My Favourite Place

We spent the first week of the year at my favourite place - Great Barrier Island.  A group of us went to Orama Christian Community in Karaka Bay, near Port Fitzroy.  Orama is used like a camp, in conjunction with OPC (Outdoor Pursuits Centre), but once it was a fully-fledged community with over a hundred people living there.  I've been there once before, two years ago.  Paddy had to work, so I went with Ella and Greer.  It was a mission, but so worth it.  I found a haven - an incredibly beautiful, wild, remote place, full of history, a place on the edge, a "thin place" in the celtic vernacular.  I fell in love with it, so to go there again all of us together was amazing.

The group we were with was there partly for a holiday and partly to learn.  We were a mixed group of ages and backgrounds, brought together by an interest in the story of New Zealand, using the Huia as a metaphor for our journey of discovery. (More about that to come.) We were there to share perspectives and ideas, and maybe even collectively hear what God might have to say about our country.  (Yeah, I know, Christians are weird like that!!)  We heard from Keith Newman, author of Ratana: The Prophet, Alastair Reese, who holds postgraduate degrees in History, Maori Culture, and Theology, and who has written this dissertation on the alienation of Maori land, Cindy Ruakere, and Brad Haami, author of True Red.

The book I'm working on is partly historical, so it was just the inspiration I needed.

The girls had such a good time.   There was plenty for them to do, and lots of kids around to play with.   At dusk and when it was quiet wild rabbits came out from the bushes by our rooms and they loved watching them.  (Good entertainment for the kids but not so good for the vegetation...) The building we stayed in was at the back of Orama, looking up to the bush and hills behind, and right beside a creek.  We slept listening to the trickling of water.  It was perfectly peaceful.

It is a wonderful thing to have found a place that connects with somewhere deep inside of me.  A place where I feel completely at rest, completely at home, and at the same time completely alive and envigorated.   Where I feel so grounded, so connected to the land and to the past, and yet as if I am standing on the threshold of my future.  Words don't do it justice.

I do have one other place that feels almost as good as that - Raglan.  My mum's family is from there, and it's the setting of my book.  So maybe I should be honest and say I have two favourite places.  I like the maori idea of having a turangawaewae, a standing place.  The best explanation I could find of it was here.  "Tūrangawaewae are places where we feel especially empowered and connected. They are our foundation, our place in the world, our home."  Maybe my turangawaewae, in a physical land sense, can be two places, maybe I have one foot on Great Barrier, at Orama, and the other on the shore of Raglan Harbour.

Do you have a favourite place?  Where is your turangawaewae?  Tell me...