2 November 2012

half hermit, maybe?

I've been back into my writing lately, and loving it.  It's been squeezed between guests, and finally it has got hold of me properly and wont let go. A good thing? I hope so! But so were all the guests.

My most recent guest was a charming woman a few years older than me, also on her own and choosing the next "stage" of her life. She has loved Italy for longer than I have, but she chooses to stay in NZ.  Her next move takes her back to her friends and a social life that she had put on hold for a while.  It's the kind of life I thought I might be living, back when I left my marriage.  A two bedroomed apartment in central Auckland, concerts, galleries, you know the sort of thing. Running or walking the Around the Bays, listening to music, walking, beach strolls... a far cry from the life I lead on my scruffy mountainside. Everything familiar, beautiful, and on a practical level, very easy.

When I put her on a train this morning I asked myself yet again, why do I reject the "perfect life" in beautiful New Zealand? What is this strange urge to bury myself in a country where life is not easy and I am still, more than five years on, struggling to find the right words every day?

An answer hit me a minute ago.

I think that I am half hermit. Here I can hide away, ignore the world, and indulge in my art and writing. Perhaps I really don't want to be in the middle of my own culture, where I must participate and be sociable.  Perhaps I am more anti-social than social.  I like to think of myself as a big picture person, and maybe back there I couldn't see the wood for the trees.

Back in NZ I was planting myself in, planting trees to hide my home from the world.  My dream was not your normal Kiwi dream. I wonder, am I recreating that dream in a completely different way, unconsciously?

There is a sense of relief that after five and a half years of living here I have finally identified something that links my present life to the dream that I nurtured so long ago.

Today I am grateful for flashes of inspiration. 

1 comment:

Sarah said...

You can hide anywhere that you are, Mamma. Even in a two-bedroomed apartment in Auckland. But perhaps it is the illusion of no-obligation that seduces you. The title 'foreigner' is very easy to hide behind, after all.