Oh bless the sweet universe of magick and mystery. Bless her every curve and undulation. Bless her swift feet and slow punishment. Bless her for accidental beauty and unexpected wishes granted.

There is no meaning today, as in the big Today. I refuse it on the basis of experimentation.

I burn in the meaning. Will hell follow me outside?

There is laundry drying in a sunny breeze because I will be traveling tomorrow in a flatbed truck squeezed between two boys for 6 hours until we arrive at the east cape. And I will be there for possibly two weeks. No electricity unless the sun shines, no shower unless it's in the river. Meeting us there will be.....PEOPLE!! Oh how I love my species, in spite of their nastiness.

There will be several people with whom I can bounce myself off of like a bat does with her squeaks. People with all sorts of accents.

And, better still.....dogs!!!

No internet, no phone service, no contact with any people but the ones I can touch.

So, you won't be hearing from me at all for a while. I'll be in a paradise valley surrounded by buzzing creatures, barking creatures, clucking creatures, galloping creatures and talking creatures.

kisses!

mass if christ

Christmas eve. In New Zealand. While putting the brownies together after a fantastic dinner of wild boar, roasted beets and tender small potatoes with herbs, I was in the warm kitchen with my house hosts Gerry the Scot (hiding my chocolate) and Sally the Brit (taking my side) and Chris the engineer, on the floor properly sorting the plastic.

The champagne and red wine had just made me a little brighter, and I felt so fully immersed in the moment. This surreal moment of making my home under a southern hemisphere sky surrounded by emerald hills and black tattooed beauties.

Now that I'm here, and comfortable, it all seems so easy. Like, it wasn't such a struggle after all to get here, to close up my life in Michigan, to end contracts and kiss goodbye. But that's just an illusion isn't it? I was just reeling last night from the lasting imprints of goodbye kisses.

Thankfully, the summer days just go on and on and it's nearly always appropriate to wear sandals. It makes it easier to ignore the holiday altogether.

Except that tonight, with the fantastic feast and after the boisterous traffic today in town, there is just a kiss of festive in the air. In the lovely warm, lightly wet air.

I am pondering what it was exactly that brought me here. Why am I filled with such wanderlust? What is it that drives some to explore and roam and others to settle in and grow generations of people on the same small section of land? I can't comprehend the latter sort. I wonder at their expensive cars and furniture when they claim nonchalantly to have never seen the ocean or the mountains. But, for the cost of a lazyboy they could have driven right up to the top of pike's peak. 14,ooo feet above sea level. Where cougars and bears yet roam!

It's like the people who don't read. How rare is literacy in the history of the world? And how rare to couple literacy with the information age? To choose not to use such a gift confounds me.

But I digress.

It's like being born speaking english in a rich country and opting not to use such an advantage to roam.

There. That's an explanation. But one that just credits my unspeakable intelligence and good taste. And I'm bound to admit that it's just a good argument and not the reason. At all.

I may never live long enough to know the whys for such things. Maybe I'll live long enough to realize it doesn't matter to know.

Here I am anyway, nearly an entire day separated from my younger brother and his new child experiencing his first Christmas, and from my dearest friends, all of them strikingly beautiful. So much so that I long for their soft kisses and skin at this very moment. The spicy blonde who can whip me just how I need and the tender brunette who will slow dance with me into the wee hours.....the curvy cosmic sister whose gaze has mesmerized and whose lap full of queens has rocked my imagination into the wettest daydream. The ears I held in the cold, coat unzipped to listen to hear the heart beat.....second mother, first mother, father.

Talkative Persephone and my saviour Cha-Ska........

All so far away.

It makes more sense that we are just animals living out the will of nature and that ego persuades us otherwise. Why else does it feel so good to leave such love for unknown?

Well, the brownies are finished and I must be sharing them now. My love to the new continent, the island underbelly of the world.

Sending all of you the wettest kisses and the longest embraces until we meet again.

everywhere and nowhere

I bit the apple. Or peach. Or mango.

Let's say mango as it's messy and hard to know where the sweet parts begin and end.

I slid right down the slippery slope into enchantment.

The fibre optic christmas tree must be an illusion because the sun isn't setting until 9pm.

Palm trees and soft vowels complete the effect.

The steamy mountains aren't smoky, they are boiling. I know I'm not in Tennessee because I couldn't order flapjacks if I wanted to.

I am a foreigner finally. A lucky one. Lucky in that I'm invisible. No one has batted an adorable kiwi lash at my accent. They say "you don't have an accent"

Is that how you know you are the citizen of an empire? When you go the the island underbelly of the world and people who sound nothing like you tell you that you have no accent?

I wrote a song on the way to the east cape, before I cried when I saw a woman galloping on a horse by the sea and after I'd eaten a kiwi pie (famous for it's nastiness).

It's a song about jesus of course. And it combines the nastiness and the longing for a muscled creature to mount all together in a sweet little ditty.

And there are monkeys.

I'd sing it for you, but you are in another time and place.

Pray hard that I'll remember it and when I see you and I'll delight your panties right off.

It's what songs about jesus tend to do.

Love love love

and wet wet wet

kisses

in all the right places ;)

It's important to have a car in New Zealand. Big lesson number one.

For the first time in many years, I have no pet to cuddle. When I walk past the fields of sheep and cows or horses, I just about faint with desire. It's even worse if I see someone walking their dog.

A pet is just not feasible at the moment, so the suffering shall continue. I only hope the need to hold an animal doesn't fuck with my ovulation.

Of the spectacular scenery changes I've experienced in the past couple weeks, the most shocking has been inside of me. More on that later. When I figure it out.

Freya sits on my left shoulder, and Coyote on my right. Let's just hope I live through this.

peace and love and kisses

freya and barley

"Will you consume me?"

The woman in white smiled serenely.

"Nothing like that" she answered.

She touched him and he became honey which she poured over her hair.

He fell down her back and neck, dripped from her nipples and sacrum.

He caught in her cunt

and then slid down her thighs and calves to finally moisten her toes and lightly stick to the arches of her feet.

A thousand bees came then to lick him up from her skin.

She gathered them into a swarm and turned them into a stallion.

Freya lifted her dress and put one leg on either side of him and let down her dress again to cover where she and he met.

He galloped her into the sea and then became the sea.

She turned into the wind and all through the night she blew him and he would rise and swell and crest white over and over again in the darkness.

But being the wind and the sea is too dignified for a goddess and too sweet for a barley king and so the morning sun found them human and clever.

And they did what all clever humans do, which is to say they ripped each other to pieces.

new world

Did it. Am here. This is what I have found so far........

First, the climate. Asking a native or transplanted Kiwi about the climate is futile. It's all so relative. So, I observe the citrus trees bearing fruit and determine that no, it doesn't get cold here. And after a beautiful balmy day of being outside working in the sunshine, I am told it was hot, perhaps 90 F the natives guess. Pfft. Not exactly. So, when they go on and on about the heat, I suppose it must be hot for those accustomed to paradise.

Next, the scenery.

I spent the past few days beekeeping on the east cape.....which is a very desolate, wind swept and breath-taking part of the world. Hours of driving windy mountain switchbacks and coastal road and it's all wild, unspoiled land. At least I have the wild part in common with this place.

Random fences and pastured animals together with bee hives are the human touches.

Some lovely Kiwis I met yesterday told me that Robin Williams (did I know of him, they asked) was interviewed on tv and said that god made the planet, got done and then thought to create a theme park, and so made New Zealand. Yup. About right.

It's as if Hawaii and Colorado had a party and invited coastal Oregon and Cali and Virginia and Tennessee and they got liquored up and had an orgy in the living room. New Zealand would be the magical love child.

About the beekeeping....the people we are wwoofing for here are a scottish osteopath and a british shiatsu therapist. The beekeeping operation is a new venture, about 5 years old and is mainly being run by a former british wwoofer about my age who never kept bees before this. He's been with them about a year.

There have been many wwoofers with their hands in these hives, none of them with much, if any experience. Upon opening the hives, I can tell that. Boys in the hives. It's a typical situation, but my opinion still stands that it should mostly be women in the hives with some strong men about to lift things. I know, it sounds sexist, and there are some men who get it.

These bees are women. And Italian women at that. One only needs to see how they treat their brothers and lovers to know what it takes to make them happy. They let their brothers push them around all summer, doing no work at all, coming and going as they please. But come fall, these tolerant girls become vicious and drag the boys out on the front lawn to die. Alone.

And that is gentle compared to how the virgin queen rips her lovers' phallus's right out of their bodies in mid-air with an audible POP and flies on as they plunge to the earth to die. Alone.

With women like that, it's best to engage in a little foreplay. Offer a little smoke, move slowly, sing a love song, compliment them on their beauty.

The Scot told me these bees were fierce and mean. But, when I met them myself, I found them sweet as honey. You see? Boys in the bee yard.

Inside the hives it was quite a mess. There were medium depth frames in deep boxes resulting in the bees having to make a complete mess of burr comb filled with honey and drone brood. Sometimes there were spaces with no frame at all, of course the bees filled it. Feeders had been left in with fermenting syrup and rotting bees and plant material. I found myself astonished and disheartened. Here are these bees on the most valuable honey plants in the world (manuka)and they are being managed by inexperienced young wwoofers. Tragic.

There were too many queenless hives and no plan to requeen them but to give them a frame of egg and let them try to raise their own. In my experience, that is a very regrettable plan generally leading to a collapsed hive. If they were my hives, I'd be chopping heads.

The views at the bee yards was a saving grace.

To get to these yards, we drove on a road which is really a river bed that floods every winter and has to be re made every spring. It's a road only in name as four wheel drive is a must.

Wild horses roam with their foals and there is no place to point the camera that is anything but jaw dropping.

I saw my first southern hemisphere starry sky. They looked so foreign and so close. It's stranger than I thought to gaze up and see constellations I don't recognize.

At last, let me say that immigrating may be a complex task.

Beekeepers are on the short-term and long-term skills shortage list on the NZ government website. However, it is apparently impossible to get a beekeeping job that will lead to residency as they require a college degree for an apiarist. And a degree in apiary is something that does not exist in the US. So, this government is like the others, which is to say, a general clusterfuck.

I'm optimistic, though. The degree is apparently available in correspondence courses. Ha!! Isn't that hilarious? Correspondence beekeeping. What a concept.

I don't know how long I've been off line....not too long to be beyond describing the length in hours. Like, it may be approaching 48hours. And it has begun to feel as though I've dropped off the planet.....or the linked planet anyhow.

I am staying with a lovely couple, not kiwis, they are from scotland and england. They asked us what country we were from before they agreed to take us on and I wasn't sure if being american was a good or bad thing. Turns out, as long as we weren't french it was all alright. Apparently the french have attitudes not conducive to humbly doing that tasks needing to be done around here.

Moving right along, let me just say the scenery is spectacular, as expected. Our room has gorgeous fat paneled genuine wooden walls and sloped ceiling, but that isn't the important part. One wall is a window looking out on to a little table and worn wooden chairs and beyond that is a small mowed bit and then a fence row of lovely bushes and flowers....and beyond that is a spectacular over view of lake Rotorua and the surrounding city. The lake has a few green mountain bumps called islands. Off in every distance are these green mountain bumps. I suppose they are mountains, but they are nothing like anything I've called mountain before. They are green and rolling, dotted with grazing animals. They are of various heights, some look like I could climb them in an afternoon, some might take a weekend. There are random rocks interspersed along them, of various sizes. They reach up to the sky when the clouds are thick, which seems to happen often, and together they create this sense of being in an imaginary land created on a tv show for children. It feels as though you could run up them and roll down laughing. I'm describing as best I can without pictures or video because our lovely camera has nothing we can charge it with, but rest assured, I'm falling short of the task.

Today Chris and I were dropped off by a fellow beekeeper at a place called “the redwoods”, a park not too far from the house. It was beautiful there, but as we have no transport back, we had to leave earlier than we wanted in order to catch a bus which we didn't catch anyway. That left us walking the entire way back, which wouldn't have been bad had I been wearing a pair of shoes meant for walking in. As it was, I was wearing my Chacos. I bought the Chacos because they were recommended to me by several people in the most glowing terms. They are cute. They are loved by those outdoor types who put packs on and get dirty and wet. I am often that type. But these shoes are the worst thing that has ever happened to my feet. They have a sort-of famous way of loosening and tightening which supposedly allows for optimal fit and comfort. But mine will not stay put and every quarter mile or so end up way too tight in some places and way too loose in others and the pain eventually has me bent over readjusting.

When I tell other Chaco wearers of my dilemma, they say “oh ya. Mine do/did that too and I had to wash them/soak them in solution/rub them in dirt to make them stop.”

Well, I have done all that. And what I was wondering today after readjusting for the 30^th time, was why should anyone call them so amazing when it seems pretty universal to have to fidget with them so much to make them work. Very perplexing. My final opinion....Chacos are not the shit, they are just shit. Expensive adorable shit.

Well, it's another early day tomorrow, so I'd better be getting to sleep.

Big giant wet kisses to you. And goodnight.

arrival

After too many hours in airplanes and airports, protected from breezes and sunshine, after waiting in long lines to declare or not declare the crazy things I brought from home, after the kiwis washed my boots and said things to me in adorable accents, I walked out into the New Zealand sunshine. The humid air caressed my skin. Just try to wipe the smile off now, I thought.

The short bus ride to the hostel gave me time to absorb and remember.

The last time I was here, I felt so at home. I even shed some tears saying goodbye as the plane took off for home and the islands grew distant in the window. And I missed the place I never really knew. I stopped wanting a baby after that. I stopped paying my mortgage, I stopped wanting the east coast and goats.

It has taken so long to unravel myself from Michigan, and it has taken so much energy and will, that I forgot about where I was heading. Sort-of. A side effect of being so easily distracted is that the big picture only comes in spurts.

So, it did not feel like coming home exactly. Not yet. What is home anyway? If it is where the heart is, then my home is scattered all over the planet. I am in love with it all, except China. :)

Anyway, last night I slept in a dorm with 3 boys and a gal, I on a top bunk.

I had the best fish and chips in Auckland at a restaurant boasting locally sourced produce. I paired it with a New Zealand beer that tasted like lemonade and beer together. It was really good.

I am storing nearly half of the things I brought so I can be lighter. I am listening to some boys speak english in some accent I don't recognize, one of them is german, the others I can't say. I haven't heard an american accent in a couple days. And it's exactly what I wanted.

The sun is shining outside and the mission today is figuring out cell phone service, bus schedules and where we need to be at 10 am tomorrow.

Peace

Love

and

Sweet Sweet

Kisses