still alive, i see!

Yikes, pencils about my astonishing lack of updates!! OOPS. I'd love to take responsibility for my own negligence, only it's not en tirely my fault. Let's blame Katherine and Jodi because they distra cted me for weeks and kept me away from technology of all sorts. S o.

Here is what we did with Katherine and/or Jodi: drove around the South Island, saw big round boulders, talked to parrots in the Dunedin botanical gardens, had a geography contest with a man at a bar, drank wine on the beach, froze to death because it is "summer" here and people don't bring coats on trips in the summer, ate fish and chips, needed to throw-up fish and chips, hiked Franz Joseph glacier, took a boat out on the Milford Sound, spent Christm as with Carolyn's family, swam on Christmas day because remember, it is summer here!, awoke to a wind storm of absurd strength b lowing away our tent on Abel Tasman, surprised ourselves by spending New Years Eve at a bar in a boat club resort in the Marlborough Sounds with a traveler named Gethin who looked a bit homocidal, but turned out fine, spent that night packed like sardines in a campsite with our neighbor to the left being a man known only as "Drunk" and on our right a professional dirt bike rider we like to call "Gross", ferried across to the North Island, used our shadows to tell the time of day using a sun dial in the Wellington botanical gardens, hiked th e Tongariro Alpine crossing during another extremely extreme wind storm that made Maggie cold enough to wear underwear on her head, gave a white guy from Zimbabwe a ride after the hike and dropped him off 7 kms from his car because he "hadn't had a run yet" that day, pretended that our muscles weren't screaming in p ost-hike agony as we watched him jog away, camped on the Coromandel Peninsula beside a group of kiwi boys who were surprised to learn that more than 4 stars appear in the American skies and that the Milky Way is not a blackhole, read on the beach, ate icecream, laughed for about 3 weeks straight, woke up at 3am to take them to the airport. Bye Katherine and Jodi!

Now, Maggie and I find ourselves back in the wonderfu l, loving hands of Gilly and Greg. It felt like coming home, getting back to their house. We left their garden in October as a bunch of brown beds with frail seedlings that looked absolutely hopeless. We left half-joking about how we were soon going to need to sneak produce from the grocery store into the garden to make ou r efforts appear successful. But we returned to the most incredible forest of vegetables. More veggies than you can shake a stick at. I have found a renewed sense of wonder at the basic facts of life. For instance: plants are alive, y'all. They grow. It's incredible.

Our first day back was a fantastic day of hay collection. You might think that I use the word "fantastic" with sarcasm, but it couldn't have been more fun. For one thing, we got to spend a morning back on the farm with Ron, our most remarkable octogenarian friend. After a morning of our first 50 bales, we took Ron to the beach, where I almost asked "did you surf when you were younger?" but revised the question to, "do you surf?" Yes, is the answer. The afternoon was set for picking up the remaining 150 bales of hay straight from the paddock where it was cut. The entire Shine family, their partners, and their partner's siblings all came out to help. We ran around the paddock behind the baler throwing bales on trucks as fast as we could. It was so fun. Ron and Margaret (82 and 83, respectively) were both in it to win it with the youngest of us. They have redefined "age" for me, in case you couldn't tell. After all the bales were loaded and unloaded we snacked on pears straight from the tree until it was time for a bbq dinner for all 14 helpers. Gilly and Greg are the most generous humans in the world. This is a fact.

Yesterday we went on a snorkeling trip. Today we returned to our Most Perfect yoga class, planted hundreds of new veggies, fed pigs, calves and horses, ran at the Most Perfect beach, and made dinner with our garden bounty. So many days make Maggie and I scream out love and thanks.

There are also days when I feel a twinge of unsettlement. Dissettlement? Nope. But you get it. It is hard to know that I can be happy doing this for myself now, while trusting myself to work on something bigger later. I just feel anxious about that on some days. I suppose that things can only be so perfect before I begin to distrust the reality of it all.

Now I'm looking forward to Mom's visit in less than a week! Yay, Mommy!