Questions

Tuesday morning, a quarter to eight. I need a car today so have dropped Nicola off to swim before work and now I am in Starbucks waiting for the shops to open at nine. It’s quiet, peaceful, grey. Distant, distracted people pass the window absorbed inside their own worlds. I am here with it all, calm, relaxed.

I think about work and the feeling changes. MY heart beats, butterflies flutter inside and I become anxious, slightly rushed, edgy . . . Why?

It could be the coffee but it’s not. I sit still but cannot pin down the cause. It could be the unknown, the uncertainty. It could be the closeness to other people, being within their personal space and mine. I am suddenly uncomfortable and cannot settle.

So I think about a couple of friends of ours, Dave and Carol. They seem to have this open calmness about them, receptive, ready to observe things, think and then act. To act without uncertainty, or to accept uncertainty as part of it all. As I picture the two of them I see myself being the same way. The butterflies suddenly multiply and swarm through me along with a voice from deep within.

“What if I am wrong? Just like I am always wrong. How will I explain that?”

“What will people say?”

“More likely they’ll say nothing won’t they? - I am not worth it, who would want to talk to me, to risk being associated with a strange one like myself?”

I stick with it and the feeling subsides to a nervous emptiness.

The feeling I have at work.

The Mirror

Sunday 3.21pm

Isn’t it funny how you can make a decision and everything changes instantly, like a pebble rippling a pond. Or rather everything does not change but I change, and that changes everything, because the world around us exists, is created in our heads.

And isn’t it fragile this world I create, because I have discovered that what hurts the most, what hurts so much that my reaction is to run away or just turn my back and deny its existence, withdrawing into myself to hide, warily watching it while I rebuild my world around it. What hurts the most ? Simply . . . . The Truth. But not my own truth, no, someone elses.

The picture is the view from inside Napier Airport - I know what I see, but what about these others.

More of the Pacific

Monday 9pm

Wouldn't it have been great if my first view of the Pacific Ocean had been a twinkly azure blue-green sea, stretching to a distant horizon, glimpsed through primordial Norfolk Pines. It wasn't. It was a fertiliser factory seen in the dark through the rain. Let me explain. We arrived in New Zealand at Auckland in the middle of the night. After stopping the rest of that night in one of those souless instantly forgotten boxy motels with souless service and a souless breakfast, both of which I would like to forget, we picked up a hire car and headed for Havelock. What we thought would be a sixhour journey became eight then ten, and as we came down into Hawkes Bay it was long since dark and the rain had started. We were all tired and just wanted to arrive. Driving out of Napier towards Havelock, as I gazed sleepily out of the car window ( Nicola was driving ) I saw in the vague lighting . . . dusty factories, vandal decorated railway wagons, and chimneys. "Oh my God " I thought, "what have we done " The rest of the journey was coloured by this, all I could see in the dark were row upon row of houses and more factories. ( we were driving through orchards ! ) In the daylight, well yes the factory is still there but on the other side of the road is also the pacific, azure blue-green and yes, bordered by a row of Norfolk Pines. Sometimes we just do not see what is really there. Sometimes you need to look in a different way or different direction, the answer is there.

The Pacific Ocean, for me a symbol of everything we dream of but never expect to find. But you can you know.

Picture of fertiliser factory by Nicola ( hope she was not driving while taking this ! )

The Sky

I love New Zealand. Especially the sky. Big and blue, it is the first thing I noticed here and still do, not like the grey cloudy skies in Scotland that sit on your head like a wet wooly hat. Although do I miss them as well. I think it is the houses, Scottish houses are taller and closer together. Here most are still single story and far apart. And in between, all above me is the sky, up there, over there, and, just a second . . . yes - way over there as well. I feel as if my spirit could just grow to fill the whole space with nothing to hold me back, at one with everything.

The sky - an opportunity, a promise. The world is mine.

ps thanks to Nicola for the picture - clive square in Napier