Thursday, March 02, 2006

Re-location


Aaahhhh, what a relief to be spending my first day at home in ten. Too much time away from where ever I call 'my place' and I start to lose track of myself, my soul, my being, my happy, my place on the planet, my goodness, my hope and no amount of fun, meditation, exercise, focus, food, or friendship is enough to compensate. Coming home, staying home, being here at last, enables my soul and my body realign in a long sigh of relief.

My usual toxic response to not being home for any length of time is exacerbated by crossing time zones. Fortunately I haven't been that far in the last 10 days (just Tauranga, Hamilton, Pekapeka and Paraparaumu). But I wrote about jetlag in one of my earliest artist's books, Dislocation. Here's an excerpt if you haven't got your own copy yet (I've still got eight left of an edition of 30, at only $100 for blog readers who email me before the end of March).

"...Oh we are torn from ourselves
by jet planes
crossing the date line.
...
I have left a little ghost in each time zone,
How to ingather my scattered selves from seven airports?
I call myself home
to turangawaewae.

Each breath of this air
stitches my selves back together
pulling them in like
beads on a string
until we are all lined up
and can be fixed here and now..."

(Turangawaewae is a Maori word which in this context means home-place.)

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