The Purpose-Filled Life

Every week there’s a new report on the latest shiniest research on living longer. The Mediterrean Diet. Acai berries. Pilates. But those who have studied populations boasting a high percentage of centenarians claim that is isn’t the latest hard-to-pronounce dietary supplement that ensures longevity, although eating well is part of the answer. Factors that long-lived populations had in common were a strong sense of community, moderate exercise, a life goal or purpose, and a plant-based diet

So what better use of my time while in Australia and New Zealand than to develop a purpose, in the company of friends? The icing on the cake, or in this case, the topping on the ice cream, is that the goal involved eating as much of a certain plant-based food as possible.

It started in Australia, where Bill and I came upon a store that sold home-made ice cream and sorbets. When we saw that passion fruit was one of the choices, we were transported back to the summer and autumn we spent in Auckland 15 years ago when we switched houses with friends who needed our home as an outpost while on sabbatical from the University of Auckland. When we arrived at their house a few kms from downtown Auckland, passion fruit vines twined up to their backyard deck, and we watched the fruits grow from a flower that looked as if it had been drawn by a graphic designer to a fruit shaped like a jumbo egg the color of an aubergine. We waited till it began to shrivel a bit, as instructed, then sliced them open and scooped the pulp and seeds over everything we could think of – morning muesli, ice cream, and of course birthday pavlovas. Mostly unavailable in Portland (and when available, largely unaffordable), passion fruit became the madeleines of our sojourn in NZ. A whiff of passion fruit scent could transport us back to that year when we had two summers, when, because of the house switch, we had a fuzzy dog to walk and a live-in friend in the flat next door.

So we ordered the passion fruit ice cream in Port Fairy on the Great Ocean Road and decided, in the words of that famous New Yorker cartoon, that it was good, but not immortal. But with that first tart lick and that first whiff of the sorbet’s transportative scent, I decided I was on a mission. In the next two and a half months I would compare and contrast passion fruit gelato and sorbet in every town we stopped in that had home-made frozen delicacies on offer. It’s a tough job, forgoing the inventive chocolate gelato flavors on offer in favor of a fruit-based nosh, but membership in the Longevity Club might depend on fulfilling this goal.

When I got to New Zealand, I asked for help from my community of friends to continue the research project. Ailie pitched in by leading me to a small storefront in her Auckland neighborhood which served moan-inducing cones and by meeting me at a gelato café in Nelson (where we were so impressed by the other flavors that, after tasting the passion fruit and pronouncing it better than most, we proceeded to buy 18 scoops of various flavors to take back to our hosts and share after dinner). I tried another specimen to rate at a gelateria in Mt Eden, a fifteen minute walk from the house where we originally feasted from the long-gone passion fruit vines, and another while waiting for the ferry to Devonport to  attend a folk music concert held in a WW II bunker built into the side of a defunct volcano, but that’s a whole other story. And after completing my week’s teaching at the Remarkable Symposium (named after the hyperbolically-named mountains rising beside Lake Wakitipu, which made me wonder about the extreme modesty required to name a town Boring, Oregon) in Queenstown, I compared notes with fellow tutor Lisa Walton (Http://www.dyedheaven.com).

By this time, the clock was ticking and it was time to revisit what I suspected was the clear winner. Although the golden weather had reached its end by the time I had concluded my teaching on the North Island and headed back to Auckland, I didn’t let the need to don my polar fleece stand in the way of getting back to Ailie’s neighborhood in St. Heliers to test my initial reaction to the Village Co-op’s passion fruit sorbet. The return visit took on a festive air courtesy of the young women behind the counter, who had donned bridal veils in honor of the Royal Wedding scheduled for that evening.

And so it came to pass in a land far, far away that a left-wing Oregonian who doesn’t quite get humankind’s need for ritual sat eating passion fruit sorbet and watching The Royal Wedding with two Kiwis who couldn’t wait to see what the royal bride would be wearing. With each velvety spoonful of gelato we gawked at another example of Dr Seussian headwear spotted among the wedding guests. Was the wedding even broadcast in the US? In New Zealand, parties were being planned all over the nation, and friends were gathering, some wearing outfits befitting wedding attendees, some in jeans and tiaras. On the bus earlier that day, I had overheard a woman speaking at full volume, as people unfortunately do in public when using a cell phone, discussing with some urgency what Kate’s new title would be.

Wedding, schmedding. Over the burbling about the dress, the hats, the invitees, I declared the Village Co-Op the clear winner in this quest for the best passion fruit gelato or sorbet. But I intend to return in a year or two to determine if they’re able to hold the title. There, I have a new goal. Just added a couple of years to my life.

Flightless Birds of New Zealand

The Takahe

The Giant Bronze Kiwi

The Rubber Chicken

Identify Yourself

When traveling in ostensibly English-speaking New Zealand or Australia, one would be forgiven for thinking you could leave your travel phrase book behind. But that idea gets munted when a friend replies to my greeting, "How are you today?" with "Box of birds, mate, box of birds."

For those of you searching for your Kiwi-English phrase books, "munted" means destroyed or misshapen, and "box of birds" signifies that you're feeling just peachy. And if you think about it, "just peachy" is an equally puzzling answer to the question if your'e a Kiwi trying to figure out what this strange American is saying.

My Australian class responded like stunned mullets when I mentioned that one of their quilts was hung catywampus. It dawned on me that catywampus, a Southern colloquialism, might not be Standard English (and just wot is Standard English when she's at home, mate, you might ask, but we'll leave that for another discussion). When I explained that catywampus simply meant off-kilter, the class breathed out as one and said, "Oh, you mean squew-whiff?" Well, sure.

Sharon Patterson, a Nelson textile artist, understands that language and art can be cultural markers. The main image in her work, Hard Yakka, is the phrase, "I AM," a visual declaration borrowed from one of New Zealand's most famous paintings. Sharon's piece is a pearler. Though certainly not the first to appropriate imagery from Colin McCahon, arguably New Zealand's first Pakeha artist to produce work that didn't look like art from anywhere else, she has produced an accessible work about culture and personal identity. Worked on a grey wool blanket like those folded into every linen cupboard in this country, she tells us she is a textile artist using native materials. By employing McCahon's iconic "I AM," she locates herself in a line of NZ artists reusing iconic natinal imagery. And by stitching a colloquial monologue into that unyielding statement of identity, she is inviting us in on a conversation among the locals who have made a home and a language here on these isloated islands.

 

I carry a notebook with me so I can remember phrases from those conversations. From "rark up" to "a bit of a dag," they fill me with wonder at the expansiveness of the English language, and its ability to describe both the object in question and the identity of the speaker. How am I doing on this trip around one of my favorite places in the world? I'm just a box of fluffy ducks.

GLOSSARY

Stunned mullet: surprised

Hard yakka: hard work. Pronounced something like Hod Yacka. Middle "R"s here are more of a concept than a sound.

Pearler: Good, great. Pronounced Puhlah. See above.

Pakeha: I'm never sure if this just means non-Maori Kiwis, or specifically white Europeans.

Rark up: wind someone up, tell someone off. For pronunciation, again ignore that vestigial middle R.

Bit of a dag: hard case, comedian. The origins of this phrase puzzle me, as a dag is defined as the, um, fecal matter stuck to a sheep's bum. If someone tell you to rattle your dags, you're being instructed to get your rear in gear. Rattling said dags might be more visual imagery than you'd like to conjure up over your tea and pikelets.

Travels: The Extraordinary and The Strangely Familiar

Several decades ago I read an autobiography of Agatha Christie about which I remember very little except for her caution to think twice before returning to a place you remember as extraordinary, with emphasis on the exquisite precision of that word’s meaning. There are a few places I am hesitant to revisit because they are preserved with such visual clarity and heightened emotions in my Hall of Peak Experiences: our twentieth anniversary/fortieth birthday trip to the islands of Greece, our family sunset walk at Bryce Canyon. They are trips that wove together unique landscapes and fleeting life events: I will never be 40 again, blinking at the astonishing blue and white landscape of Santorini, accompanied by the person I had loved for 20 years; I will never hold hands with my 7 and 9 year old sons again as we enter a sculpted landscape painted in desert hues I could not have dreamed up on my own. There are also places I have been brave enough to revisit, like the interior of Ste. Chapelle in Paris, where I remember standing as a 17 year old and thinking with that self-drama only a 17 year old American in Paris can muster, that it would be okay if I died right then, bathed in the light of a stained glass Bible and sung to heaven by the choir echoing in the chamber. And the reason I once again had to blink back tears on my revisit three decades on was that I was returning with the one thing I didn’t have in that room of color and sound thirty years ago: a family to share it with. The voyage among the Grecian Isles seems complete in a way the experience of Ste. Chapelle had not been, since not even Ste. Chapelle’s ecstasy of light and sound exempted me from the inchoate yearning for human connection. That feeling of being almost integrated with a time and a place, that not yet fulfilled yearning itself might provide the password back to a place. What I bring to a place on the second visit might be what I didn’t possess on the first, and it might be what closes the circle.

Then there are places, like New Zealand, that I return to because I don’t think I will soon be done with the discoveries I can make during my stay. New Zealand is a place best explained by that useful oxymoron, Strangely Familiar. It feels like home, but a home entered from a different door and in which I have an inarguably finite amount of time. So I make time to see friends, visit places, learn about the native literature, art, and natural world without putting any of it off till tomorrow, next week, next month. It feels like a home where they speak my language, but with phrases for which I must seek definitions, and pronunciations I sometimes ask to be spelled. Because the strangely familiar subtly shifts the tectonic plates of experience and expectation upon which I normally stand, I have to daily acknowledge the fact that I’m balancing on moving ground.

Last week I returned to Nelson, a small city on the northern tip of the South Island, a place I visited with Bill and the boys 15 years ago. It was a city enlivened by a burgeoning art scene, heavy on glass and ceramics and wearable art. Its small art gallery had an exhibit of pieces by artists I was moved to contact and interview for a magazine article I was researching on NZ textile artists. It’s also the city whose setting seemed perfectly Kiwi to me, nestled in a turn of Tasman Bay, reachable by a long drive on a twisting two lane road after a three hour ferry ride from the North Island.

Nelson View

Those interviews resulted not in a published article (the magazine folded) but in close friendships with the artists, one of whom, Ailie Snow (http://ailiesnow.com/), was with me on this trip. A trip we took not by car and ferry but by plane, something we wouldn’t have done 15 years ago when it cost as much to fly to Australia as it did to the South Island. The art scene has been muted, tamped down by a world economy that isn’t directing enough tourists with disposable income to a small city tucked on the Tasman and by a government that has dialed back its support of craft and art. And it is a larger place now, with big box stores and new blank-faced buildings, making it a bit more like everywhere else. But the view from our room recalled the impression of ocean and sky from my previous visit, and my favorite mural was still there, repainted in response to the bleaching effect of the strong NZ light, but still perfectly embodying the feeling of strangely familiar: a landscape that is hyper-real and surreal at the same time, that might be the very manifestation of perfection or the imagined ideal of perfection. 

Aotearoa

This time around, the visit was more about people than about place, as Ailie’s sister-in-law took us to meet her sister, Sally Burton (http://www.sallyburton.co.nz/), a local artist (and like her a Nelsonian from birth),  Susanne Williamson, a dyer and clothing maker from the US who washed ashore in the seventies and never left, and various family members and friends with interesting stories to tell. On this visit, as on the last, the circle remained invitingly open when our plane took off for Auckland, inviting a return to the unchanging view, evolving cultural scene, and growing number of people whose stories I’d like to follow here in Nelson.

Need to ask what a gumboot is? Why, it's a wellie.

Yesyesyesyesyes

My policy when I return to New Zealand is simple: Say Yes. When friends invite me to events I haven’t heard about, I gratefully reply, “Yes, please,”  buy a bottle of wine to ensure future invitations, and toddle off. In the past two weeks, my strict Embrace Yes policy has been my ticket to family dinners, road trips, studio visits, gallery rambles, video marathons, high tea and three evenings of Culchah in downtown Auclkland and its environs. Having a great time, wish you were here, but since you’re not, some impressions of a benefit concert for earthquake relief, a drama debut, and an authors' panel…

Singing for Christchurch

Bobby McFerrin walking onto the Sky Tower stage, dressed as casually as if headed to the corner grocery store, wordlessly seating himself and launching into an equally wordless song from somewhere – Africa? Asia? Here and not here. Mesmerizing a sold-out audience, engaging the phalanx of choir members seated behind him – who haven’t met him before, haven’t practiced anything they’re now being shown to sing —with a flick of the wrist, a nod, a raised eyebrow. Turning to the audience later to ask, “D’you know Ave Maria?” and on nothing but trust and 10,000 hours of experience, singing the Bach underlay while the audience, who from the sound of it were given an evening off from singing in the Angel’s Chorus, sang the whole aria, knew the tune, the words, and ended in an Amen of harmony we must have practiced over and over in an alternate universe. Inviting two volunteers to come and sing with him one at a time, one providing tuneful comic relief and the other a heartstopping seductive improvised vocal pas de deux that made me realize when their last chord ended that I hadn’t breathed the whole time they were  singing.

A Night at the Theeaytah

Evening at the Maidment Theatre, downtown Auckland: Enter the theatre for the 6.30 (!) performance, settle in among an audience divided between the usual grey heads, a section of high school students and a dozen or so youths inexplicably dressed in the Full Mime – striped shirts, white faces, gloves. The elaborate set is aswirl with cloud or fog as we take our seats, then houselights dim and  the metaphorical curtain rises on an original play built around songs by a “world famous in New Zealand” (local phrase, not mine) musician. A home grown professional production, a Kiwi go at an experimental play: surreal melodrama interrupted by music. This particular experiment ticked all the Houston we have a problem boxes:  a twice life size papier mache zebra head, a dead man inhabiting a 7 year old’s body,  a father digging digging digging in the garden and bewildering rock songs with no discernible connection to the action, sung by actors who turn to the audience, a la Ethel Merman, before beginning to sing, giving us that split second to pray intensely, no, please, no, not another song. Hard to know what to say when my Kiwi friends turned to me, faces beaming, after the shamelessly milked ovation and asked how I liked it. Thought it might be a good moment to grab a mask, turn to the rows behind me, and belt out a tune. Still, better than the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical I saw in LA a decade ago at which people applauded the chandelier on the set. They would have loved the zebra head.

Authors Talking Among Themselves

Setting: a former convent newly born as an art museum filled with contemporary NZ art bought by the heir of a meat packing fortune. Title offered by the panel of authors: Nazis, Natives, and Nudity. And yet even with that gotcha title we were the only three audience members (other than Grae – one name--  the “temporary art” installer there to video the evening) until a minute before the event began. But then the magic of the written word takes over, along with the personalities of the three writers who read to us and questioned each other and somehow included us in the discussion, which  ranged from how “shutting the door to hold the audience at bay” while writing keeps you from second guessing your own voice to how you manage to sit at your computer again after a savage book review. Then they kicked off their Lucite 6” heels, switched chairs, and tucked their knees under them to discuss the ignominy of being disinvited to appear at a local library event because of the sex scenes the people in this “funny little Presbyterian country we live in,” were afraid you’d read and the importance of a good editor-- especially if you are dyslexic and  “can’t spell for toffee.” All of this, the reading of the torrid sex scene in question, the talk about writing to make time stop around a single image – is done with the meat packing heir who has funded all of it --the building, the art, the writer’s residency, the evening’s panel --sitting with his Tom Wolfe linen suit and his circus striped socks in the front row, with good, bizarre and downright odd sculpture visible through the window behind the authors, and with a glass of good NZ pinot gris in hand.

Homework

Compare and contrast.

Watch Bobby’s experiment with the pentatonic scale, then try to keep yourself from wondering how hard-wired we are for music.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ne6tB2KiZuk

If I’d seen this video of Poor Boy, the Split Enz song that lent its title to the play, I might have known to expect a wander down Surreal Boulevard.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcrRcUDAEYw

Scroll to the May 1 2009 blog entry, Collections, for more on what to do with an inherited meat-packing fortune.

What's Your Sign?

Signs Glimpsed In Passing -- Victoria, Australia

Boing

Disembodied Leg Crossing

Wombat crossings can take a while.

When the tram moved forward, an "M" came into view in front of this word,  changing it from a remarkable exhibit title perfectly categorizing some of the art I'm seen recently to just the usual artspeak.

Anybody Home?

Remember those great Michener novels, that began not with the birth of the protagonist but with the birth of the land itself? Those novels that read more like a geologic version of the Bible, with “In the beginning…” followed by hundreds of pages of description of volcanoes forming islands rising from the sea or mountain ranges pushed upward by chapters of continents grinding together? If I were to be Michenerian in this Australian blog,  it would be a very long time until I got to this week or two that Bill and I have been doodling around a very small part of this continent/country. Australia is an ancient land, which is evident in its rock formations honed by millennia of natural forces, by its thin top coat of top soil – all that remains after eons of blowing away or washing out to sea, by its peculiar fauna which have evolved in isolation since Gondwana’s  pieces split and inched away from each other 55 million years ago.

Dingo, Healesville Wildlife Sanctuary

Australia is so old that the dingo, which landed on Australia’s shores 5,000 years ago in Asian trading ships, is considered an arriviste and can stir up arguments about whether it’s a native animal. Try not to let the questions that come to mind when learning of Asian traders plying the ocean between Australia and home get in the way: Why didn’t Asians claim other lands as their own, as Europeans did? What did the Aboriginals have to trade, and what did they get from the Asians? And why were the Asians carrying an Asian wolf, which is what the dingoes were, on their ships? Like the Polynesians carrying rats in their canoes, it makes me think the committees deciding what to pack and what to leave behind had unique senses of humor.

The question of who is native and who belongs surfaces again when you look at the human settlement of the continent. Although some scientists say that the Aboriginals have lived on this land for 40 to 60 thousand years, when the British dumped their convicts in Sydney Harbor they declared the land Terra Nullis. Where Americans warred with, then signed bogus treaties with the natives -- or simply handed them smallpox-infected blankets – the British had a simpler answer: just say there’s no one home, then move in. Until the mid-seventies – that’s the mid nineteen 70’s—white Australians took Aboriginal children, especially mixed-race Aboriginal children—away from their families and either adopted them out to white people (who often used them as servants) or shipped them to missions. The plan was to breed the blackness out of the race. The effect was to dislocate a culture to whom the land was life, history, and family. It was only three years ago that Kevin Rudd issued an apology to the Stolen Generation. In the 15 years since we last visited Australia, signs have begun to appear in parks and scenic overlooks acknowledging the indigenous populations linked to that land, finally admitting that the terra was not nullis when the convicts came ashore. But we talked with people, on this trip in 2011,  who claimed that the policy of taking children away from their parents resulted in better lives for the children, in that same anecdotal way that Reagan used to use to cloud the issue of the larger effect of government policies. And much like readers of Gone With the Wind will recognize: we too wanted to believe in the happy slave myth to avoid confronting ourselves in the mirror.

GOR between Wye River & Lorne --signs that wouldn't have been here 20 years ago

As we watch the dismantling of the American education system with funding cuts, union breaking, and Texan textbooks, we might take a cautionary tale from Down Under. The people I’ve talked with, aged 35 and up, know more about British history than their own. Cultural cringe was real here until just a few decades ago – even their gardening books were imported from Britain, and everyone accepted they just had to add 6 months to the recommended planting times—so few white Australians knew they had descended from convicts (except for those living in South Australia who proudly, and accurately, proclaimed that they were not) and fewer still knew anything about aboriginal history or government policy toward indigenous people. It is hard to make good public policy based on cultural myth rather than historical fact.

For years Australia wanted only British immigrants – witness the “Ten Pound Pom” policy after WWII, offering ten pound sea tickets to British families relocating to Australia. Was it a way of underlining their invented definition of who had been here long enough to claim the land? And now that Australia has relaxed its immigration policy to grow its economy, the Asians have returned, as have other non-British ethnicities who believe that life would be better here on the fringes of an ancient continent. It’s unclear how long it will take for them to be considered Australian – perhaps less than 5,000 years.

 Koalas on road to Cape Otway Lighthouse, GOR

Not in Kansas

Australia Blog

From being feted with a palatial suite at one quilt conference – it was bigger than my first apartment, and much more expensively furnished – to being put up in volunteer’s homes in rooms that are clearly more storeroom than guest room, the accommodations part of my teaching travels is always a bit of a crap shoot. At this conference in the middle of a national park 3 hours NW of Melbourne, Australia, teachers were stowed in a caravan park in cabins next to camp sites for tents and Winnebagos. The cabins were clean prefab jobs with verandas and full kitchens. I was surprised to find that the single room stated on my contract was a single room in a shared cabin, but how else would I have had the experience of comparing teaching experiences with a Tasmanian roommate?

The conference organizer fed all the teachers breakfast each morning, and I knew I wasn’t in Portland when I encountered an emu and kangaroos foraging for their morning brekkie on my short walk to her cabin. The human Ozzie natives at the breakfast gathering assured me that the monkeys that had woken me up in the morning were not misplaced primates, but their avian sound-alikes, kookaburras. They proved to be my alarm clock for the rest of the week, laughing into my window at 6.45 each morning.

A kangaroo with a joey in her pocket greeted me outside my classroom door on my first teaching morning, to remind me things are different here. So different that my classroom was the poolside rec room in a campground further up the road in the park. No matter where I am, my teaching days usually begin with a half hour of room rearranging, and in this venue I pushed couches around the fireplace for a gathering spot and tables to the windows since the classroom had a total of six light bulbs. From my days of working in the Arts in Education program in Portland schools, where I dyed fabric in bathrooms with kindergarteners, to the odd classroom experience of mixing dyes in a carpeted, upholstered formal dining room of a Caribbean cruise ship, I’ve discovered that problem solving and flexibility are as high on the job description as teaching skills. I’m pretty good at both, as I suspect many women are, but what I’ve learned on the job over the years is when to stop being flexible and demand a better situation for my students. The student stuck in a dim crowded claustrophic corner near the bathroom isn’t going to be a happy camper no matter how well I teach. Since the sun shone during our class, six lightbulbs were sufficient to keep people happily at work. The deep wells of fabric paint a local supplier sent, along with the morning teas of scones and muffins, didn’t hurt either, so flexibility won the day over confrontation.

Bill arrived toward the end of my second class, after a heroic solo drive from the Melbourne airport – undertaken after a 14 hour flight -- and on the left side of the road to boot. He was smart and decided on the option of renting a GPS, and I think the device, quickly dubbed Valerie Victoria, smoothed the way for him. In this second classroom (this time booked in a spacious, albeit equally dim, hotel conference room with a terrifyingly hideous red carpet which no amount of room arranging could obscure) I laid out the map of Australia Bill had bought at the airport, and my class took on the project of helping us to decide which bits of Victoria we would tour after the conference ended. We took on their advice and an additional passenger after they gifted me with a wonderful stuffed wombat named Wally who despite being the burly silent type knew his way around the area. With the help of Wally’s innate geographical knowledge and Valerie’s computer-generated Ozzie accent, we found our way around the Grampian byways that remained open after last month’s floods, then on to the Great Ocean Road. We had a bit of a where-am-I experience as we pulled into our first night’s lodging – in Portland. We are chagrined to admit we were so busy figuring out which direction to head the next morning, we left without the expected photo of two Oregonian Portlanders standing by a Victoria Portland sign.

Twelve Apostles, Great Ocean Road

Our week of post-class touring gave us views of the Southern Ocean graced by land formations I would love to translate to fabric, encounters with koalas, kangaroos, emus, and wallabies in the wild, vast windfarms, and glimpses of Australian art in a succession of mostly free museums scattered across the state, in big and little towns. Most of all, it gave us slices of other people’s stories: the students who have lived through drought and fire, floods and locusts and were driven to translate those experiences into their artwork, the couple at the breakfast table next to ours in little Port Campbell who called everyone they knew to announce their engagement while waiting for their meals (for those who are interested in these slice of life dramas, he had the ring designed especially for her; I’m guessing he was pretty certain of her answer), the teacher who has started her own yarn supply business and travels to Shanghai and Italy to talk with her manufacturers.

So no matter where I lay my head after class, this strange and accidental career of mine allows me to gather images and stories en route to the (sometime under-lit and dubiously appointed) classrooms filled with interesting women eager to stitch their visions with fabric and thread. I may luxuriate in the times I am housed in one of those resorts with marble lined loos, but even the accommodations that give me tents as neighbors provide me with bonuses like an antipodean morning zoo and verandas looking beyond the campers to the hills and bush of a national park.