This week has displayed alternating days of sun and
rain, with rainy days consuming most of the waking hours. Winter in Auckland, I
am discovering and as locals have told me, is not only cold but can also be
very wet. Numerous days of wet weather in this temperate climate - such is the
travesty of living by the coastline, even in the coldest season of the year in
this other land down under.
Being kept indoors has proven to be a strain on my
emotional stability. I’ve managed to steal moments from the long hours of
reading and rewriting to stretch my muscles and my chakra with carpeted yoga in
my room. In these moments of stillness, in which I sit on the floor, facing the
window, legs crossed like a pretzel, I allow the deep inhalation and exhalation
of my lungs to gently open the channels connected to the recesses of my brain.
In this position, and through this stillness, I seek to release the peace and
serenity enclosed therein.
I wish I could say that yoga still does it for me.
Over the years, since succumbing to pilatés yoga in Madison, Wisconsin 9 years
ago, it no longer does for me now what it did then – inner peace and light, and
toned arms and abs. After gradually phasing it out of my life, I have since
reintegrated exploratory, long walks 3 years ago, and re-discovered the spiritual
benefits from meditative thinking while walking. Though not conducted perfectly,
and perhaps not in the way Thich Nat Thanh would suggest (I still need the
power walks, it seems, sweat dripping down my chin and all), walking tours help
me to re-connect with myself. These walks have also done wonders for my thesis,
which is finally shaping into a research project.
Though my arms and abs are no longer what they were,
I appreciate the gentle release of stress and frustrations my walking steps
afford me. But, with the rains that have come almost daily this week, my walks have been abbreviated or curtailed completely.
I can’t say that my days at Massey University still
don’t haunt me. On several occasions this week, I could hear thudding and
things being moved around or dropped from somewhere in the house; knowing my
landlord/housemate is at work during the day, my ears stand at attention at
the suspicion that someone may be trying to break in. Alarms going off in the
distance on different occasions imply that break-in attempts, and the corresponding
dangers, may be a reality in this neighborhood. My nerves trigger memories of
the RAs at Tararua Hall at Massey, giving strangers access to my room,
including on days when I was in there studying. To this day, I don’t know that
they understood how wrong it was – or how illegal – and I still suspect that someone
was instructing them to do it. So, if I hear the occasional noise in the middle
of the night or early morning, I still sit up in bed, ready to jump, instantly.
Moreover, in relation to my suspicion of someone
tampering with my thesis chapters, since moving to Manukau where I live a
somewhat solitary lifestyle, I was given a research control, something against
which to compare my thesis writing experience at Massey University. Here,
nothing about my chapters change; no moving paragraphs, no inexplicable
flicking of the screen , indicating that someone was hitting the back button - no, my chapters since revising them here in Manukau have been
stable. This control allowed me to understand that my suspicions were not based
on paranoia.
Hopefully, the sun will show itself and stay out next week so that I can pay Panmure a visit. I still intend to walk the distance to
Bucklands Beach, but first I’m curious about the history of Panmure and its
meaning.
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