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?