I don't feel gone. I don't feel away. I feel at home. At home with the land. At home with the sea. At home with the people who surround me. It feels extraordinary and I feel more alive. I feel alive in the adventure of it all. The sense of knowing with the knowledge that it is all still entirely unknown to me - if that makes sense. I ignoratnly believe I know this land but I know this land does not know me and it could swallow me whole. This land is a sacred place, well the world is a sacred place, but it took this trip for me to realize it.
Driving through the landscape my breathe is taken form me. The freeness with which the land flows like waves frozen in motion mid break. (maybe that is why we have white capped mountains, they were the rouge waves that rose too high and froze in the cool alpine environment) I think it's funny when we line the road with fences. I know it is to keep the sheep in, but somehow it seems to represent man's struggle with the environment. We act like we control it, we fence it in like we have the power to do so. But our efforts are weak in comparison to the giant mountains that lie behind our mediocre fences. Separating us from it - removing ourselves from the wild from which we came. It's sad and it's feeble. We are sad and feeble in the society we have created. We create an us and it mentality with the earth. We place ourself above the land - but just because we walk upon does not mean we are above it. The jagged white caps of the mountains. That is a glimpse of what the earth can be. And they stand as a reminder of how thankful we should be for gentle rolling green hills we inhabit.
We become accustom to our environment and fail to realize the beauty it possesses. We fence ourselves into a world of false safety - we are the kings who have conquered and divided but we did not conquer anything but one another. That became apparent to me here in New Zealand where the environment rules. The kids here do not major in politics or business; they major in biology and geology. They place a focus on the environment that we lack and it is refreshing. It is nice to see a lake that is blue and clean. It is nice to see roads that go around mountains and not through them. They are not at one with the land here but they do respect it.
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