Brief Notes and Images from Aotearoa
On Water, Earth and Air
It is six weeks since we left the cold dark of England for the brilliant summer light of Aotearoa (New Zealand) on a two month visit. Cycles of intense sunshine and brilliant light have alternated with dark humid greyness and shifting veils of rain that have shrouded the hills, obscuring and changing the land.
Here, in the Southern Ocean and South Pacific, which wrap around one of the most dynamic geological areas in the world, the waters are warming rapidly. Extreme rainfall events are now commonplace. Tropical moist air brings deluges, falling on steep deforested and overgrazed land, on land which has been cut into for roads and buildings. Seeping, loosening earth which lets go in thunderous downward movements. Land slides, rivers spill. Lives and homes are lost. Roads and walking tracks disappear.
This land is a vivid reminder of the intense dynamic forces of nature - generative and destructive. That everything is in a constant state of emerging from or subsiding into nothingness. Always in motion, always incomplete. A reminder that all that seems permanent, of substance, is an illusion.
Here in this spectacular dynamic land I find solace off the beaten track in the small and inconspicuous, the subtle and ephemeral, the tentative and overlooked. The vast and uncontrollable movements of water, earth and air have catalysed, necessitated and deepened the need for this, not only outwardly but inwardly too.
I am most deeply moved and fascinated by things close to nothingness, things on the verge of inception or devolving, especially when it is unclear which way they are moving.
There is a state of being and awareness in the body which seems to mirror this place close to nothingness. In Tantric terminology it is described as being Passionately Undemonstrative*. Far from being a state of passivity it is a state of being anchored in the body, attuned to subtle changes and minute movements, doing nothing to move attention outwards; a vital state which allows lifeforce to move through, rather than being actively directed towards an outward goal, person or situation. This, I suggest, in a world which venerates the spectacular, outward, goal-orientated, and fetishises the sensational, can be a radically healing state to cultivate.
*For more on this see the writing of Diana Richardson and Janet McGeever, specifically their book “Tantric Sex and Menopause”
