We’d been talking about this for a few months, but had been putting it off for it was going to be a bit of a tricky endeavor to move two hives built from four boxes of bees, each box weighing 30-70 lbs. In commercial bee-keeping, the beekeeper uses a flatbed truck to transport the hives, and has special bee boxes that can be closed when the bees are all in at night. The boxes can be kept together, without breaking open the hives, and they get driven from site to site. Bruce had to build special travelling bottoms for the bee hives which would mostly keep them in the hive and still allow air to get in. We only have our van, and we couldn’t lift the three-box hive all at once, so it was going to have to be taken apart and reassembled twice and Bruce would have to be in the van with the bees. I did not volunteer to join him.

The bees need to be moved during their quiet time – usually at dusk or later or in the early dawn. Not being a morning person, Bruce chose the former.

I was the lead scout on this mission, heading out to Wainui in the late afternoon so I could get some mowing done in the area Bruce had chosen for the bees. The grass was well over a foot long in most places, but it was relatively easy to mow. I cleared the path and space in under two hours. And then I waited.

I talked to Bruce around 9 pm as the last bit of daylight subsided. “I’m not ready yet. I’m still distilling (kiwiburn project). Not sure when I’m coming out,” he said. By midnight when he still hadn’t arrived and I could no longer keep my eyes open, I retired, worryingly, to bed.

Tossing and turning, I awoke many times, carefully listening for signs of Bruce. Finally I heard some clanging around in the kitchen. It was 4:30 am and he’d just arrived. “I need to keep going and move them now rather than go to sleep and get up in two hours at dawn.” I was too tired to assist in the darkness, so I puttered, worryingly again, back to bed.

During the next few hours, in my half-dazed sleep, I had many surreal dreams about the bees and I could hear a lot of puttering in the house. At 7:30 am, I got up as Bruce was making his way to sleep. He pulled an all-nighter. He moved the bees into position and lived to tell the tale with only two stings. He said they were not amused and had been agitated, but he was able to put each of the four boxes holding hundreds or thousands of bees, one by one, into the wheelbarrow and wheel them down the hill and over to their new site in total darkness. It was only during the movement of the last box, as the light of dawn lit the sky, that a bee had gotten into his headpiece and stung him right at the base of his throat – ouch! The other was on his wrist. Not pleasant, but not too bad for moving several thousand bees.

And now the bees are in their new home. Lucky them. They have an awesome view and an abundance of pollen right at their doorstep.

Mission Stealthy Sting complete. Over and out.

Bruce says:

Kathy had very kindly given me the option of moving just one of the hives — the smaller one, and leaving the large one, which was in a corner of our property, in place during the sale of the house. Since I started bee-keeping, I’ve seen that people really freak out about bees, so it didn’t seem like a good idea to leave a hive at a house we were trying to sell. And moving the bees was such a specialized operation that I wanted to do it all at once.

I didn’t leave Christchurch until 2:30 AM, between taking apart the hives, finishing the distilling, unpacking the van from a timber run for the Merkaba earlier in the day, repacking the van with everything else I could squeeze in as we try to de-clutter our house for the sale, and then getting gas. I only saw one other car for a few blocks in Christchurch during the whole trip. Friend Ali asked if I was worried about falling asleep while driving. Taking apart the hives, wheeling the boxes one at a time into the van, getting stung the first time, putting them back together, and then driving the bees was such a hair-raising experience that there wasn’t much danger of falling asleep.
And Kathy pointed out that even a minor accident with the van would have broken apart the hives and filled the van with thousands of very angry bees. It probably would have been fatal.

Once I got to the property, despite Kathy’s crucial mowing job, I still had to clear the remnants of a thorny rose bush prunings pile from the bee site, and then get a spade (shovel) and level out the site. In my adrenaline-fueled-bee-moving-madness, and my leather-gloved beekeepers outfit, this was surprisingly easy.

It was the first dawn I have seen at the new property, and it was beautiful, with pink tinged hillsides and bird calls and acrobatics. Given my sleeping habits, I don’t usually catch dawns from the morning side, so it was a really lovely end to a long tense day.

I found this quite funny since I had managed to submerge myself into the flow of living on Clyde Rd in Christchurch, appreciating its virtues and dealing with its faults, planning on keeping the building forever, redeveloping it and making it a model oasis of urban permaculture, driving at will from there to our new property in the country.

Ha!

How amusing that I had lost touch with my earlier wisdom on the topic. Because I was walking the path all along, at times poking my head up and looking into the distance, but mostly watching each footstep. So maybe that’s why this latest bit of plan/life change/emotional whiplash is going so smoothly.

First, we began to realize that a permaculture oasis requires an active human presence, and we wondered about our ability to split our time between the city and the country. At first we thought we might find a friend to be the anchor person and help us manage the city property. A very productive talk with friend Amba led us to start thinking of other options including flatmates, if only as a transitional step. That opened up further speculation, and we considered just renting the house out to a family and perhaps developing the back workshed into a cottage.

In the meantime, we continued to spend more and more time at the country property in Wainui. The quiet, the beauty, the je ne se quois of the place continued to work on us, and we also saw that the projects there could easily consume all of our energy.

One night at Wainui we developed a matrix weighing all of our options in terms of ongoing time management costs, flexibility, and cash flow – all very important since we spent more than we really wanted to on the purchase and we need capital to continue developing Wainui and we also need to generate a continuing income stream. Added into the mix of options was the idea of throwing some money in with friends Tobi and Alex, who are looking for a house; we’ve discussed a joint partnership where together we buy something with an in-law flat for our city adventures.

Interestingly, all of the different options, despite their different initial effort and follow up admin levels all penciled out the same financially, except for the option of just plain selling our house in the city and moving whole hog out to Wainui. And of course that’s going to be the easiest option as well.

This pretty big major change of plans idea rolled around our heads for a bit, then slowly settled in and made itself home.

Of course we thought that we could make a nice leisurely move of it. We certainly couldn’t move before the bazillion pumpkins we are growing at Clyde Road were harvested! And we’re so busy with Kiwiburn and trips and visitors at least to June…

A few discussions with friend and agent Maggie about the reality of the current real estate market upset these comfy notions. December/January are really the best time to market a house in our neighborhood. Especially since our house will not show well in winter (June here, for you folks above the equator). And the whole real estate market is slowing down, beset by high interest rates, low affordability at current prices, and the evident slowdown in the United States.

It felt really good as we loaded up the van for a 10 day stint at Wainui over Christmas and New Years not worry about bringing “too much” out—we were moving there!

And then during hours of great conversations with Dennis, Tobi, Alex, Maggie and Roelf, somehow by Boxing Day we found ourselves agreeing that it made sense to show the property while we were away at Kiwiburn for two weeks at the beginning of February!

After that who knows? If the property sells fast we’ll count our lucky stars and move wholesale into the charming but cold-as renovated 1900s farmhouse at Wainui until we get our new house built out there. Pretty tame compared to what a lot of homesteaders go through, actually, since we have wall heaters in every room, a fireplace and a wood burning stove. It’s just a matter of gritting our teeth and paying the power bills, and dealing with cold in the proper Kiwi fashion, which is to go outside, get some sun, and do some work. Amazing how that warms one up!

So here we are, new year, new property, new plan. It seems crazy and ambitious, but despite our new projects and the continuation of the old ones (me – building the centrepiece of the Kiwiburn 08 temple with orgone generator; Kathy – Kiwiburn Kostume Korner; us – the Green Fairy) I think it’s doable. Given that I was distilling until the day before we left for Kiwiburn last year and it all worked out fabulously, I think our new plan is equally doable.

I take two lessons from this. One, is that if you stay in touch with your feelings and keep your eyes for the most part on what you are doing in shorter time scales, you will stay on your strategic path.

The other comes from my recent increase in reading in astrology and other similar interpretive systems. When troubles come up, you can brace yourself for them and fight to hold your place, or you can use the chaotic energy to propel you forward towards your goals faster than you thought possible.

So I count myself very lucky to be able to say, it’s time to hold on to our hats and get ready for a wild ride! Because the bucking bronco we’re riding is heading toward paradise and the fulfillment of our dreams.

We just spent the week in Karamea. Wow!

Kathy and I were at times quite close to putting an offer in on a house. About 20 acres, 2 bedroom house, very cute and funky and tidy, 2 tunnel houses, a barn, a stream, photovoltaic panels, water wheel power generation, solar hot water, native bush, a cute little valleylet. Nice views. Already off the grid, turn key, ready to roll. But very affordable connection to the grid if we wanted it. No restrictions on building additional structures. And cheap! NZ$395,000. That’s about US$280,000 at today’s exchange rate. You can’t buy a one bedroom TIC (apartment without separate unit title, everyone on one mortgage) in our old San Francisco neighborhood for that price.

We haven’t sold the San Francisco place yet, we haven’t visited all the regions that are on our short list, but with a bit of financial finagling we figured we could buy it, move in, and take a step closer with our dreams and give us a good base to make further progress should this place not end up being “the one.”

Karamea is a small (650 people) town on the west coast of New Zealand. It’s at the end of the road, where further travel is possible only by foot trail to the next inhabited part of the island.

The parallels with Kathy’s former place in Hawaii continue. Lots of cool caves and trails to explore. It’s in a wacky little microclimate area that keeps it wet but sunny, and according to the locals the soil is quite fertile. Avocados and cherries both grow there—the best of all possible fruit worlds.

We met good people there. Most of the time we stayed at Rongo Backpackers. Rongo is run mostly by a collection of volunteers supported and guided by a visionary who aims to establish an artists colony. After meeting this extraordinary person and seeing the beautiful work that has already been done there, and luxuriating in the very wonderful vibe, his ambitious dream seems not only achievable but inevitable. Between him and the friendly local real estate agent (just one in the whole town!) we were already connected to the other folks we needed to meet (Permaculture Pete, for example) if we were to make a go of it there.

And Kathy responded wonderfully to the trip. She went from burnt out to expansive. Note to self: make sure Kathy keeps travelling. It’s good for her, good for both of us.

An added bonus on the trip was the wonderful Sebastian, who was passing through New Zealand, found us via tribe, stayed with us for a few days and then travelled to Karamea with us, and was the perfect sort of person for us: intriguing conversationalist, similar musical tastes (a practicing musician, actually), great vegetarian cook, mindful, thoughtful, kind, a burner and a GAMER! We broke him in on Puerto Rico, San Juan, and Ra, and he couldn’t get enough. Couldn’t have asked for a better house guest, travelling companion, and new lifelong friend.

We could have done it there. We made real connections with folks, the climate was great, and we found a great place to make a go of it. But in the end we said no, we’re not quite ready.

The question is, wave or particle? Is our positive experience in Karamea an indication that we should live there, or is it simply a resounding positive indication that we are on the right track and making good time? That our plans are aligned with our hearts. That we can hit a town and meet the people we need to meet to do what we want to do. That the kind of people we enjoy spending time with will find us anywhere, even at the end of the road.

That information is incredibly if not infinitely dense and we are appropriate interpreters of the information such that it results in the kinds of experiences we want to have? But that’s for another post.

The probability wave hasn’t collapsed yet. We don’t know if Karamea is the place yet, or if it is another proof of concept. We need to see Taranaki. We need to explore the Nelson region a bit more. We need, and I say this with a groan, to go through the next few months here, then go back to San Francisco for a couple of months as planned, and then come back again. Right now the trip to the US seems like a real burden; an interruption. Damn, is it that time again already? Good things will come of it, friends, family, Burning Man and Bernie Langan (my chi gung teacher ) but it sure seems like a big weight hanging over my head right now.

Would we live in Karamea? Yes. Absolutely. Without reservation. But only if we can’t find somewhere that’s even better. This is our burden, o woe is me, tongue firmly in cheek, to have both the ability and the awareness to seek it. Nice work if you can get it.

Thanks for the encouragement from Kat– here is an attempt at a short post.

So maybe you are saying to yourself, gee Bruce, how can I have some of that wacky cutting edge sustainability fun you seem to be having without leaving the country?

Look no further! The answer to your prayers is here!

Actually, the answer to my prayers, or at least some of them, are here. It may be the case that people who live, where I imagine many of you readers do, in places that are warmer or have central heating or more wood floors and less carpet won’t be having the problems we had when we moved into this in many ways lovely home.

But here in Christchurch we have coldish temperatures, no central heating, poorly insulated houses, lots of carpet, and curtains.

Those who took note of our former house (still unsold, sadly) may have noticed that there were wood floors throughout, area carpets added by Kathy usually at my protest. There was also a striking and quite wonderful lack of curtains. Venetian blinds where necessary. Well, Kathy did put some foofy pink curtains in her office. The reason I didn’t like these carpet and curtain things was because they are major filth attractors. They get dusty and musty and they aren’t ever really clean. Now, many of you will be saying to yourselves, gee, I didn’t think Bruce was a terribly clean person, and well yes, that is true, which is exactly why having a house that was fundamentally clean(er) makes so much sense.

But here we are now, in a house that has a lot of carpet. Not only is there carpet on the floor of every room except the kitchen and the bathrooms (one of them is half carpeted, actually), but there are whole walls and posts in a couple of the upstairs rooms covered in carpet. Wallpaper was also really big in this circa 1970s house, and they had the great idea to make a lot of it textured. Textured means increase in surface area, and organisms just love increased surface area. There are lots of curtains here too.

The cold temperatures and not heating the whole house with ultra dry central heating also help promote mold formation. It is a commonly acknowledged problem with New Zealand homes. All that carpet and curtains and textured wall paper just give the fungus lots of extra places to hang out and store their spores.

A couple of the rooms were noticeably musty smelling, and a bit of sniffing quickly got one to the curtains.

Enter Effective Microorganisms (EM).

NZ site: Effective Microorganisms/Nature Farm

A site for you yanks: EM Trading

This is a complex of different microorganisms that work together. There are yeasts, lactic acid producing bacyteria (like when you make a pickle), photosynthetic bacteria, and I am pretty sure some other kinds of fungus besides the yeasts. It’s a Japanese invention that was I seem to recall modeled on the activity of a forest floor. The products for different countries use their local microorganisms, I think.

The original use for all this stuff was in agriculture. We have been using it to compost kitchen wastes and it is a whole lot more easy and can handle many more different kinds of things than worm or traditional “hot” composting.

But guess what? We were told you could clean your house with it too. I tried an experiment one week of spraying it on those musty smelling curtains. Wow! It really cut down the smell a lot. So the next week I started spraying it around the house. Pretty soon I was spending an hour or two with a little hand spray bottle going around the whole house and spraying it everywhere. I reckon I was spraying about 6 litres (1 1/2 gallons) or so around the 2500 sq ft. house.

It has made a huge difference in the level of air quality in the house. In a short while the molasses smell goes away (it comes as a concentrate and you add warm water and molasses, sort of like a yeast starter for bread) and the air in the house just smells fresh and good. When it comes time to give the bathrooms a scrub down, the gunge comes off much more easily than one would have expected given the lapse in time from the previous cleaning. It has really made the house a much more healthy and pleasant environment. Some places smelt like a wet dog or there was a little ammonia-like pee smell when they first got sprayed, but with each application this has improved and I think this is the process of these things getting cleaner and the EM eating the unpleasant stuff that was on them that was making them smell bad.

This is the new paradigm: instead of trying to kill everything around us with pesticides, herbicides, and toxic cleaners, we recognize we are parts of living biosystems and we instead try to manage these systems to produce the conditions we want.

There are a very few things you should be careful about spraying. The fresh food sitting around your kitchen should be avoided, or else the EM will start “composting” it. I’m also starting to see some signs of EM activity on the small cork board bulletin board we have in one of the rooms. Other than that, no problems so far at all.

This has been such a success that I have gotten a garden sprayer so I can now walk around the house and hopefully dose it with EM much quicker than when I was going pumpa pumpa pumpa about a million times with my small handheld sprayer.

So much for a short post!

Gone are the mindblowing vistas and revelations of being totally unhinged from everything fixed, the future wide open and new exciting things happening every day.

Even the harrowing real estate adventures have been absent these past couple of weeks. We’re in the middle of the process, progress is happening, but it doesn’t have much to do with us, right now. That will change, and there will no doubt be some harrowing negotiation in the final stretch, which unfortunately looks like it will be occuring when we are once again travelling.

We are quite clearly not travelling now. That is the difference with everything. We are stable, we are steady, we live here, we are home. And I am =stuffed=

Our stuff arrived a week and a half ago and has since been demanding all of our attention, getting it unpacked, getting it sorted, enjoying a few bits and pieces here and there, getting it repacked and stored away because we are leaving in just two and a half weeks, and renting the place out again. Add to that the need to buy more stuff for the tenants—extra beds, NZ compatible TV, freezer, DVD player…

It’s practically like moving again. It wasn’t fun the first time this year, and it isn’t fun now. And then in three months when we return it will be unpacking and house setting up, though that’s only going to be for what, a year? Who knows, until we find our property. And then moving again, probably into a house that will also be temporary, until we finally build our dream eco-greenhouse a couple of years after that. Boo hoo hoo, most of the people in the world should be so lucky, it’s a high quality problem, but damn!

The bodymind doesn’t care that we’re only here on a temporary permanent basis, though. We have easily fallen into the habit of just living here. The things we are doing are normal things, things that don’t inspire great sweeping bloggable insight. Getting the car battery replaced. Raking leaves and mashing them into the leaf mould bin. Getting into a steady groove with my chi gung practice. Shopping for food. Making dinner. Watching movies.

All of this is cool in a way, because just a couple of months into my expatriate adventure I feel quite normal, quite settled, except of course for the imminent trip, which is quite unsettling. At this point I am thinking of it as an important long term community building task, but it isnt’ really what I feel like doing right now. I know I will have loads of fun, but I feel like it is very disruptive to the putting down roots work I am doing here now. If I had another 4 days in town, I could have gone to www.massivenz.com/. If I had another month in town I could have thrown together a crazy little burning man style party, DJ, firespinners, maybe the dome put up in the yard. instead we will have about 5 people over for dinner next week. Pleasant and domestic, but without the big excitement I like to have every once in a while.

There were some cool firsts recently, which are very much in the mood of being settled. At Ali and Jake’s game night we met a fellow who knew another kiwi friend of ours quite well. Degree of separation collapse, when the social branches shooting away into the peoplesphere come back again through a new acquaintance. Is there a name for this? Social Loop Back? At any rate, it makes it feel like home.

Along similar lines, we ran into Briar at the natural food store. Nothing feels so homey as to meet one’s friends out in the world.

I got my New Zealand driver’s license. On a 35 question test, I was twice asked how much distance maximum is allowed between a vehicle and a vehicle it is towing. 4 meters.

I planted my first tree here. A little Meyer lemon bearing an outrageous number of fruits for its size, which I pruned off so it could put more energy into getting bigger. Of course, wise growing strategy aside, it would have been nice to be here for the fruit to ripen… But it is not time yet for us to fruit, here. This winter is growing our roots deeper in preparation for the big tree we will become.

“Marooned” isn’t quite the right word, but that title from an obscure SF work by Vernor Vinge sticks in my mind.

Our new Christchurch friend Anne has started saying, “I’m blooming where I was planted,” or something like that. It’s more appropriate. We’re not marooned, or stuck, here. We’re growing, even flourishing here.

Tonight we had a table of seven people at Dux De Luxe, hanging out on Friday night. 7! We are now a community, a crowd, a clan. There are certain good feelings that come from such groupings.

More evidence that we are now in realtime—that time keeps passing at a ridiculously rapid pace. Ken has been here for close to two weeks now, we have been here for close to three. Where many of my previous blog posts started with or contained, “so much has happened,” now nothing much seems to happen at all.

Further evidence: when we were on hyper accelerated holiday time, I was up every morning with the sun, and Kathy was the late sleeper. Now she is up at 7AM every morning, and I have been sleeping until 10. Back to normal, the regular cycles of our bodies asserting themselves, back in realtime.

We were going to take a big trip up to Marlborough Sounds and do a 4 day tramp (hike) at the start of the week. Called on account of weather. Kathy and Ken were going to leave today for a trip to Dunedin, once again called on account of weather.

The season has come for being in one’s place, for setting down roots, for staying, for being. Notice I said Kathy and Ken on the trip to Dunedin—I had already decided to stay here, because I was finally into a rhythm that felt good, a pace of place where I was doing my Nei Gung exercises, building toward getting my compost bins built, getting financial infrastructural stuff done, feeling good, operating at a steady sustainable pace.

We have a lot of plans that are operating on a lot of different timescales. The establishment of the farm community is probably 5-10 years. The development of the Christchurch property is probably 3-5 years. The purchase of the farm property is probably 1-2 years. Kiwiburn is 8 months out. Getting our place ready as a furnished rental is 6 weeks. Building my internal energy, becoming one with the Tao (should that be where it leads): that’s all process, baby. Open ended.

Describing these different goals with different time frames is in some way helpful, and in some way obscures the point. All of these different tasks are emergent behaviours that are built on our day to day actions. All there is, is what you do in the moment. What you do right here, right now, is all your life is. The train of everyday events that can be laying individual bricks to build cathedrals, or just what you need to do to get by. Either way, it’s best to enjoy it as it happens. That’s why I didn’t want to leave town—because I had started to build a solid groove of day to day actions that were building towards my longer term plans and yet were sustainable and pleasurable on the realtime level. That, my friends, is my current recipe for success.

Certainly I am lucky, and of course just like everyone else I interpret the world in a way that reinforces my worldview. With that caveat, let me note that after a couple of days of being grounded and taking care of fundamental business, many good things came to me today. Our container with all of our personal goods which was lost at sea or perhaps heading to Australia suddenly appeared a few miles away in docks at Littleton Harbour. The electricity, which has magically stayed on during our stay benevolently provided by an unknown source identified itself today via the post, from a company that claims all power they provide is renewable, and they would be pleased as punch if we would just pay our bill on time. My US based international sharebroker (stockbroker) responded with some information that allowed me to take one further step towards trying to get local control over my New Zealand equities. And our real estate partner in our former home in San Francisco finally gave us a substantive proposal for a way to complete the sale of our interest.

None of these issues are resolved, but on all of them there is sudden progress, and I am here, grounded, in a mental space and settled space to try to bring their resolution to fruition.

I may, and I hope that I will not be, here forever, but I am here now and the firm ground is rising up beneath me, grounding me, bracing me to make further efforts to steer the continuing chaos of the world to my ends. I am in a place where I can and am continuing the work that is my life. There is nothing more that I could ask.

Normally I’ve been telling myself to slow down. Pacing! Pacing is not statis, however, pacing is still forward motion, just at a =sustainable= rate. I think this past week it felt like I was not making forward motion even though I obviously was. There were some emotional blocks there, I think. Today a big log jammed loosened and I feel like I am once again making progress.

Today was the first time I spoke on the phone to anyone in the US. The occasion was necessitated by my earlier mentioned problem with my burning man storage in San Francisco—the idiots running it had given short notice that it was all to come to an end, with me here in New Zealand unable to physically do anything about it.

I’ve written about the surprising generosity of the Kiwis, but not to be shortchanged is the astounding generosity of my friends in San Francisco. Two of them this afternoon spent several hours sorting through a huge pile of very dirty crap with me on the phone telling them what to move to another storage unit across town, sourced by one of them, and what to leave for trash.

“Dirty” does not begin to explain the state of things that have been on the playa, especially things exposed for several years running. The extremely fine dust sticks to everything, and the extraordinarily alkaline qualities of it inflame all human tissues and make it almost impossible to be rid of. They dealt with piles and piles of this shit, stuff worth far less than the money spent on storage, but somehow worth all this effort, if only because it would be so impossible to duplicate it. Stuff created in part by the gift economy, stuff not available in stores, stuff that takes a bit of space to fabricate, stuff that would make all the difference between barbaric suffering and playa plushness. I cannot express enough thanks.

I was left in an incredibly emotional state after this, a raw and open state of love and gratitude which was far more grounding than the week of working on my new sort of permanent home in Christchurch.

At various points in my process of deciding, and then trying, and then moving to New Zealand I have been an obnoxious advocate of getting my close friends to move here as well. I like to think I heard a word or two of oblique encouragement in the discussion centered mostly on my dusty burning man crap.

And then an hour and a half later Kathy and I went to the airport to pick up another close friend, the one most “New Zealand curious.” He will be staying with us until mid-June. An individual of such positivity and puissance that, once again, I am shaken and moved by the gift of his presence.

Something still and maybe always difficult for Kathy and I to deal with is the influence of others. I am a stone cold introvert who has intellectualized his way to understanding the benefits of other human beings. My dislike for feeling responsibility for other beings has at times been perhaps a bit pathological. Accepting no favors or gifts meant I didn’t owe anyone anything.

Kathy is maybe 50% intro and 50% extrovert. We are both serious planners; we both require a lot of time to ourselves. In some environments, like San Francisco, that means fighting to make a private space for oneself. That is our habit. In the country perhaps it is different, and one must instead work to bring people closer. Still, WWOOFing for us was in some ways difficult because at the end of the day we want to be in charge of our own time, even over the short time span of a few days under the most benevolent of regimes.

For our friend to be here, we thought, would be a wonderful treat and yet a diversion of our energies on our path of rebirth, but at the end of the day how could we say no to such a wonderful person to whom we had so relentlessly pitched New Zealand? We were wrong. His presence here, my connections with my friends doing me such a big favor are not diversions, they are essential lessons and signposts for the future.

And this is the lesson this day taught me, as were I more sensitive to my interconnections with other people I might have picked up much sooner. Our friend’s game but jetlagged presence at lunch was all the necessary context it took for us to vent, in great detail more fully realized than we had previously been able, thoughts on the creation of our dream. The community part. The part of us that speaks said a lot of interesting things to that part of us that listens, and the part of us that feels helped us evaluate our words. We learned a lot, and made good emotional progress.

If we had been more “people people” we might have achieved this a few days ago with our new friends with whom we spent so much time. I don’t know. Would it even have been appropriate to talk in such practical and personal detail about possible community ventures? Maybe not, but there is a certain straightforwardness in speech in the kiwi culture I would like to learn, especially after having to keep my work almost a secret due to its politically sensitive nature during the last 10 years in San Francisco.

While it is difficult for us to come to grips with because of our nature, =community is an essential part of our vision=. At this point, it seems the best practical way of achieving community is a series of almost chicken and egg iterations which go something like this:

1) We buy a piece of land with community potential, which is more than ample space in an attractive place.

2) We begin to develop that space towards our vision, part of that vision including the ability to accommodate comfortable medium term (multi month) stays by visitors that may be able to contribute effort but not necessarily cash. The WWOOF model shows us that this is an economically viable model for the landholder, by the way. Also possible is people who can contribute cash but not effort, the vacation rental or B&B model.

Finding the balance between or walking the tightrope toward activities we feel motivated to pursue that are expandable and can generate a little bit of extra cashflow if given more labor still seems quite tricky, but I think that behavior will emerge successfully if we can create the right substrate for it.

What is clear is that we really do have to bite off more than just the two of us can, or want, to chew, and managing these resources will take intention and effort. But this needs to be done. This is an essential part of the dream.

3) People who choose to make their stay longer will need to be incorporated into a system based on their needs and desires, the capacity of the land, and existing systems generating both sustenance and cash resources.

It’s easiest to make all this happen if we maintain reasonable capital reserves. Moolah. Our escape from the money economy is dependent on the money economy.

Practically speaking, this means leaving equity sunk in the Christchurch house and effort spent towards its development.

This also means a tradeoff of spending less money on a less developed or more remote or smaller location, but compromising on these factors make it potentially less attractive to us as well as potential visitors/longer term members. Selection of the property will therefore be quite critical, and will thus more than likely take a longer and more considered period, extending this interim period of unsettledness and pushing farther into the future the acheivement of our desires. But this can only go so far as well. The astrologer told me I was going to have a long life, but I’m getting a later start on this project than most, and some plants take a number of years to reach maturity. Here we have another needle to thread.

Or,

If you build it, will they come? And when?

But tonight the prospects seem good, the goals achievable, the challenge motivating. Thank you, my old friends, thank you, my new friends. This one’s for =all of us=.

Much more than in the month we were travelling, things seem quite surreal. I know how to live this urban existence, so it’s quite easy to just go along and do the things I need to do. Get the phone turned on (phone companies the world over suck, in case you had any doubts: the DSL package that was supposed to arrive on Thursday came on Tuesday, the phone service that was supposed to be switched on Wednesday just came on today, Saturday, after days of harried conversations conducted at phone booths); research over the internet, comparison shop and then purchase consumer goods and appliances; discover what works and what doesn’t in the house; talk with real estate agents; get caught in traffic; visit friends.

Yes, friends! We spent the entire day with a couple we met originally over the internet and had a half hour coffee with in San Francisco, two lovely people recently from Washington state a few weeks ahead of us on the expatriate timeline who Kathy and I feel quite harmonious with in worldview. They plied us with good conversation, local information, kiwi speculations, wine, food, and a beautiful moonrise.

But waiting to ambush us whenever we let ourselves get too tired or run down are the freakouts, the what are we doing heres? So when we dragged ourselves home after this wonderful but tiring day, more socialization on a far more intimate level than we have had for five weeks, ironically, the tiredness of our body/minds bred some fierce angst.

And since we arrived in Christchurch, the more “normal” the activities we pursue, the more surreal it feels. When I felt fiercely that “this is not my beautiful house” I felt much more grounded, real, than I do when I wander around now feeling that it is really quite acceptable, this place I now live. The more I live my regular day to day life, the stranger it feels. I do it with ease and yet the familiarity of a deep connection is missing. When things are fresh and new the experience is much more intense and pleasant than the floating disassociative drift that is becoming a more common feeling now that my life is more normal.

Some of this is definitely the difference between being in the city and being in the country. It’s quite clear to me now in which environment I feel best. Even though Christchurch is a super pleasant city environment, it’s still sensory deprivation compared to rural living.

Not to be discounted is the often heard wisdom that it is different to live in a place than it is to be a tourist. Is this the hard work of reestablishment finally catching up with me after a few weeks of adventure?

Also demoralizing are the time scales it seems wise to operate on in order to properly lay the ground for our grandiose plans. It was so exciting a few weeks ago to think that we could purchase a turnkey lifestyle/organic farm/artists’ colony property in the Coromandel. The real estate listing had, apparently, everything we were looking for including a new funky lodge-type residence. We could have diverted our container at sea and moved right in, skipping all this messy groundwork. Even if we had already sold our place in San Francisco it would have taken all of our cash, though. And unfortunately we are far from selling our place in San Francisco.

The story with this house here in Christchurch is the same. It’s held its value in the 14 months since I bought it, but the heady days when one could flip a property after a few months and double one’s money are over. It’s a good redevolopment situation, but it will take money, entreprenurial work, and most importantly, time to come to fruition. It’s clear that our future dreams will run more smoothly with periodic infusions of capital, and so this is time we must spend.

Instead we are here doing the hard work of recreating normal lives, learning our way around a new place that we don’t intend to be for more than (we hope) a year or so, making connections, building the infrastructure of our daily lives, trying to wrest a sunny garden space from an indifferent yard, trying to make ourselves comfortable in a place we plan on leaving. All of this somewhat unrewarding work at the same time as we try to extend our skills and keep the machinery of the big dream not just going, but growing.

It’s wonderful to have our connections that we started building a year ago: the burners, with whom we can now argue policy and talk dreams via Tribe; Maggie, another in a series of honest, knowledgeable and capable real estate agents I have been lucky to have in my life; the folks I found via the internet that run regular german-style board game nights; the folks we spent the day with yesterday. I think the real treats, though, are the continued pleasant suprises of the culture here from the kiwis we meet doing our everyday things. The extensive recreational and adult education resources available in Christchurch. The appliance salespeople who will talk all day with you about a $10 rake. The pacing of the culture here, where stores close at 4, or 5, or 6 so people can go home and have a life and it’s OK, there’s time to do it tomorrow, or a few days from now when the Easter weekend is over. We’ve had two invitations to Easter Sunday dinner from people with whom we’ve had very superficial business connections. An embarrassment of the riches of human kindness.

And it is becoming clear to us that we can make a difference here. It’s not all filled up yet, and there is space for us to do things to support and strengthen the aspects of this country that attracted us in the first place, things that are under siege here as anywhere else in the developed world. But such achievement requires a bit more studying, research, accumulation of oomph before we can go out and stake our claim, make our place, start living (in a bigger way) our dreams. Pacing!