Autumn Equinox update

Happy approaching equinox friends and family,

Here in Aotearoa New Zealand we are slowly returning to the dark. Very few cicadas are singing but the water and days are still warm for now. My family abroad in the US (or I suppose I am the one abroad) are looking forward to summer. I still feel that old circadian ache in my body, though twenty-eight years or so have passed. A yearning for the season’s opposite.

On Monday I was stung on my hands several times by wasps while I was gardening. I am ok but I did have an allergic reaction — fierce itching all over my body — a first for me, which antihistamines from the Dr fixed up, apart from my hands being hot swollen little parcels and fiercely itching most the next day. I found if I read a book they deflated a little but if I tried to do anything else they swelled up again. So I bought myself a new novel (below) and lay down for hours reading. I finished Marina Kemp’s fantastic book this morning and today my hands look almost normal again. With a few days of rest at home to recover I finally have time to share some news.

I was very pleased to have one of my photographs included in the Women’s Work 2025 exhibition (In)visible, shown in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland from March 7-10 with the tagline: “A photographic exhibition exhibiting the work of 35 of Aotearoa’s finest female photographers.”

The Women’s Work collective made me feel welcomed and celebrated. I am very much in admiration of their aim to bring artists and photographers, often in competition for scarce market resources, together to showcase their work, creating an environment more collegial than competitive.

I exhibited a photograph of an exposed kelp bed at Te Kohuroa Matheson Bay with the artist statement below:

This photograph was taken opposite the island at Te Kohuroa Matheson Bay, currently the site of community-led conservation run by the Te Kohuroa Rewilding Initiative, working towards kelp reforestation by removing an overabundance of kina.

Working within their female-led team, I can’t help but draw parallels between conservation and caretaking. Much of our labour, underwater or behind the scenes, is invisible, just as a clean home obscures the hours of work that go into keeping it that way. Arrowing down towards the seafloor to gather an armload of kina, I wonder how this work will be quantified at the surface.

This photograph peers through the ocean’s mirrored edge, to frame this ever-changing space at the intersection of observation and ecological dynamism, of women’s work and the caretaking of our ecosystems. This photograph aims to make our labours of caretaking visible.

Being included in the exhibition is good encouragement to keep going on this path, to keep capturing the world in imagery and text and sharing it.

I continue writing every day, drafting new material and editing work already underway, applying for residencies and mentorships. I had some recent bittersweet news of making in onto the reserve list for a mentorship which wasn’t exactly what I was hoping for but is still very encouraging.

In art I’ve begun exploring a palette I call ‘the gathering hours’ from a sunset dive a few years back. Think red rock crabs in rich burgundies scurrying between underwater boulders, the ocean’s surface glimmering mandarin and lavender and deep navy. Slack high tide, just before it falls. I’m not sure where the work will take me but it’s a nice reentry into art.

I snorkel and swim several times a week. I’ve been noticing new species on my last few snorkels at Goat Island Marine Reserve. They’ve been there all along but I am only beginning to see them. Seeing more clearly underwater takes time, as the fog of civilised life slowly recedes from around our heads. Lately I’ve been going in with just a mask and snorkel — no weights or fins or suit, just my unencumbered self. It makes me feel like a kid again.

I spend a lot of my free time with kids. One of my friend’s kids are twelve, eleven and five months, another’s twin girls are a year old. Two others have five-month-olds and another is about to give birth next month. Of course I track the timelines of my own might-have-been-babies, but I feel only joy for these fat little delicious humans. I hold them and delight at their milestones and blow raspberries on their bellies. I swim the twelve year old around the reserve, showing her everything I never saw until I was in my thirties and it feels so right to do this. So emboldening. My own inner twelve-year-old is with us underwater, eyes wide in wonder, starting to understand why she had to come all this way.

In the tradition of Native American Animal Medicine and my own tradition of relentless meaning-making, I wonder what message the wasps delivered with their stings. The message might to be slow down, pay attention, and be careful with ourselves. To not take ourselves or our hands or our talents for granted, but to use them for a good purpose, whether that is art or medicine or just living. Also to protect our sacred spaces, to shut the doors and bar entry when necessary. The wasps stung me with no emotion, no anger, but simple industry — it was much less dramatic than I thought it would be. I brushed the nest with both hands. The wasps did not rise up in fury but stung me from where they rested. Of course I ran from the bottlebrush my hands had been buried in, petrified, fingers smarting under my gloves, but only one or two wasps rose lazily into the summer breeze to see what the fuss was about. To my surprise now, I feel robust and bold and safe. I feel my own hands are good hands to be in.

Funny that comes to me now, as my brother Bill V once made me a journal, after we moved, when I was about twelve, and on a loose piece of tracing paper he’d attached to the cover, in rough burgundy capitals he wrote: ‘YOUR OWN HANDS ARE GOOD HANDS TO BE IN / YOU ARE’. I’d forgotten that. (Thank you Bill V, I love you.)

Wishing you all love and ease and good health and recovery out there.

Thanks for reading xo