Lockdown, Week 4, Manapouri

We seven are doing okay, out here on the farm for this Level 4 Lockdown, where Nature does spectacular most days.

I walk every morning, with 2 hunting dogs who will go as far as I am willing to wander. They put up with my puny efforts. They know that I know they could run all day, if required, but they wait for me.

And yesterday morning, that was me, out there on the side of highway … walking along the side of the almost empty road, with my big old Canon camera in one hand, its leather strap wrapped round my wrist. And my other hand, well … I really was holding on to a medium-sized, rather fluffy, dead possum.

Mana, the male hunting dog, had caught and killed one of New Zealand’s more noxious pest; captured roadside, in the depths of a stand of native flax bushes.

Why was I carrying it?

It was a time thing. Rather than kill and devour these dogs like to, quite delicately, pluck the fur from the possums before eating them …

Standing on the side of the road, waiting for their impromptu picnic to unfold, held no appeal. So there I was, roadside wandering, carrying that big old dead possum by its tail … just another Manapouri Day in the Life of Di.

I only dropped it once.

The tail of a Possum works as a kind of hook, there at the tip, and it’s quite strong. As the possum began stiffening, its tail suddenly seemed to curl round my thumb.

I may have exclaimed, quite loudly, and dropped it for a moment but I after a second check that it actually was dead, I picked it up and got it home for them.

My wandering life … it’s more than roadside wandering with the dogs. I try to head out again, in the evenings, across the fields around sunset because the landscape really sings then. So many variations of light on landscape. I can be incredibly beautiful..

And I’m learning, the light always changes, depending on the time of day, the weather, and the season.

And each element seems to find an infinite variety of ways to combine and create new kinds of beautiful. Scenes so breathtakingly exquisite that I have no idea how experience them.

You know…?

Last night, I turned in slow circles, crossing the Lightning Paddock, watching the sun set behind the Hunter or the Cathedral Mountains, painting the Takitimu Mountains with a wash of light that made my soul sing.

I have been so fortunate. I have lived in, or visited, so many beautiful places around the world but Manapouri … this farm. I am so blessed to be here.

So very blessed.

This Other Life ...

This Fiordland life is full of creatures, especially now we have time to really see all of them.

There is the Fantail, as pictured above. We have a gang of 4 who, when ignored, have been known to fly right up to your face for attention.

Bellbirds chime at daybreak, and again in the evening. It’s a liquid song, like nothing I’ve heard before.

We have woodpigeons what whoosh through the trees. They’re a pair I think, and accompany all of us as we move through our days.

And then there’s the landscape.

Lately, there have been so many misty mornings. Mornings that become blue-sky beautiful before 10am.

It’s breath-taking.

But see for yourself. Here it is, in-between sunlight and mist.

Saturday morning, out walking the dogs.

Arundhati Roy

Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could.

Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.

We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us.

Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.

- Arundhati Roy