Richbourne

Home for a while.
When my job was making bread and starting a vegan burger business with two brothers. I'd been here once before, sitting at the table eating avocado on toast, standing on the deck watching the sun set over the western motorway. I remember a whatsapp chat with Em "I don't want to live with 4 christian girls but it feels like I should" and so I drove my shitty audi a3 over the bridge with all of my things inside and moved in on a cloudy autumn day in 2016, the year that would break me (or make me???), just because my gut said to and like it always is, it was right.
Here I have grown.
whittakers creamy milk chocolate blocks consumed x10,000
first dates discussed: too many to count
break up hand drawn posters hanging from doors, made from the roll of brown paper that has never run out
I can't count the number of people who have stayed on our couches, in our rooms, shared our lives for a little while
my brothers, abbey's friends from christchurch, laura, jannah, the irish boys, naomi, kendra and nicole, claire, hannah every time she photographs a wedding
smoking cigarettes and drinking bourbon on the deck with katie and abbey hahaha
our cocktail parties
the most outrageous dinner parties with the best food, all of the furniture in lydia's room and tables and chairs to fit 30 people in.
the deck and the sunsets.
the first time tim kissed me
the mistletoe hanging above the front door for 2 years straight.
tandoori chicken burgers
walking on the cycleway to work;ponsonby;crumb. walking home at 5pm and how all the cyclists furiously ding their bells.
going to work at kokako, last year when we were all freelancing and the power would go off.
the tears we have cried on that couch. the movies we have watched. the cups of peppermint tea had. the coffee brewed. the times we have held each other.
going to the christmas carol service at katie's church and singing on the road to santa tell me by ariana grande
the bikes beside the stairs. all of the things I've put on my walls. the sound of the motorway at night. the helicoptors circling at midnight. 6am footsteps on the floor above me.
sharing a room: spilling all our secrets late at night, my messy half and abbey's tidy half. all of the books. only a couple of fights. the bookshelf in the middle: still hasn't tipped over despite precariousness.
when I was sick and everyone came to see me in hospital every day, and how sam and annie tidied my room while I was gone, and all the times katie emptied my bucket of vomit and checked my fever, and how abbey drove me to the emergency department that first time when I couldn't walk.
all of the airport runs.
all of the picnics
all of the walks up mt eden
all of the early mornings at habitat
all of the pizza nights, dessert nights. pooling our food to come up with some kind of meal. feeding each other when we're too broke/sad/busy to eat.
here's my home, a family I found by accident. here's to us.
X

Links

This is good. Reach out as well as up, please widen my perspective.

It's the middle of winter but this song is summer inside me.

We memorised this when we were kids, now I've forgotten most of it but the words still make lil tears spring to my eyes, because this is what it is to learn to be alive, and it's bloody hard, but it's worth it.

I want to see this.

All you have to do is keep giving a shit.

If you can't find a purpose, just find a reason.

This album is changing my life.

Anecdotes

Living somewhere is something very different from traveling. Traveling is finding somewhere you can eat and if it’s bad then you only have to do it once and if it’s good then rad! You nailed food choices this time! Living somewhere is buying salt and pepper and clothes pegs. Traveling is visiting the spectacular. Living is getting your feet dirty amongst the ordinary. 

It’s still sinking in for me that I moved to Africa.

This won’t be over in a week or two. 

Learn to boil every drop of water before it goes in your mouth. Learn to look poverty in the eye 365 days in a row, and figure out what you have to do about it. Learn to be lonely and learn to do well with that. Learn to say no. Learn when to let your guard down and learn when you keep it fiercely up. Learn to keep everything charged because of power cuts. Learn to shower any time of day you hear water in the pipes because chances are it won’t be there for long. Learn to keep your cupboards fairly full so you don't have to walk to get groceries when it's pouring with rain. Learn to be ok with bugs crawling on you. 

Today on my way to the markets I saw a guy standing in front of a tree saying “amen” over and over and over. When I walked back the other way he was on the other side of the road, standing in front of another tree doing the same thing.

I saw a guy walking down the street with a red hair clip proudly clipped in his beard. 

I saw a centipede as long as my foot and as fat as my big toe.

I walked past a man holding his son’s hand, I smiled at the little boy and the dad pushed him towards me and said “Take him!” and I was about to run away before I got landed with a small Malawian child. But turns out he was joking so I stayed and laughed.

I carried a 5 litre container of water home from the shop and wished like anything that I knew how to carry things on my head like every Malawian woman can.

When I cut through the park a man starts walking alongside me:

First he laughs..

“Why did you buy water?”

“Because I get sick! I’m not used to Malawian water.”

“Oh! Where are you coming from?”

“From New Zealand”

“How long are you in Malawi?”

“I’ve been here for three months”

“And you like?”

“Yes, yes! Malawi is very beautiful!”

“What are you doing?”

“I work at the hospital”

“Ah!” 

Then he told me about his business and how his office is nearby, how he is going to the sports centre to play basketball. He used to play basketball but now he’s old, but he’s going to anyway. 

He says “I will come and visit you at the hospital! What’s your name again?”

Ok, Patrick! Lovely to meet you!

- Malawi, January 2015

Find yrslf

The wild saturdays are back.

8.56am

I could fill a book with all the things I didn't say.

A conversation in the early morning light left me thinking about all this year has been.
Full of learning and growing, successes and failures experiences, doubts, joy, wonder, feeling loved more fully than I ever have before, getting to know myself in way deeper ways and confronting all the pieces I don't like.
It's been misunderstanding and reframing.
It's been love, time and time again.
It's been anxiety and fear, guilt and shame.
It's been honesty.
It's been asking questions of everything, scratching away at all the noise and finding out what's at the very core of this. What is important when everything you thought you knew implodes?
It's been letting go of everything I thought people wanted me to be.
Just be.

I'm getting more sure that every person is a great person.
I'm getting more sure that it's worth being kind to yourself as much as it is worth being kind to others. I'm getting more sure that you should say the things you're scared to say.
I'm getting more sure that we all pretty much want/need the same things, but we all talk about that and pursue that in different ways, and that's ok.
I'm getting more sure that stopping everything, lying under the stars and just looking at them is always a good idea.

What a wonder it is to live in this world. What a wonder to experience all of this. To fuck it up magnificently and then try again. How many times will I do this in my life? How many times will we all?
It's a great embrace, isn't it. We're big, we're small. We're everything, we're nothing. We're anything at all.

I feel it all.

Here

Where my favourite pictures were taped to the wall with masking tape. 

Where the bed I slept on would sometimes fall apart in the middle of the night. 

Where toast reigned. 

Where we scraped the ceilings and listened to Emily King.

Where I'd run to Mairangi Bay and watch the reflection of the sunset.

Where anxiety kicked me in the face.

Where I found out what it was like to have someone you could speak in stream-of-consciousness to.

Where double-decker buses took me to the city.

Where I could sleep with the curtains open.

Where I wouldn't stay long.

Where I wanted to be when I was lying in a hammock on the other side of the world.

Where I slept in the back of a truck once.

Where we went surfing.

Where I found common ground.

Where I lost my sleeping bag.

Where a lady with a dog called Theo took my photo.

Where I felt a beginning that looked like an ending.

Where we raced the tide.

Where the sun is setting behind the hills I can see from the overpass.

Where the stars are.

Read this if you want

To anyone who thought I lost my faith,

I wanna shout about how I’m sososo human. How I’ve effed up in so many ways and caused myself and others pain that I wish we didn’t have to experience, but we do. I I see the world from a way more humble place than I used to, knowing that I’m a stumble away from crumpled on the ground. I feel like that's all of us. I know about how life is fragile. I know about how it’s also beautiful, ugly, ridiculous, wonderful, so full of meaning and so meaningless all at once. I guess we’re big and I guess we’re small.

I’ve sat lonely and quiet with my questions and my fears because I’m scared of disappointing anyone who invested into me. Because I’m scared that you’ll look at my decisions and write me off as off the rails. Because I don’t know how to tell you that saying you’ll pray for me feels like a cop out. Because I don’t wanna disregard what’s personal and true for you. But man, I do wanna be honest, and I feel like my silence on where my head and my heart have been hanging out lately isn’t that constructive.

I know I went away and came back different, and I know that was bound to happen. I didn’t ever imagine it would be this much. I’ve been afraid that Malawi will get the blame for my ‘loss of faith’, that’s the last thing I want you to believe. Malawi didn’t do this to me. Malawi provided the context in which everything I ever thought I knew about anything could be deconstructed. All the illusions, gone.

Now I rebuild. 

All this means is that I wanna learn to live in the trust that truth wins, whatever that may be, and that if grace is real then it’s big enough for all of our humanity. 

It means that I’m not signing up to anything out of fear. I’m not searching for any kind of high. I’m not trying to be anyone else’s saviour. 

It means that I’m wide open.

It’s had me terrified. I’ve felt an urgency, that I have to figure this out before it’s too late. But maybe all ‘figuring it out’ really is, is realising that I never can. Anyone who says they can is lying. There are people much wiser and more intelligent than me but none of us are gods.

We’re all just figuring it out, doing our best with what we know.

Let’s have grace for each other. Let’s talk about stuff. Let’s figure out why we’re uncomfortable talking about some things. Let’s dance outrageously outside the cages of our beliefs. Let’s search for radical truth. Let’s not look at religion in any of it’s facets and make a god out of it.

I was driving back to Blantyre after a trip to the lake, the sun was setting. Bright pink and serene, a perfectly defined sphere balanced above the horizon. You could cut around the edges. But I’ve seen representations of the sun’s surface and there is nothing calm or serene about that. It’s raging hot fire, always changing, always the same. There’s no cutting around the edges.

What we can see from here isn’t the same thing. And I’m sure if we visited the sun it’d be another story all together.

Maybe God is like that.