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You are here: Home / Archives for New Zealand

New Zealand

Countdown New Zealand Day 9

05/28/2020 by John 1 Comment

This is a series of posts that will log some of my thoughts in the month leading up to my moving back to New Zealand.

Eight years ago, somewhere over Texas…..

New Zealand already seems like a lifetime ago even though it has been just 24 hours since we left the ground in Auckland. Here we are, still in transit.

After so much time invested in the last two months, it seems unfair that the memories, the feeling, of being there can pass so quickly. More lessons in impermanence, a reminder to take care of each moment because it is already in the process of dying. Travel only takes us away during the time it is occurring. As soon as we stop moving, the old, sedentary world comes rushing back into all the spaces that were so recently filled by the wind rushing past as we soared down mountain passes in the Southern Alps on our bikes or bloated by views of an endless blue sky set against the green of the sea and yellows and browns of the land.

Below us now, the Mississippi is meeting its end in a tangle of channels, lakes, and marshes splatter painted in a fan across southern Louisiana. Its waters are becoming a part of the Gulf of Mexico. Our path will likewise be splintered as the demands of jobs, others, and our own distractibility, plugged in once again, take us out in many directions at once. We must strive to find the channel, the depth in our lives that can guide us to what is true and of value.

Filed Under: Mindfulness, Travel Tagged With: Countdown New Zealand, mindfulness, New Zealand, travel

Countdown New Zealand Day 10

05/27/2020 by John Leave a Comment

This is a series of posts that will log some of my thoughts in the month leading up to my moving back to New Zealand.

We’ll be on the road a lot over the next week. I’m sure we will encounter some traffic, but not quite like the type you run into from time to time while driving in New Zealand.

Filed Under: Travel Tagged With: Countdown New Zealand, New Zealand, travel

Countdown New Zealand Day 11

05/26/2020 by John Leave a Comment

This is a series of posts that will log some of my thoughts in the month leading up to my moving back to New Zealand.

We’re going home.

That’s a thought that runs through my head but makes no logical sense. No, we’re going about as far from home as we could get without arriving in Antarctica. But no one can tell a person what home feels like to them. No amount of history or past experiences can define what the heart yearns for, can tell it what to call home. Home is not defined by where we grow up, or where our friends and family currently reside. Home is a mystery that lies within us that is difficult to unravel.

Home is the place I’ve been searching for my entire life.

I believe we can make just about any place we can carry our body home so long as we can meet our basic needs there. For me, many places feel like home. I have a home here in Western North Carolina, as well as along its Outer Banks. I have a home on the fringe of the land and sea in Southwest Florida where I found my partner for life and a sense of peace within me that I theretofore never knew existed. There is a part of me that calls that meandering line of people traveling across Northern Spain on the Camino de Santiago home.

But something about New Zealand feels different than these other homes. I think I knew it in 2012 upon first visiting there. The simplicity. The vastness. The endless sea and sky. It feels like the last place on Earth, and in terms of humankind’s inhabitance of it, it almost is.

There is no explaining why Aotearoa (the Maori name for New Zealand) feels like home. It is foreign to my upbringing and my eyes in innumerable ways. And yet when we drove away from Auckland after arriving there two years ago, I felt like I was home.

So I pack away the things that will make the long journey. I dream. Soon the day will come when a plane will carry me far across the sea and deposit me back in a place called home.

Filed Under: Home Tagged With: Countdown New Zealand, New Zealand, travel

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