A Peaceful New Year My Friends!

Here in New Zealand 2008 is already 9 hours old. For me New Years Eve has been a deeply reflective time. I found myself wanting to reach into solitude and pray rather than join the revellers. Not just for the will to change personal habits and break patterns and stop eating so many Danish pastries! My prayers are for every person on this planet. That each one of us might find a measure of inner peace for it seems to me that world peace can only arise from hearts that are truly at peace. And then, what good is a world at peace if the planet that is home to every last one of us is tortured and scarred by our thoughtlessness? I pray that, above all, each of us will act in small and positive ways in our everyday lives to reverse the march of global warming. Bless you all.

To This!

Sometimes nothing else will soothe my soul but making fresh berry jam. And then of course this labour of love must be artfully partnered and mindfully consumed. Here is my very last baking for 2007; saffron infused scones. I adapted an old family recipe given me by my mother (and which has found its way via word of mouth the length and breadth of Dunedin!) by infusing the water called for in the recipe with saffron before preparing the dough. The scones blush with a pleasing saffron hue but on tasting I decided they needed something! Enter my freshly made strawberry jam and a blob of marscapone cheese. Ahh the delight! In my more poetic moments I am inclined to say that saffron is the flavour of eternity but on an average day I am more likely to explain that as the flavour of tobacco, hay bales and dark bitter tasting honey.

This combination of ingredients is a playful and exhilarating farewell to 2007. Rather like lying back in a field of hay eating just picked strawberries dipped in a bucket of fresh cream you hauled there from the milking shed! Well yes perhaps it is a tad decadent but is this not New Years Eve!!!! (Well right now it is where I live)

From this ...

Oh the unadulterated joy of fresh strawberries!

The Measure of Distance

The true measure of how far apart my love and I are is to be found in the fact that for me out here in New Zealand Christmas Day is all but over. For her it has not even begun.

I am writing this post at 11pm on Christmas Day. Families and friends all over this country have come together and long since taken their leave from each other in various states of exhaustion. Wrapping paper lies in piles in every corner of the land, some folded neatly for reuse and some scrunched into balls and stuffed in rubbish bins. With luck the presents this wrapping concealed are continuing to evoke delight in the hearts of those they were intended for. The roast lamb and organic ham and fresh peas and new potatoes and luscious dark gravy that graced our Christmas table have now assumed the role of leftovers. There are of course the inevitable symptoms of over-indulgence and the discussions about dealing sensibly with yuletide debt have already begun in our media.

All this and the great love of my life has not yet awoken to begin her day of Christmas festivities!

A Thousand Roses In A Storm

Even the presence of a single rose is vaguely disarming. But the presence of thousands of roses is like a drug that stills the ceaseless motion in my mind. Thoughts are no match for this thick honey sweet air that, by some peculiar chance, seems to hint at the nearness of my love. Now I am a thousand times disarmed! How does one preserve such a place as this? Yesterday the winds and rain were wild and so I walked far out of my way to pass through my rose garden, for fear of her safety. But I should not have worried for a thousand roses in a storm are every bit as beautiful as they are in times of peace. Perhaps more so. Now they spin and swirl wildly and droop to lie heavy upon the dark moist soil. Now the air is thicker still with the scent of love and the ground slippery underfoot with the silken paste of rosepetals and rainwater. Now, all about me here, there is character and resolve as well as delicate beauty!

A Mockery Of Distance

Sometimes in the dawn I find you there with me, softly like the thin curtain of daylight that brushes against the sleeping body of the night. And in these times you and I make a mockery of distance. In these times there is no ocean , continent, international border or decree that can stand between us. For you have come to me. And I to you. And it is we alone who triumph.

My Two Worlds

Last weekend I flew to my parents home in the North Island of New Zealand and spent some time here on this secluded beach. The sandhills are strewn with masses of oddly formal little flowers that seem to have been carved from bars of soap. When the tide is just right and the moon looking kindly upon you one can wriggle one's toes in the wet sand at the water's edge and find shellfish we call pipis hiding just below the surface. These delicacies are delicious when cooked in a bucket of boiling water over a fire on the beach. (Though now and then one of these shellfish will take its revenge by filling your mouth unexpectedly with sand!) The island just offshore is a nature reserve where rare and endangered birds are offered protection and sanctuary.

When I am in America I am constantly astonished at the variety of small animals which share our woodland home with us. In New Zealand, above all else, it is the bird song I notice. Here we have no squirrels or groundhogs or wild turkey or bears or chipmunks or skunks. No bambi on the deck just beyond my window and no otters or beavers in the lake across the road. During my childhood here in New Zealand I found these creatures only on the pages of my story books and for a time suspected they were merely a figment of Walt Disney's colourful imagination!

From Helen To Helen

I was so grateful for your kind enquiry as to how the great love of my life is faring following her car accident. Her whiplash injuries are taking some time to heal but she is a strong woman and, in terms of character, a force to be reckoned with and I know it will take more than a bout of whiplash to bring her down. Sadly though while she was recuperating with family our little house in the woods was broken into and the place ransacked and burgled. Even from ten thousand miles away I feel grossly violated. It saddens me that I cannot be there with her to take care of her injuries and to bless our home and reaffirm it as a place of peace and love.

This Quality of Sheer Magnificence

(Photo By Helen)