One summer’s day, when I was just three years old, I stood alone in a farmyard along the Kaikoura Coast and knew there was Mystery in the world. It was an experience of anticipation and apprehension: of the self, and of the world. The New Zealand novelist Maurice Gee makes use of an evocative juxtaposition of two common images in several of his books — the creek and the kitchen: "I’d run home from the creek to the safety and security of the kitchen; one the place of safety and affection, the other the place of adventure, danger, excitement." This is how I too see my childhood. The light and the darkness of the world existed in polarities which felt like a natural circumstance.
So I stood there, in that farmyard, in warm long sunshine, seeing the light flossed by thistledown and the bright-winged insects hatched for a brief existence in the summer air. I had walked out of the house of the folks my parents were visiting that day, down a path and away through the wooden garden gate beneath the trees. I wandered about, under the brooding macrocarpas, amongst and through the wooden out-buildings. Bruce Chatwin writes of these first adventures:
"Children need paths to explore, to take bearings on the earth in which they live, as a navigator takes bearings on familiar landmarks. If we excavate the memories of childhood, we remember the paths first, things and people second — paths down the garden, the way to school, the way round the house, corridors through the bracken or long grass."
"Children need paths to explore, to take bearings on the earth in which they live, as a navigator takes bearings on familiar landmarks. If we excavate the memories of childhood, we remember the paths first, things and people second — paths down the garden, the way to school, the way round the house, corridors through the bracken or long grass."
I think we remember such things because they are adventurous; that juxtaposition of anticipation and apprehension heightens our perceptions. So I still recall my impressions from that day, along each path I took: the smell of sun-warmed fuscous manure and straw in the doorway of the hayshed; the lanolin musk of the pile of old woolsacks; the pungent odours of thick oil and creosote oozing from rusted drums against the back wall of the barn; worn leather harness hanging on nails amidst odd bits of machinery and tools; the tractor standing on its cul-de-sac of off-set chevron tracks imprinted into dry mud; the rusting plough and chain harrows; the cawdling of magpies, and the sudden barking of the sheepdogs…
And there is something else in that memory of place — awareness of events as further paths. There may have been a few earlier memories, but this is my first experience, as I walked from gate to yard to shed to barn, of mood… Now I look back, marvelling at this awakening, hearing in my heart each summer’s call: Receive the light.
