The Jandal of Joy ...

When I changed my jandals for something more sturdy the plump and middle- aged dog was seized with a puppyish urge. He pounced on a jandal, ran to the lawn with it, tossed it high, pounced again as it landed and shook it to death like a rat. Then he looked at me with both ears cocked and the jandal pinned and I had to smile at his joy. Don't let anyone tell you that beasts don't feel.

Indeed, as I tied my shoe I asked myself when I was last as happy as the dog was now. And the answer was Wednesday.

Joe Bennett, extract from, Happy as a Dog.

This captures something of what my New Zealand life was like sometimes.  Although I only fished off the wharf and out of a lake.  No fly-fishing.  But it was possible to live so much closer to Nature than it is here in Antwerp.  And lately I've found myself attempting to weigh up what means more to me ... the proximity of Genova, Paris, and the rest of Europe, or quiet moments spent wandering on an empty beach with my dog.

I loved the morning hours back then ... dog-walking, or dreaming over breakfast coffee taken on the steps of some house I was living in.  I lived in so many houses between 1985 and 2004.  And all over the South Island of Home.  Each place I lived would be added to my list of places colonised by my soul.  Mosgiel, Dunedin, Cromwell, Blenheim and Te Anau, before circling back to Dunedin.

I had one dog for most of the years of my first marriage.  She and I had so many places we loved.  She knew the joy of jandals although we were happiest with stones or sticks, a tennis ball, a lake, river or beach.  We needed so little to be joy-filled.

Joe Bennett's article set my soul singing a song of longing this morning.  I'm just in from zero celsius and horrific pollution.  Miss 9 and I headed out into it at 7.30am, mostly laughing our way across the city.  We're both very amusing ... we tell ourselves.  We shared Gert's big old woollen gloves.  She wore his left glove, I wore the right glove, we held hands with the hands left bare and were warm enough out there in the mist and the frost. 

She's wearing the cutest little bear hat these days, with long sides that hang down as pockets for her hands but more effectively, those long  bits can be worn as a scarf.  I hand it to her some mornings saying, what did the fox say?'  It's our signal to begin ... she says, 'It's a bear!!!'  but we can't help singing that bloody song.  'Bloody' as explained in this interview with the guys who created it (the language switches to English quite quickly, if you haven't viewed it already).

And here I am, still smiling over the long answerphone message I left for my baby brother over in Perth.  It's Kim's birthday today.  He's surprisingly old, not the 17 year old I still imagine him to be.  There was that surprise of time moving on when I picked up our Nana's ancient birthday book, looking for the year he was born.

I'm nursing a pollution-inspired ache in my head, putting off beginning the work I know I must do.  My Genovese friends are in Brussels today and I'm cooking them dinner tonight.  The skies have been clear since they landed, this morning's mist is already gone ... 10am.  They'll never believe me next time I'm in Genova, when I tell them I'm fleeing the grey grey skies of Antwerp.  They just haven't experienced those skies, and I'm torn between glad and compromised.  They leave on Monday.

But anyway, today's quest ... I would like a small jandal of joy moment like Joe's, like his dog too.  I looked through my this time last year photographs from New Zealand and found this one.  It was taken on a beautiful sun-rising morning while out wandering Cook's Beach in the Coromandel.

New Zealand in Antwerp

It seemed I only needed to roar a little and voila, the words came bubbling up afterwards.

I sent the advert text away before rushing out and across the city on the Thursday school pick-up.  It's a half-day, like Wednesday.  So now I just need to do the bio and locate some photographs of Genova.

But the happy news from today was that Miss 9 and I stopped for lunch at the new New Zealand shop located in the heart of Antwerp.  Pies ... Buzz bars, L&P, and etc.  We love it.

Miss 9 is a fairly radical vegetarian at the moment and so she chose the vegetarian pie which, to me, seemed like a very big waste of 'pie'.  I had the Stoofvlees pie ... a pie filled with the rather divine Flemish beef and beer stew.

L&P was our choice of drink.  Miss 9 because she finds it delicious and me because it takes me straight back to those childhood days where it was always summer.

Fortunately, before devouring too much pie, I remembered to stop for a photograph.  An imperfect image but I was far more interested in eating it.

Home

The desire to go home, that is, a desire to be whole, to know where you are, to be the point of intersection of all the lines drawn through all the stars, to be the constellation-maker and the center of the world, that center called love. To awaken from sleep, to rest from awakening, to tame the animal, to let the soul go wild, to shelter in darkness and blaze with light, to cease to speak and be perfectly understood.

Rebecca Solnit

This Time Last Year ...

On this day last year I was posting photographs of Mount Tongariro erupting because I was back home in New Zealand and had recently driven past that North Island volcano.  On December 1st I had arrived at my sister's house, down in Dunedin, and was catching up with her and her beautiful family for the first time in 8 years.

Eight years can go by in a flash ... and they did.  I was always coming home soon but getting home was a hellishly expensive business.  Fortunately I lack a sense of time passing and, while I longed for  home and family something fierce sometimes, I got by.    I was even more delighted when I discovered everyone still there, where I had left them.  

Old friendships had survived, babies and toddlers had grown, and there was enough good New Zealand pinot noir to make sure I survived how old all the babies were now, and laughter too, making every day there so very special.

I was talking to Dad tonight, harassing him in his 9.30am Monday morning from my 9.30pm Sunday night.  Since I stopped traveling so much I've made a point of startling him with a phone call far more regularly.   He's stopped with his startled, 'Is that you Di??!' and is no longer surprised when he hears my voice from some 16,000kms round the world.  I used to disappear for months sometimes.  It's that time passing problem ... no sense of it.

So anyway, all this to say ... this time one year ago I was home in New Zealand.

I may have even taken the photograph that follows today, precisely one year ago.  Sandra popped us all into her car we wandered off down my beloved Otago Peninsula.  This view, on the way home via the high road, is one that I had always loved.

Hope That Deep Sea Oil Drilling Can Be Halted in New Zealand

An Update: Greenpeace today filed papers at the High Court of New Zealand in Wellington asking for a Judicial Review of the decision to allow Anadarko to carry out drilling.

The government’s Environmental Protection Authority made an ‘error in law’ by allowing Anadarko to go-ahead without looking at several key documents, including reports on oil spill modelling and emergency plans to deal with an oil spill, according to the legal papers.

Lawyers for Greenpeace are asking for the matter to be ‘allocated an urgent hearing date’ due to the ‘national importance of the issue’.

If Greenpeace’s challenge is successful, it could bring a halt to Anadarko’s drilling plans, as they should not have been given permission to drill because the requirements of the law were not met.