tasman

Just north of Motueka in the Abel Tasman Park, I am chillin. Like Bob Dylan. The rain that poured on the tent all night has finally stopped, so we head out to kayak tomorrow.

The christchurch earthquake has cut pretty deep. It's the only thing on TV and the reporting is pretty emotional.

Cafes are keeping me going. The food is predictably good and the coffee even better. Sleep has been elusive. Something keeps me up between strange dreams. I'm stressed in paradise. Proof positive that it's me and not my environment.

I visited a beautiful cathedral yesterday. Inside, among the stained glass representative art, all of it representing things noone much understands anymore, I am washed over with calm. I am vibrating with the low hum of content. God damn it! The place I avoid and love is the church. I am never so calm as when it is quiet inside one, or when a convert is working on my soul.

Also yesterday a bus full for Mormons let a throng loose on the city of Nelson. I was walking to the car repair shop and missed them. Damn Damn!!!! I have always wanted to be converted by Mormons. If they only knew how much I wanted them.

So, back to here. Now. There is an Ohio boy talking in his confident American tone about things. Mmmmmm, my fellow Americans, how proud you are, even when you don't mean to be. It's ok. We are what we are. No use denying. Embrace the confidence, love it, kiss it, pet it. Then it can take a nap and stop forcing our hand.

Kisses to you my love. Kisses on your proud mouth and confident cheeks.

Ferried to love

Hello South Island. The peaks are so much bigger. I was just beginning to take the North Island beauty for granted. I wouldn't be stunned every morning and evening. Then, I got on a ferry and headed for some crazy craziness.

The ferry motored itself into the sound just like nothing. Just like it should be everyone's experience to watch dolphins dance you into a world of turquoise waters like glass meeting up with sharp drop mountains of pine. But I couldn't contain myself. As the dolphin jumped next to me, I exclaimed. "Sweet!" "It is, eh" is the reply from the Kiwi next to me. "Must be good luck" This Kiwi is on his way to Christchurch after the quake. His family is there. They are all ok. But he is heading down to lend a hand.

The whole island down here is rumbled with after effect. There is petrol shortage. We don't know how far we can go until it runs out. And a visit to the grocery today met us with empty shelves and signs that things will be out of stock due to the earthquake.

I have been getting messages from folks back home wanting to know if I'm ok. Just a few, though. I am in close enough contact with most that they know I'm no where near.

The contact queen.

Speaking of, I met more cool folks today. From oregon wisconsin something. Yup. Movers.

And there was Anna, the barefoot runner from Wellington. And the Wellington family who made us family for a short time.

Contacts. I feel a thousand miles from the first experience here. The British boy who allowed me to play with him as much as I liked. The pig hunters, those who aim their rifle right out the window of the truck, against their mate's chest. The man with the sweet dog who picked me up when he hugged me.

Tonight, I stay in Nelson, the sunny city on the north coast of the south island. I am in a backpacker's, and it's the best one I've seen. I'm dazzled, just like the lonely planet guide said I would be. Just finishing a glass of red wine and listening to people discuss the downfalls of drug use. I always tend to think people who say such things have no idea what they are talking about. Like someone who has never had butter melted on fresh warm bread waxing on about the dangers of saturated fat.

I think it's time to head off to sleepy land.

Believe me, I have never loved you more. You are not far at all. You are my insulation. Without you I would be shivering. You are the leaping I do to a great tune, you are the sigh I breathe at the sight of Marlborough Sounds from the mountain top.

And look, they are playing Bon Iver. Love songs.

So, while they play, I kiss you on the face until you are giggling. Then we'll touch noses like the Maori do and breathe the same air.

Goodnight.

How much breaking can she take? Can she

Heal fast enough for the next round? Or will

She resign? Resign herself to quiet safe flat

Flat like the landscape after glacier. Fertile for

Seed and brutality of rotational crops planted too closely. With

Too much poison.

Is it just her share? There is never

Enough to go around. Someone always ends up

With the short end. Be broken from

Resistance like the fairy tales. Wait for the

Hero. Then best him.

before the moon

I hear you knocking at my door. You've been hanging around, intruding on my hopes and dreams since I first left my mother. I've named you several times.

You came in like a whisper through a cracked window once and I punished you with all the will I had and drove you outside to wait.

I don't even know you and yet what you ask from me is nothing short of everything.

It's my body you want. I know. I'll have to make you from scratch out of my own blood and bone. I will have to let you stretch me and weight me for months until the agonizing day when you are finally ready to tear my flesh open so you can breathe your own air. But it won't end there.

It only begins then. Even as I am healing from the scars you will have left, you'll want me to feed you and bathe you and sacrifice sleep and showers and nights out. You'll make me helpless in my service to you.

For years you will be my burden, my responsibility. Yes! I said BURDEN! I can say it now because you are only a shadow on the lawn and have not yet made me an eggshell walker.

For it's not only my body will you need, but my mind as well.

I'll have to cultivate your experiences, weeding out the harmful in favor of the good, the healthy, the valuable.

And I am supposed to know the difference.

This leaves no room for myself. No space for freedom or spontaneity. You would belong to me only for duty, but I would belong to you for everything.

Don't mistake the locked door and my head shaking "No" for lack of desire. Oh, little stranger, my cells ache for you! When I allow myself to imagine you for very long, I nearly melt into surrender. It is a terrible thing life does in longing for itself. But, I can only suppress longing because I regard us too much. I know how love overtakes and I sense it would drown me for you. And I am not yet willing to receive that death. Heaven may wait on the other side, but I am not convinced. Keep waiting little stranger, time may set us both free.

earthquake

I am overwhelmed.

I don't want to believe it, that I can't just steam roll through and experience all with no rest. Let the body squirm, I'll be in love and angry and heart broken as well as meet all new people and sleep in a new place every night and learn a couple new languages and eat new food and learn to surf and snorkel and drive on the left side of the road as well as weed gardens and stack firewood and milk goats and look for a new job and attempt to immigrate to a new country where january and february are summer months. And keep up my running and yoga and reading. No crying. No looking back. No weakness.

How can I take a nap on a beautiful summer day near the city I've been wanting to explore most? But the body is persistent. She wants to hide, to quake, to rain great tears of sorrow at the truths of life. She wants to be held in an infinite web of love and acceptance. And she needs time. So much time.

She doesn't seem to know that we only have so many years. That it slips by quickly and much of it must be counted out for work and sleep. She makes no distinction.

She just wants what she wants, needs what she needs.

She, as if there is a "her" and a "me". Only us. Denial is futile. Resistance is useless.

I am back to eating well. Day after I moved out of a house inhabited by the U.K. and I am feeding like royalty again. Fresh homemade organic butter from local grass-fed cows. Red seaweed and bee pollen, orange yolked eggs and glorious wild caught ocean fish.

Quinoa with greens and Himalayan pink salt.

Stone ground whole wheat bread that is fermented overnight in the making, fresh ground peanut butter, raw goat milk, chevre, whey fed bacon.

There's more, but I'd just be bragging.

Sorry, no long kisses tonight.

These lips are not up to it.

But my heart remains open. I hope it shows. And although the sting is painful, I hope to keep it open long after a wise person would have closed up the gates.

rhythm

It took some time, right about until now, that the burden of my homeland has begun to slide off my back.

The stress of the news and divisive politics, the distance between the haves and have nots and the stress of keeping as far as possible form the latter while the former run faster and faster ahead.

The general distrust and separation, the things that happen when there are so. many. people.

I met an American turned Kiwi today who is keeping bees. He lived there too long I guess, the whole time he was doing the American thing of making a case for himself.....making sure we understood him like he understood himself. Nice guy, good conversation, but I don't miss that "look at me" attitude.

Not at all.

The sea is my new girlfriend. I've spent two days all up in her and the whole night dreaming of her.

On a surfboard for the first time in my midwest-born life and it's better than I thought. In the water, I'm not goal oriented. I'm just full of wet salty love. When I spill it's as good as when I'm up, I really love tumbling into the sea as much as staying up with the wave. It is so all good.

I'm paddling into the shore as she builds behind me, and my view is misty mountain over black sand beach, flat as.

I have to focus on what's happening under me (as the actress said to the bishop) but the view is so stunning sometimes I'm just too melty to stand. Melty in love.

I've stopped making definite plans. That's a lot for an Midwesterner of German heritage to do, but it's true. If I find a job somewhere I don't expect at a time I didn't plan for, then it's stay for me.

I've found my rhythm.

I've found my paradise.

It was at the bottom of the world in the island underbelly. The soft, wet untouched underbelly. The peach fuzz sweetness, the belly button peek-a-boo, the rub your cheek across over and over again underbelly.

Kisses all over you my love. Kisses all the way to the dark, cold, hard shoulder. The freckled, often seen, overlooked and over used shoulder.

If my invitation means anything, if I can impress upon you the taste of my new religion enough to convert you, then come. Come to the island underbelly and never stop coming.