There Are Those Who Love to Get Dirty

There are those who love to get dirty

      and fix things.

They drink coffee at dawn, 

      beer after work,

And those who stay clean,

      just appreciate things,

At breakfast they have milk

      and juice at night.

There are those who do both, 

      they drink tea. 

-Gary Snyder, 1986

A day in the life: wake up in the front room of 367 Leith Street, go on a field trip to the Otago peninsula and scurry around mudflats barefoot because my gumboots are in the states (and the weather is nice enough for cold feet). Step on crabs; try not to step on crabs. Do laundry and hang it on the line, because this might be the last nice day we get. And besides, I needed to wash my jacket ASAP since I dripped maple syrup on it (and my carton of eggs, and my pants) when I got a maple syrup crepe at the farmers' market yesterday, and now it's sticky and unwearable. Walk through the botanic gardens to the grocery store to buy a red pepper to go with the sweet corn I got at the farmers' market in a soup (dinner); hurry across Dundas to the final block of Leith before home (and the sun is setting, sunset is getting so early, now).

All of This

I am putting God and love together
with the tiny blue flowers in the wild vetch,
with my father who can't move anymore
and has given up the idea of time
in a chair in front of the TV,
with my mother in the nursing home with her seven strokes;
and I want to stop now to think about their suffering
as if they belong together like a Christmas cactus
and its pink blossoms. I want to send them rivulets
and all the sweetness they can hold in their arms.
I want their grief to matter.
And I want God to remember them and make up for all of this
in a sweeping gesture of mercy like a warm rain.

-Anthony Petrosky, 1998

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. 

For the Anniversary of My Death

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveler
Like the beam of a lightless star

Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
And the shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
And bowing not knowing to what

-W.S. Merwin, 1993

Tomorrow's the anniversary of my birth; not to be morbid, but this one seemed appropriate.

Happy Easter!

Dad (hi Dad) told me I should start posting a "Sunday sermon" in my blog to go with Wednesday poem day (I'm not sure how). I think he was kidding, but in honor of the holiday, here are some thoughts on celebrating Easter in New Zealand.

On Good Friday I went to a Tenebrae service at the Anglican church on the Octagon (not pictured). Easter kind of snuck up on me this year, as Easter is wont to do. But it's especially strange to be celebrating this holiday while the air tastes like fall and I eat roughly two farmer's market apples per day. We (me, my flatmate Sandra, and her friend Alex) are planning to make Easter dinner tonight, and it involves pumpkins and no asparagus. Easter in fall, to me, represents the death with hope of resurrection, while Easter in spring emphasizes the resurrection itself. It's not better or worse, just different.

It's funny, too, because now when I picture the garden of Gethsemane I see lush ferns and trees with yellowing leaves. And at the Easter Vigil service I went (on Holy Saturday; same church) the call to communion was in Maori as well as English.

p.s. This is a scheduled post, which means I wrote it ahead of time (Saturday) and set it to show up...now. This week it my mid-semester break (I know, I'm in the middle? Already?), so I'll be heading up to Auckland for some adventures. All that to say, I won't be around (the internet) much this week, and I'm not even really around right now. Cheers!

Today I got to go out with one of my marine ecology lecturers and another student to collect plankton for our lab this afternoon. My life jacket and boots were so big that I probably looked like a joke, and it was a cold and windy day, but that turns out to be optimal weather for albatrosses, so while we floated at the mouth of Otago harbor in our little boat (with its 140-hp engine, which I only note because "little" in the ocean is relative), mollymawks and albatrosses soared around us and landed on the water nearby, I think hoping we were fishing for something a little bigger and tastier. We also saw fur seals and shags (cormorants), and got a quick tour of the marine lab, where we got to poke Antarctic starfish (in the extreme cold, it's harder to produce a calcium-carbonate skeleton, so they're squishy).
For once, this blog is living up to its title. 

from Our Bread

And in this frigid hour, when the earth

smells of human dust and is so sad,

I want to knock on every door

and beg forgiveness of I don't know whom, 

and bake bits of fresh bread for him

here, in the oven of my heart...! 

-Cesar Vallejo

I almost forgot it was Wednesday poem day. I'm working on a paper, and it's rainy and cold outside and time is hard to measure. Definitely a soup day, which is good because lately I've been making a lot of soup; today for lunch I finished off a chickpea and chard soup that has been my staple this week. Here's the recipe, which I adapted from something I found on the internet: 

Chickpea & Chard Soup

-Heat a large pot on the stove over medium heat, with enough olive oil to cover the bottom. Chop one medium onion, put in pot. Keep an eye on the onion, stirring periodically, chop three cloves garlic, add these to the onion, continue to stir, and add one generous tablespoon chopped ginger-root. 

-When the onion is good and soft and the whole thing is fragrant, add three-quarters of a cup of white rice, stir to coat. Add a can of chickpeas and five or six cups water, make sure to scrape any brown bits off the bottom, add some garam masala and cumin (maybe two teaspoons of the former and a half-teaspoon of the latter, maybe more), salt generously, heat to boil, then cover and simmer for fifteen minutes. 

-While the soup simmers, de-stem the chard (I don't know how much, as much as you have, unless you have a lot) and chop the stems and leaves separately. 

-After fifteen minutes, add more water and spices as needed, and cook fifteen minutes more--the rice and stems should be tender. Add the chard leaves, cook five minutes, salt and pepper to taste, and eat. Don't burn your tongue. 

Today Daylight Savings Time began in New Zealand. I laid in bed last night thinking "fall back; spring ahead, April is spring, need to turn my clock forward--but wait!" 

I turned the clock back, and made it on time to my geology field trip. 

Things are happening; I used my last weekend to the fullest and did one of New Zealand's "Great Walks": the Rakiura Track, a relatively easy, three-day track around Stewart Island. According to Maori legend, Stewart Island (or Rakiura) is the anchor of Maui's canoe, the South Island, while the North Island is Maui's fish. In its way, the island remains an anchor: Rakiura and the surrounding islands have become sanctuaries for some of New Zealand's endemic birds. Stewart Island is one of the last places to see wild kiwis (the birds, not the fruits or people), and the entire remaining kakapo population lives on nearby Codfish Island, which does not allow visitors and is only inhabited by the Department of Conservation workers who steward the birds.
I didn't see kiwis, if you were wondering; but each day was a cacophony of unidentified birdcalls, and I did spot fantails, tomtits, and little blue penguins. And it was good to be outside and alive, and carry my house on my back like a turtle. I thought of all sorts of clever things to write here while I was walking, but of course I forgot them.
The Most of It

He thought he kept the universe alone;
For all the voice in answer he could wake
Was but the mocking echo of his own
From some tree-hidden cliff across the lake.
Some morning from the boulder-broken beach
He would cry out on life, that what it wants
Is not its own love back in copy speech,
But counter-love, original response.
And nothing ever came of what he cried
Unless it was the embodiment that crashed
In the cliff’s talus on the other side,
And then in the far-distant water splashed,
But after a time allowed for it to swim,
Instead of proving human when it neared
And someone else additional to him,
As a great buck it powerfully appeared,
Pushing the crumpled water up ahead,
And landed pouring like a waterfall,
And stumbled through the rocks with horny tread,
And forced the underbrush-and that was all.

-Robert Frost

It's still Wednesday poem day--I didn't have time to look up something novel for today, but it was only a matter of time before Robert Frost made an appearance, anyway, and this seemed appropriate. I did see deer on the island, as well--it has one of the largest populations of Virginian white-tailed deer in New Zealand. Or something like it.