while my car was being fitted with a new front facing car seat. Her car is keyless. At the park I closed the car door and then my grandson touched a rubber button on the door handle and the car locked. Very satisfying. We went to the lift well. He pushed the button to open the door. Inside he pushed the next button to take us to the first floor. In the library he posted the books into the return slot. On the way out he climbed the child-size wooden steps placed beside the checking station. Very confidently he held the card with its barcode up under the laser light and then swiped the books across and we were done. Back at the car he touched the door handle and the car unlocked. I followed all of this with fascination and awe that someone so young could be this competent. When the door unlocked, I commented ‘You are magic. You push on the door handle and the car opens!’ He looked at me and considered my flattery. ‘No,’ he replied. ‘Mama would say it’s a button not magic.’ I love him.

Then we went down to the sea and he sat at a picnic table scooping out his elaborate morning tea from the compartments in his metal lunch box. We observed two seagulls in loud argumentative conversation and he commented, ‘Those seagulls are squawking.’ The language. On the swing he chortled as I pushed him higher and higher. Propelling him, I sang ‘You are my sunshine, my only sunshine. You make me happy when skies are grey…’ The lyrics rolled out automatically, the song ringing on the air while my attention was on the giggling child and keeping him high, on this glorious bright green, bright blue day. ‘Why does the sunshine go away?’ he asked. I hadn’t thought about the lyrics as I sang, ‘… Please don’t take my sunshine away,’ How strange are grown up sentiments to a child who is paying attention and trying to make sense of it all. Again I love him and treasure these moments in the time of coronavirus.

Back at the car I had great difficulty plugging him into the car seat. His bright green raincoat was bulky. ‘Oh, darn.’ I exclaimed. ‘We’re going to have to take off your coat and start again.’ To which he sighed ‘Oh this ridiculous coat!’

​Day 81 and resuming after a break of four days I find myself casting about wondering how to begin again. In her journal, 'Still Life with Teapot: On Zen, Writing and Creativity' (2016), New Zealand born writer Brigid Lowry dealt with a gap like this, ‘… Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Forgot to write anything.’ The Friday entry that followed was sharp, pungent, joyful.
Prayer. Listening tonight to my car radio as I drove home into a billowing sunset, the sky and sea lit with a radiant pinky tawny light, I chanced upon a BBC programme, 'Heart and Soul: Personal approaches to spirituality from around the world’. The topic was prayer in the time of coronavirus and it crossed many religions: a Buddhist man in Sri Lanka, an Anglican nun in the north of England, who has lived as a hermit for two decades, a Muslim woman lecturer from Sudan, a Tanzanian writer, a Scottish monk in Santiago, Chile... The themes were the same. They spoke of the value of simplicity in a time of confusion and fear, of the importance of creating regular routines to provide structure to days thrown off schedule. Time for meditation and prayer came through as did stopping to see the beauty in the ordinary.
The nun had made a path around her small garden and created twelve stations where she would stop to pray for people’s spirits to be released from stresses. She spoke of other ways of calming the mind, ‘play a piece of piano music, something simple, not too difficult, the same one, over and over.’ She said some people found the act of knitting a comfort in challenging times — its repetitive action, the soothing rhythm.
Up came a memory of a dear friend, a teacher, wife, mother and grandmother, a craftswoman, who through the earthquakes in Christchurch and then through her own dying process knitted, all kinds of light and feathery and intricately patterned ethereal shawls, the wool so fine, they were more ornate cobweb than woollen garment for babies, for friends. Very near the end I visited her in hospital. Her pain by now was severe. Her face shone with moisture, she pressed her lips together and sometimes paused to breathe, but still she asked how my shawl was coming along for the new baby. This had been her initiative. She’d taken me to the wool shop in Devonport and helped me choose the gossamer skeins and set me up with circular needles. I had the shawl in my back pack and pulled it out. ‘I’ve come to a halt,’ I said lamely. I’d dropped a stitch and didn’t have the skills to fix it. She took the needles then and working slowly, digging down the rows she rescued the fallen stitch and cleverly and with dexterity knitted it back up. I watched incredulous as this dear person, in the midst of extreme pain, resolved my problem.
The Buddhist speaker reminded me of the inevitability of death and how becoming ill and declining is a natural process and part of being human. The challenge, he said, and the others talked of this too, is finding the courage not to resist. Instead when we accept this absolute truth it can help us to live more fully and deeply in the present moment.