Winter Solstice Update
Kia ora friends and family,
We’ve not long passed the point of peak darkness or peak light hours, depending on where in the world you are based, which seems like a good time for an update and a few announcements.
First the announcements: I’ve had work published in two books recently, one released in June and one that is about to be released at the end of July. The first is Short | Poto, a collection of 100 short short stories from Aotearoa printed in English and te reo Māori which includes a micro-non-fiction piece titled ‘Private Acts’ and the second is Strong Words 4: the best of the Landfall Essay Collection which includes my essay ‘Choosing Sides’.
It is very very exciting to see my work in print! Especially as these works appear alongside my two writing teachers Diane Brown (in Short | Poto and Strong Words 4) and Paula Morris (in Short | Poto) and other writers from Aotearoa whose books I cherish and have on my shelf. I feel so incredibly excited to be a part of Aotearoa’s cohort of writers. This land is filled with diverse, strong, interesting, funny, and intrepid voices, and I am absolutely honoured to be one of them.
As for an update — I am still figuring out how I want to share on this website platform, more or less and what kind of writing to engage in, surface level or subterranean. So forgive me if these emails or blog posts are occasionally clunky and odd! As I slowly figure out how I want to continue showing up in this online space, away from social media.
For Matariki and the winter solstice, Logan and I were very lucky to get away to a beach north of us called Tapuaetahi where we spent time with our friends Meesh and Vero. We woke early on Matariki to look at the stars and saw two small eaglerays at first light in the shallows of the bay. Logan fished from sun up to sundown. I went cold swimming. We ate fresh snapper for our solstice meal. It was shirts off on the shortest day feeling like we were getting burnt while fishing at the blow hole. I hooked one huge kahawhai that busted me off on the rocks on the second day.
Having crossed the peak of darkness in the southern hemisphere and the peak of light in the northern hemisphere, I feel huge shifts internally, many things ending and leaving. Friends I speak with are feeling this too. Big endings, lots of grief and things moving through and on. I am clearing space, crying and walking and cold swimming and getting the bodywork done, osteo and cranial and yoga and weights and romiromi, and the emotional work, therapy and EMDR and writing and excavating memory, and cleansing all the things, the bod, the mind, the heart, the house, the family line, the closets, the garden. I am reading and working and loving, welcoming the peak of darkness because I know it brings the light.
I have come through some of the hardest (and best) years of my life recently, and I feel I am finally starting to rise out of the underworld and into the light. What a voyage it has been and the more I recognise this, the more all the years feel like one immense voyage with many ups and downs and digressions and iterations and I understand more and more, that’s what life is, this immense and unstoppable flowing river, on through the days and years and centuries, and that we have been travelling for quite some time and that we will continue to do so, well beyond our lifetimes.
I will leave you with a short excerpt from the essay I’m currently at work on, one essay digressing into several essays, building a larger book-length work of non-fiction, of which my essay ‘Choosing Sides’ is a kind of beginning.
‘I’ve learned to resist the impulse to burn my diaries or tear out pages, hoping to erase all evidence — of what? My own shame. The feelings I could not unfeel. The grief, the yearning, the rage. The injustice of it all, the humiliation. The compulsion to erase the self that, despite my best efforts, kept on appearing.’
Happy peak of dark or light to all of you and thank you, as always, for reading,
ox AMB