TAKAKA

---

& GOLDEN BAY

---

I have known that Takaka is my true home for a long time. When I was much younger, my family and I would take Christmas vacations along the beaches there - where you could walk out into the shallow water for what seemed like miles. We would visit the natural wonders together, but on some special days my mum and I would take off for a girl's trip to search the countryside for those small galleries that are really just sheds full of pottery and wonderful paintings. 

When I imagined where I would like to live, as an adult (because even now I do not feel like I have reached adulthood), I always imagined myself as an old hippy, grey hair reaching past my butt, working and living as an artist in the backwoods of Takaka. 

---

SMALL WONDERS
 

Tree touching along the pathways of the Te Waikoropupū Springs. Hearing the rush of the water running through stone hollows. That feeling of awe I get when I look into the heart of the Springs, seeing the waving water weeds that seem so close, yet knowing they are six meters deep.

The wandering sheep, and the odd horse or two.

The humpy green hillsides dotted with scrubby outbursts of trees.

A small tour of a candle gallery, where we are introduced to the five women that spend their days creating such delicious artworks. 

Barefoot people in the village streets.

Beaches of fine white sand, whipped up into my hair and eyes, so I have to wash it all out the next morning.

Real-fruit ice cream on a scorching day.

Snatches of familiar conversation between friends and shopkeepers inside a store that sells coconuts and root vegetables out of woven baskets.

A huge bowl of steamed mussels and half a lemon, whisked fresh from the ocean to my seat at The Mussel Inn - where they have composting toilets, tire swings, and a strict 'no cellphones' policy.

Swimming through a liquid aquamarine ocean to this jumble of rocks off the shore, hoisting myself up and sunning my front-side like a seal.

Being asked if I want to pay for 'this item' by trading in one of my artworks or a few hours of my time working at handiwork.

Beaches of golden sand, so gritty underfoot, intermingled with bits of broken white and purple sea shells.

A couple meditating, knees touching, in the village green.

Walking through the mountains to a hidden cave, and through beech forests filled with fern fronds.

Free-camping amongst a handful of other travelers who spend their nights singing and playing guitar.

---

AN ELVEN FOREST

In the very north of the South Island of New Zealand, on the top of a rocky hill riddled with caves, there lies an ancient beech forest called the Canaan Downs...

The forest is vast, hillocked with stoney outcrops and mired with small mirror pools. I met a thin legged South Island Robin there, and she hopped forward, very close now, till she was just a breath away. Other forms of magic occurred there too: small mushrooms growing in the cleft of a stump, along with the mosses, lichens and ferns adorning every tree bole. 

In the centre of the forest, there is a hole so deep one cannot see the bottom. 

---

“About four days from the enchanted stream they came to a part where most of the trees were beeches. They were at first inclined to be cheered by the change, for here there was no undergrowth and the shadow was not so deep. There was a greenish light about them, and in places they could see some distance to either side of the path. Yet the light only showed them endless lines of straight grey trunks like pillars of some huge twilight hall. There was a breath of air and a noise of wind, but it had a sad sound. Their feet rustled among the leaves of countless other autumns that drifted over the banks of the path from the deep red carpets of the forest.

... a longish way off, it seemed, they saw a red twinkle in the dark; then another, and another sprang out beside it.

After a good deal of creeping and crawling they peered round the trunks and looked into a clearing where some trees had been felled and the ground levelled. There were many people there, elvish-looking folk, all dressed in green and brown... There was a great fire in their midst and there were torches fastened to some of the trees round about; but most splendid sight of all: they were eating and drinking and laughing merrily.

In the Wide World the Wood-elves lingered in the light of our Sun and Moon, but loved best the stars; and they wandered in the great forests that grew tall in lands that are now lost. They dwelt most often by the edges of the woods, from which they could escape at times to hunt, or to ride and run over the open lands by moonlight or starlight; and after the coming of Men they took ever more and more to the gloaming and the dusk. Still elves they were and remain, and that is Good People.

The beeches were their favourite trees. ”

— EXCERPTS FROM THE HOBBIT - J. R. R. TOLKIEN

---

BEECH WOOD

---

The beech is the yin to the yang of the great oak - having long been depicted as a tree with a feminine spirit and ancient wisdom. That energy of wisdom may, in part, originate from the tree's long entangled history with writing. The ancient beech forests of the British Isles bear witness to their contemporaries thoughts, in the forms of Dendroglyphs: pictographs and letters carved upon their trunks. It was not uncommon, in the later middle ages, for a lover to carve their sets of initials on a beech tree, as Helen of Troy had supposedly done centuries earlier.

“Oh Rosalind! These trees shall be my books,
And in their barks my thoughts I’ll character;
That every eye, which in this forest looks,
Shall see thy virtue witness’d every where.
”

— AS YOU LIKE IT - WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Moreover, the beech tree, called 'bok trees' by the Anglo-Saxons, were often cut into thin sheets to be bound and written upon, thus forming a sturdy sort of book. 

THE WEST COAST

TRIBUTARIES

We escaped with next to nothing, one Saturday morning,
Ollie and I.

We wove our way up the West Coast
sleeping in the car and under the stars
and with a host of mosquitoes and sandflies.

Each day was our own, to do with as we pleased,
and what we pleased to do was to walk.

To walk beside blue rivers.

To walk in mossy forests, under beech trees bearded with lichen.

To walk on the beaches - rocky ones, pebbled new beaches of river-stones.

To walk seeking waterfalls hidden in the woods.

To walk under the austere gaze of glaciers.

We were like the tributaries and small fissures of a river, making finger-like journeys into the bush and the coastal dunes on either side of that narrow, black stream - that one road that runs along the rim of the island.