FLIGHT
By Trish Harris
Image from Wikipedia Commons
Twenty years ago I saw three witches moving a-pace above the western hills. They were on broomsticks, silhouetted against the clear dusk sky. They had flown straight out of a book I was trying to read, a book in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy.
I say, trying to read. I was tethered to a hospital bed. There were tubes – liquid in and liquid out. It was day-three of a post-op haze and drugs were flipping my reality into strange shapes. I can’t remember the book-characters’ names, only the image of their flight, and the pull to join them. My actual reality was something I couldn’t face – a fractured leg, six weeks bed-rest and no promises of walking. Flight from my body, extending those tenuous moments in surgery where the body and soul want to separate, felt like a good option.
The witches however, never flew back into view. Outside the window birds took their place parading freedom. And freedom did come. Five months after surgery I was back to my default-setting, walking with one walking stick.
A year later, at age 40, I moved into that rarest of things – an accessible house. In this often ill-fitting world, a place that is physically easy to live in gives so much more than shelter. It straightens your back, lowers the hunch of your shoulders, tilts your head and shifts your gaze so that when you look out on the world, the possibilities for living in it are different, the view is different.
That ‘new vision’ was physical too. My house has a deck that looks across a small gully. Initially the gully was bare, but native planting brought the birds – pīwakawaka, bellbirds and in large number, the tūī.
The tūī who can launch from the tip of a pine tree growing on the opposite side of a gully and land with the accuracy of a fighter plane on a kowhai branch, dripping with September blossoms, on the other. This year especially the blossoms have drawn the birds.
However there was a time when the kowhai in my neighbourhood were spindly. One tree in particular languished out the front of my place looking not like a tree, but like a large, dead, twig – no branches, no leaves.
One day I asked my neighbour, ‘How can I tell if the tree is still alive?’ She said, ‘If you snap a small part of it, and it’s green inside, it’s alive.’ I snapped, and there it was, a thin green heart inside the bark, telling me to wait.
In the following years the tree revealed itself to be two different varieties, curled around each other, branches fanning out, one flowering earlier than the other, causing a slow painting of the tree until three weeks into the season it was completely golden.
This year the kōwhai drew a new bird – kererū. Occasionally a pair circled across the gully-airspace, whomph whomph with their large wings and headed to the pine trees across the road. Then one day they landed, two metres from where I was standing. I couldn’t believe it. It felt like a visitation.
I watched them eat kōwhai flowers whole, no exacting nectar retrieval for them. I caught their impressive wingspan on camera as they left. It was the month of the Great Kererū Count and on the website I discovered ‘…Kererū are the only bird left in New Zealand able to swallow and disperse the seeds from our largest native trees … trees vital for forest regeneration.’
Yet their slower rhythm is so different from the constant motion of the songbird tūī.
I’m in favour of slow, though maybe a better word for my physical pace is steady, measured. I’m always calculating energy out and replenishment in. Sometimes I mis-calculate. Sometimes I don’t want to calculate – I think, I’m going to say yes to this, damn the consequences. The last few years have been a lot about saying yes – to study, book publication, teaching…grabbing opportunities small and big. It’s exhilarating to pretend to be a tui.
But it’s never sustainable. In the first half of this year I said ‘no’ to a teaching contract. I quelled any desire to dream up another writing project. It wasn’t ‘slow’ that I wanted,
it was ‘de-compress’, to separate out the layers of the last few years and see those experiences in their complexity, beauty, ordinariness. To ask some fundamental questions about the future – how will I earn money as I head towards my 60s, do I want to write more and if so, what? I wanted to see where I’d been in order to see what was next.
Often those deeper processes remind me of feminist theology – a way of looking at life which isn’t about big sky thinking, about inspirations, aspirations, flagellations. It’s about knowing where you are, now.
The trouble is though, when you’re looking to the past and don’t know the future, how do you live in that in-between space and wait? It can feel as barren as the kowhai trees that stood outside my house.
Those trees were in danger of being registered dead, ripped out because evidence of growth was missing. Yet movement is sometimes invisible and transformation can’t be hurried.
Flight needs to be balanced by what’s on the ground. The ambling nature of the kererū balanced by its ability to plant a forest. The speed of the broomstick, balanced by the slow swing of the walking stick.
