You here again?

I still board these flights -- first across the wide Pacific from Portland to Auckland, then across the Tasman to Australia – with a sense of wonder at my great good luck, no matter how many times I strap myself into these airplane seats. I am still grateful, and more than a little amazed, by the places I’ve gotten to go because my interest in making art, manipulating fabric, and teaching combined into a thoroughly unlikely career. 

This time I’m flying to Melbourne and crossing my fingers that my very tight connection will work; if it does, I’ll be in Hobart, Tasmania this evening, setting up my classroom for tomorrow’s workshop, in much the same way I’ll be mixing the paints next month for my class in California. But this class will be filled with people with wonderfully different accents and maybe even different approaches to their work; outside the classroom window will be views of landscape and trees I’ve never seen before, and the sounds of unfamiliar birdsong.

I remember the impressively extravagant birds that visited my classroom a few years ago when I taught at a conference held in an Australian national park a few hours northwest of Melbourne. The birds in New Zealand are less showy, but their sounds remind me that I’m not in Kansas any more. When I arrived at my friend Sue’s house two weeks ago after the long flight from San Francisco, the sounds of the tui outside her window struck me with a sense of return that I hadn’t thought about on other visits. Although our trees at home are alive with what seems like hundreds of avian visitors, our yard is curiously absent of birdsong (especially if you don’t consider the strident bickering of the crows song). Here, the dawn chorus shows up for role call each morning, and the resident owl calls out his name (which is conveniently the same as his demand) in the evening: more pork, more pork. And in between there’s the sweet whistling sound of a bird whose name I don’t know. It’s funny – I don’t normally pay that much attention to birds, and I’m so sadly amusical that I almost always choose to listen to a book or a podcast rather than a song—but I smile when I hear the tui greet me as I open my eyes in the  New Zealand morning. It’s telling me, You here again? Aren’t you the lucky one?