Batten Down the Hatches

Hoar Frost in Central Otago

Sound the alarm.   A storm is coming.  This is the gist of the national news headlines and reports for the past two days.  This isn’t really news though.  This is about the time it happens every year.  Winter has arrived in New Zealand.

It’s an interesting time of year for a woman who lived her early childhood years in tropical locations and whose family settled in California, Southern California to be precise.   I can remember Christmas day celebrated in 90 degree Fahrenheit temperatures wearing shorts and being barefoot!  That isn’t to say that Southern California doesn’t experience winter weather and temperatures.  The geography does include deserts, mountains and valleys besides beaches, and the local mountains do get snow every winter.  But living somewhere that actually has four seasons, one of them being a real winter outside your door, is different.

I arrived in New Zealand in late March 2008.  Summer was over in Queenstown.  Autumn had arrived.   April and May rolled in shortly afterward … a time when more affluent Queenstown residents escape.  (And there are more of them than you would think.)  It’s one of two shoulder seasons where tourist numbers drop.  Being that Queenstown is a tourist town and the crown jewel of NZ tourism (according to the national tourism body, Tourism New Zealand), it’s a time when tourism operators drop their prices, locals’ specials are advertised and many residents go on holiday to escape the ‘grey’ of the season.  Then June rolls around, and the buzz begins.   Snow is coming, which means the town’s population will probably more than double over the next few months as heaps of skiers and snowboarders arrive from Australia and the Northern Hemisphere.  

Well, that time is now.  The snow has already arrived in Queenstown being that it is in the southern part of the South Island, and most storms come from the North Pole.  Facebook posts from locals were already saying yesterday afternoon that the two local grocery stores were out of bread.  Some cheeky (and clever!) bugger had already posted a loaf of bread for sale at $200 … which actually isn’t that much more than what you’d pay in the grocery store.  (I’m just joking here, but the cost of living in Queenstown is incredibly high.  I’ll save this topic for another time.)

The news is on the television, and the weather reports have said that the storm is going to hit the entire country.  There’s even some talk that snow could fall in Wellington and Auckland, the two largest cities on the North Island.  I’m sitting here tucked up under a blanket wearing slipper boots, nursing a cold.  The winds are blowing hard outside.  The storm isn’t making its way, it has arrived.  But there’s a loaf of bread baking in the oven and soon I’ll be noshing on a slice smothered in New Zealand butter.

What I Will Become

Thank you, Steve Jobs.  Thank you for this reminder, for this inspiration.  "Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition, they somehow already know what you truly want to become."  These are strong words, words that resonate so deeply, so strongly with me these days.

When I started this adventure over five years ago, I was on a journey to change my life.  At the time, I was working for a large international technology corporation.  I got there because the small, start-up software company I worked for was acquired by this large corporate.  I was working a lot, too much.  I had no personal life anymore.  Job satisfaction was little, and there was quite a bit of stress.  I often had to remind myself that we weren't curing cancer or even doing anything really important to help others live a better life.  Where was the meaning in this work?

It wasn't an easy decision to make to leave a job that paid a good salary, provided multiple benefits, gave me opportunities to travel, taught me a lot, and looks good on a CV.  Resigning was a bit like cutting the lifeline to home and security.  But it was time to follow my heart. Something else was calling me.  Maybe it was that inner voice that Jobs refers to.

You see, when I was a teenager, people used to tell me what they thought I would be doing later in life.  There were two things in particular that always came up, and they both had to do with helping others.  I'm not doing either of these things.

I think back now to what they said and realize they were right.  How did they know?  How did they know even back then that helping improve the lives of others was work that I would find important, work that I would want to do.  More importantly, how did I stray from that?  Well, I know what happened, and I know when I knew I had to change it.

Since I resigned from that company, I've been trying to follow my heart to finding work in NZ that is meaningful to me. In Queenstown, I was told that I could reinvent myself.  There's a lot of truth in that statement, and I had been somewhat successful in that regard.  The last full-time 'project' I was working on in Queenstown was near and dear to my heart.  It fit the bill for what was needed, what I think of as meaningful work to affect change.  But that inner voice spoke up again.  The heart and intuition were telling me something.  So the journey continues.

I had two disappointments regarding the work journey this week.   Then I saw this quote by Steve Jobs again.  It reminded me that things happen for a reason.  Sure enough, by the afternoon, I had received more news, more positive this time.  So I'm following my intuition on this one, and we'll see what happens.

Tramp, tramp, tramp

Monday is the Queen's birthday which made today the first day of a three-day holiday weekend for most people in the country.  Like any self-respecting Kiwi, I got out amongst it and went for a tramp in the bush.  Destination was Catchpool and Orongorongo Valleys in Rimutaka Forest Park in the southern Rimutaka Ranges of the North Island.

Having not done much tramping on the North Island, it's so interesting to see the difference in vegetation in the bush up here, most noteably, the ponga, or silver tree fern.  This is a favourite of mine.  The fronds of the tree are green on one side with a silver-white colouration on the underside that seem to 'glow' in the shade of the bush. As the day started to get long and my legs a bit weary from the hills, my gaze started to drop to the track, and I finally realised the significance of the silver white fern as a national symbol when I saw bits of fern on the track.

The Maori spiral shaped koru symbol is based on the shape of a new unfurling silver fern frond.

For more information on Rimutaka Forest Park and these tracks, visit the Department of Conservation site.  You can also read more about my 12+km tramp on my other blog, Get Amongst It.

Where Have I Been?

 
(Big ... no, make that HUGE ... sigh)  Where do I start?  I've been away from blogging for about two years.  Well, serious blogging where I'm actually writing and not just posting videos or quotes.

(Queue long silence ...)

Two years.  Yep, two years. Two years?  I can hardly believe it as I'm hammering out the words on my keyboard.  I would have been back sooner, but quite honestly, even thinking about writing about the past few years had been painful.  I had been struggling to figure out how I could explain it without sounding too negative, incriminating others, hurting people who had hurt me, getting myself in trouble, and destroying relationships.  Whew!  That was a lot to consider and work with.

You see when I moved to New Zealand over five years ago, when I said 'if not now then when', when I decided to change my life in a big way, I took a huge leap of faith.  I took a chance on love.  I thought that was it, that I'd found my rest-of-my-life partner.  I was happy, and life was great!  At least for me.  I just wished I'd known that he wasn't happy.  And in the words of Forrest Gump, that's all I have to say about that.

Why am I writing about it now?  Because to just pick up and carry-on with this blog and leave a two year hole in history seemed dishonest.  This blog is about changing one's life and all that comes with it when we make the choice to remove ourselves from the comforts of home and live in another environment ... the good and the bad, the adventures and experiences, the joys and heartaches, what we learn about ourselves and others.

In the last two years, I met an interesting journalist from Australia who really  inspired me.  We got on really well and spoke about how we got where we were.  I explained that I was struggling to keep writing because I was concerned that the recent circumstances of my personal life were influencing my writing in a negative way.  She encouraged me to continue writing regardless, because even if my writing came across negative, it would be genuine and real.  She told me that people want to read about how things really are, and that by sharing, I may actually help others.

So where have I been?  I think maybe I was going through hell.  Winston Churchill said, "If you're going through hell, keep going."  And that is what I did, I kept going.  I just didn't blog about it.

So here's me now ...

This might say it all ...

"Certainly travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living." – Miriam Beard

Rugby World Cup 2011

Water & Rocks, New Zealand

Here's a really nice video I came across on Facebook.  The Hot Air Balloon Pilot is Hugh McLellan with Sunrise Balloons in Queenstown.  It's pretty soothing to watch ...

Water & Rocks, New Zealand from Metron on Vimeo.