re-polishing the rose-tinted spectacles

Moana unbundling...

Aotearoa may be considered [by some]

to be at the ends of the earth

but

i suspect that's actually an attraction

last week we had folk from the Cook Islands and from Australia

this week

we have more West Islanders [see the 'A' word above]

from both extremes of east [QLD] and west [WA]

as well as participants from Scotland, the east coast of America

and from all over New Zealand 

when it came to the crunch

we had more applicants that we could comfortably accommodate.

it's been a wonderful journey.

full of intriguing signs and waymarkers

and serendipitous moments, such as

on one of the days at Titirangi

when i murmured something about needing to choose a poem for our morning reading

and Heidi [our gracious and graceful host] slipped a page into my hand

which turned out to be exactly the 'randomly selected'  poem i had read for myself at dawn.

[and then read it to us exquisitely]

 

here in the green heart of the Lud Valley

we revel in simple pleasures

balmy breezes, songs of beeses

exquisitely prepared and indescribably wonderful food   

[mostly grown here]

 + + +

once again our pots are heated by fire

and while we work at coaxing local colour

into cloth and paper the days pass far too quickly

this evening i too was permitted to play at the kitchen stove

and to harvest the ingredients from the garden

[for those of us of Latvian descent there are few greater pleasures

than being allowed to seek for potatoes in soft earth with our hands]