Ancestors in the wood

Te Papa, New Zealand

Myself as a tourist, wandering and revelling in carvings and carved spaces. There are living marae and vibrant wharenui out beyond the wall of the museum. There are people who still sing to the waking ancestors. Te Papa is the National Museum of New Zealand in Wellington. It is wonderful

I step down to enter the Wharenui, respectfully barefoot, slipping in to sit quiet under the glaring eyes and tattooed bodies of carved, wooden ancestors.
 

NZ is full of ancestors

Watching people, it pulls us into silence, this place, into simply sitting. Children, laughing and babbling out there in the marae, leave their noisiness with their shoes by the door and, Maori, Pakeha and foreign tourist alike, all stand and look. No cameras. Just a moment of peace before they are called on and leave the strange hairy man alone again on the chairs.

For me, this place is full of presences and the shapes who have loitered on the edge of my senses since I arrived in New Zealand take form and I feel these short, green, tattooed bodies around me. I would like to dance a prayer here in a cloud of scented smoke but instead I find myself reciting poems and blessings out of my own far away lands*

Power of the raven,
Power of the rain on the hills,
Power of the wind over the moor,
Power of the hare in the grass
Be thine.

Grace of the clover,
Grace of the geese in the loch,
Grace of the gunmetal grey clouds,
Grace of the white clouds that catch the light
Be thine**

This wharenui is transplanted. A museum artefact, moved with blessing and permission and respectfully contained and even at this distance from its place of origin, I can sense the root that still links wharenui to marae and back to home. But what would it be like to stand in a living wharenui within a living marae while the voices of a strong and vibrant people echo round the walls and remind the carvings of their descendants and the families they gave life to?

*and later a Maori friend tells me that the spirits like to hear voices: that prayers (and poems) are gifts to them that help the ancestors stay here, with us.

** The lines come from a blessing prayer from my book “Old stones and ancient bones: poems from the hollow hills”. The final verse is an ending from a much older blessing
 

Brodgar
Slip into stillness
Beside a tall stone
Bristled and bearded with lichen.

Listen to the voices that 
Whisper along the wind,
Through the grass,
Out of the old stone itself,
Saying,

Power of the raven,
Power of the rain on the hills,
Power of the wind over the moor,
Power of the hare in the grass
Be thine.

Grace of the clover,
Grace of the geese in the loch,
Grace of the gunmetal grey clouds,
Grace of the white clouds that catch the light
Be thine

Stillness of the wave on the shore,
Stillness of stone in the Ring,
Stillness of sunrise behind the ridges,
Stillness of long sleep in the hollow hills
Be thine

Strength of the gull’s freedom,
Strength of the bull’s endurance,
Strength of the rooks’ gathering,
Strength of the crab’s stealth
Be thine

May no day be grievous to thee,
May each day be joyous to thee,
May love of each face be thine
May death on pillow be thine,
Honour and compassion.

Moa in Kaimai

Deep green dreams

Rounded,
Green,
Moss-shaggy boulders,
Brood in tree-fern beds.
But at night,
Under moon-light or star-fire,
Old creepers uncoil into necks,
And heavy legs lift those boulder-backs,
And tough leaves relax into browsing.
These woods still dream of Moa


Kaimai Range, North Island, New Zealand November 2014

Midwinter greetings

with best wishes to all visitors to the Toadblog!

Phutukawa trees are wonderful! Find out more: Metrosideros excelsa

Pohutukawa

Sea tree,

Stone tree,

Bark as grey and

Beautiful as boulders,

Wrapping rocks with roots,

And twisting branches

Out over the waves,

Lifting sea-green leaves

In a burst of crimson fire

To the wide blue skies.

Tuahu walk

Walking in the Tuahu forest

I leave the car first and the sealed road second. I'd like to leave my shoes as well but stern warnings of thorn-vines and stay-a-bit-longer creepers infiltrate the impulse. Familiar, alien birdsong fills a spring afternoon and with the woods just over there and green fields and roadside flowers I could be in England. 

The woods are calling and their edge and its shadows turn the blackbirds away, and the greenfinches and goldfinches and chaffinches. Even the bold robin won't follow me for long. The trees here aren't the trees I know and even these are alien to the wood that waits. Japanese Honeysuckle, Pepper bushes, gum tree and wattle are punctuated by those cheerfully tough treeferns. They seem to manage to poke their wonderful exploding crowns of uncurling fronds through any gap in other trees' canopies, doing their bit to defy these alien invaders

At the useful station, I pause to scrub my shoes and disinfect them. Having endured for millennia and bypassed the logging orgies of the 19th and 20th Centuries, the survivors are now facing another of those pernicious Dieback fungi that seem to be turning up everywhere these days

Keep walking. Keep walking. Listen now. Now I can hear native voices singing: tui, bellbird, maybe. A fantail dances in the sunshine on the path and flits away as I get closer to pause on a branch and tease me on

The woods are changing as the path begins to climb. On my right, the hillside drops away sharply to where an unseen stream burbles along. The shadows under the trees are filling with tree ferns, thrusting upwards, elbowing the toppled trunks of their parents aside. A little further on, and palms are doing the same thing. The two trees create a prehistoric gloom where something hungry, browsing and reptilian would not seem out of place.

The woods are still changing. Tougher locals replacing the invasives. Big trees, now: southern beech have their grey trunks bearded with ferns and cascades of epiphytes. They are massive trees, trunks fork and sweep majestic branches out over the path. Elegant Rimu and Totara slip in beside them. Tough vines string trees together and by now, I seem to have left all the birds behind and the woods are quiet. Tree ferns sigh and their dangling dried fronds whisper secrets to each other. Or rustle suggestively so that I reflexively look for the squirrels of home or expect deer.

The path climbs and forks and I take the narrow trail that loops back, climbs up the hill. Steps. More steps. Somewhere I take my shoes off. The need to do this barefoot is greater than the risk of thorns. Still climbing, still rambling, at least on the inside, I turn a corner

I have met older trees and possibly met bigger ones but very rarely have I met a tree with the simple majesty of a mature Kauri. At 500 years, the Tuahu Kauri is the oldest of this forest and it stands there and takes my breath away. Someone written into being from a book. It reminds me of so many moments: Tolkien's Middle Earth. Beautiful Iftsiga from Andre Norton's Janus books. Ursula Le Guin: The Word for World is Forest. Charles de Lint's First Forest. Middle Earth again. Mallorn? 

At 8' wide, the trunk soars upwards. 25' before the first branches, The trunk is sort-of smooth. It flakes carefully to keep itself free of fern-beards and moss-hairy chests. Those growths come with the branches high above. Here, the trunk feels rough as elephant skin and as grey. Down at ground level, Vulnerable root systems lie just below the surface, cruising through the mulch the trees make for themselves. Delicate, easily crushed, too fragile for a tree of this size, we have to approach Kauri on boardwalks, lifting us off their sacred ground and making the whole experience even more of an audience

For it is an audience and I know I enter the Presence as a supplicant slipping into the throne room.  somewhere, I slow down. Feel the smooth wood under my feet, the warmth if it, the rightness of the moment. somewhere I manage to shut myself up. To stop talking and reading and spouting and just. Stop. And be still. And curl up on a corner of the boardwalk and just breathe for a bit. And stop for a bit and be wrapped in the ancient, growing peace of a Kauri tree.

Tane mahuta in the Agathis Forest of Northland, New Zealand, is believed to be the oldest kauri surviving and to be anywhere from1 250 to 2,500 years old. Coyly, Tane does not give away his age

Waterfalling words

New Zealand: words and stories

Tui

Tuis build their songs,

Out of everyone else's leftovers.

A squeak, a creak, a whistle,

And a bubbling waterfall trill

That froths like wave foam

And wakes the morning into delight

29/11/14

Tui (Presothemadera novaeseelandiae are beautiful birds 

whose gentlemen where smart tufted bow ties 

of white feathers on their black bibs)

The Falls 

(started at the Erskine Falls in the Great Otway NP, Victoria 

but then finished at falls on the Kaimai Mountains in NZ)

Endless voices,

Shouting or whispering,

Depending on the rain

Voices pouring

Themselves over stone.

Wearing away,

Washing away.

Moss grows,

Ferns drip fronds,

And straps and necklaces,

Leather and pearl and precious metals,

All in green,

And glistening,

In the sprayed whisper

Of the falls.

Trees die

And drop

Stone-smooth trunks

To block

The stream

And build deep,

Dark pools among the

Dinosaur boulders,

Where the voices

Rest.

Who lives in the cold shadow

Of the pool?

Whose are the voices

That sing,

That whisper,

That shout,

That wash away

Worries,

And

Polish the hard rocks of my grief

And anger and pain

Into the rounded boulders

Of hope

Quietly

My words on paper

Write you into black and white

I can't even catch the cloud-grey shades

Of our conversations.

The prospects of the bright colours of our passion

Are lost in the arts of pen and processor

17/11/14

once

Once I had a thought

Of hills and woods and

A cottage by the sea.

Once I had a dream

Of ambitions climbed

And mountains scaled

And hopes flowering

Once I held a promise

Of joy

In my hands,

On my heart.

Once.