afieldnotebook

I'm still in New Zealand. It's starting to seem ordinary; and then all of a sudden it's not. You turn a corner, and cows are chewing their cud besides the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean, or there is an arch carved into white rock. You wander down a beach where hot water bubbles out of the sand.  But the fact of the matter is, people still live here. I don't, really--I'm just passing through. But the folks who do live here are an amalgamation: American, British, European, Asian. Maori. Sometimes, roots seem relatively shallow. But you see t-shirts with the outline of the country and the word "home", and on all sorts of people. Necklaces carved from New Zealand greenstone in Maori motifs are common on Maori and pakeha, or Europeans, alike. For them, this is sacred space, and these are sacred places--for the Maori religiously, for pakeha in the way anyone's home becomes sacred. And here I am. When I first arrived it amazed me to think that this could be someone's home, that they would see it clear as day when they read a book set in New Zealand, or when they thought about going to this or that place. These would be the images they would struggle to disperse when they were trying to picture elsewhere, America or Europe or Asia. These would be the trees whose names they knew like those of friends, and the seasons that are to me reversed would be as intuitive as, well...seasons. And it is amazing, but so is every place, to some degree. It doesn't have to be dramatic. Though it does make for better pictures. 
p.s. Auckland was nice.