magic mugwort palaces, fairy god mothers and ritalin

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And so back to Coromandel it was with my new found friend Hippie, a delightful man with an enourmous heart, magic ogre feet that rarely see shoes, a loud obxnoxious voice, twisted sense of humour and tendency towards uncouthness making him my perfect companion.

Wilderlands is one of the oldest communes in New Zealand that's been going on since the 60s and encompasses wild bush, extensive vegetable gardens, orchards, a private beach, over a hundred hives, honey processing house, numerous self built homes, a sauna and communal hall. What was once someone's vision is now however coming to an end, or is transitioning into something else as all the long term residents had moved out or were on the verge of moving during my stay there and there was no formal organisation or structure. A Lot of buildings are in a state of disrepair and are natuire is slowly taking over, making things feel rather strange and a bit sad.

I lived in the bottom part of Hippie's dome house, a magical fairytale house in the midst of the bush complete with spiral staircase and a platform/porch above the trees with views of the ocean and Whitiange in the distance. My octagon shaped room with wooden beams was used as the candle-making workshop and was full of shelves of candles and lanterns and wax and the scent of honey and beeswax. Magic! I harvested tons of mugwort, a herb used in magic over the ages, which is thought to induce astral travelling and lucid dreaming and hung it all around my room to dry and so felt like a fairy tale creature in a magical mugwort honey comb palace every time I entered.

My days were spent working during the morning either harvesting fruit and veggies, making preserves or frequently cooking huge feasts for lunch using only hand-picked garden produce and pulses and even grinding the wheat to make bread and chopping the wood to heat the oven for baking. Afternoons were wandering around in the garden of Eden, conversing with my favourite trees, sitting on the porch under the Gingko tree and chatting to Hippie. A week or so later a few more people I had met at Kiwiburn came to stay and then a few days after that a whole other load... so life became rather sociable in contrast to all the months preceeding Kiwi Burn and there was even a night of drunken raucousness including a fire and barechested hooping and bourbon and gin and dancing to drum and bass from a car stereo and then me convincing everyone to go for a swim and beautiful midnight moonlit bathing surounded by phosphorent sparkles and I suddenly find my limbs entangled in another two peoples sharing salty kisses, blissing out...

A week of intensity pursued trying to deal with being sucked into somewhat of a leadership position as Hippie left to go to Christchurch for a week and I attempted to make the most of the fact that a large group of people were around to help out but needed direction and organizing, and also dealing with my heart that had got sucked into an affair that involved more than one person. Big learning curves, much intensity and then finally the strong pull of my heart telling me to go and be on my own again. And so I declined the offer to go and travel with this beautiful man I had met and two other girls and after a confusing few days of not knowing where to go, and whether or not I would get a place on this yoga teacher training course in India that was rapidly filling up, I managed to book a place on the course, change my flight to leaving a month earlier than I had anticipated and decide that I would head back to Waiheke. And so my plan of ending my trip at the bottom of the South Island did not quite manifest as I had anticipated! In the end, the furthest South I managed to get was Mangakino for Kiwi Burn, which is about 3 hours south of Auckland. Completely ridiculous.

Life since Kiwiburn has been so different for me... after months of being on such a solitary path and not really being able to fully be myself I have been living such a sociable life and have been around people that I can really be me around, which has been such a blessing and such a wonderful change. It just really reached a stage though where I felt like I didn't want to be part of a group anymore, I wanted more time to reflect on things and be quiet and feel like I was on my own. Plus being around these people creates a tendency in me towards smoking again and drinking too much...and so off I went to Waiheke to hang out with Kiwi and continued smoking far too many cigarettes and drinking far too much chardonnay but very content to spend time with my new friend and be out of the bush and have access to some modern facilities again. Coz even though I am a shameless hippy it is kinda nice to have an indoor shower... every couple of weeks or something.

Missed an important part though.... on the way to Waiheke, travelling with David Bradshaw in his hire car that constantly pissed him off for being too slow, we decided to stop off at a random cafe for lunch, and thinking it would be some souless greasy spoon, couldn't believe my eyes when I entered a room that was covered from ground to ceiling in bric a brac and collections of various kinds but mainly royal family memorabilia... there were ceilings covered entirely in jigsaw puzzles and miniaure bicycle collections, antique toy collections, miniature electric fair ground rides.... and amidst all this was Angie, a beautiful little sparkle of light in her sixties who was originally from the U.K and now ran the place. She was so fulll of life, running around and chatting to customers, dressing them up in silly hats whilst serving them traditional British cups of tea and silver Victorain platters with scones. In the course of the next hour and a half we become completely enamoured with one another and upon leaving I decide that Angie would just make the perfect fairy god mother. I have always wanted to have a quirky crazy god mother but never had one and so I decided to write to her and ask her whether she would be honorary god mother. Sure enough, several days later I receive an email from her titled 'your wish is my command' telling me she sould be delighted and asking me whether I had a prince because only the other day a rather lovely man had walked into her cafe and she had developed a very beautiful friendship and mother/son relationship with him and was going to try and help him get his residency in New Zealand as he is from Israel and doesn't want to go back and be in the army and she would love to wave her magic fairy god mother wand and get us together because we would be perfect for one another.

So not only do I now have a fairy god mother but also a rather (tall, dark and handsome) prince as well!

Unfortunately my prince will have to wait though as fate prevented us from meeting this time around but this is just another reason (as well as not having made it to the south island, grrr) that I shall have to come back to NZ.

Anyways... back to Waiheke. A final week of wholesomeness pursued after my stay in the domes, first wwoofing with a lovely retired couple from Holland who were very loving and beautiful. Unfortunately after going a but mad with a petrol powered lawn mower on a hilll for two hours on my first day I managed to do my back in and so could not do that much work (although did make some large cement tiles with shells in them which was pretty cool). So I had to hang out and appreciate their beautiful property which is surrounded by protected land and play in their 'Narnia forest' as they call it - a forest of Pohotukawa trees, the oldest ones I have ever seen and definitely one of the most magical little tucked away gems in New Zealand that I have witnessed. Their branches reach out for 20 meters and root into the earth before coming up and branching out again so you can find youself entangled in this network of horizontal tree limbs entwined around you, perfect for climbing. Continuing down the path you arrive at a secluded beach and so I was able to bliss out swimming naked on a regular basis.

Doing my back in turned out to be an enourmous blessing in disguise (surprise surprise) as at the second and final place I wwoofed at - Lori and Bruces place at the eco village where I went on my first trip to Waiheke for a healing session - I was forced to stay inside doing sewing and upholstering jobs whilst chatting to Lori which was so awesome as she is a pretty evolved and powerful individual with some fascinating stories. She taught me how to use kinesiology on myself and I spent a lot of my time reading about muscle testing and being amazed at what I was discovering and how little awareness there is of it in the general public. She pretty much lives her life through muscle testing... from deciding what and when to harvest and plant in the garden to all manner of important life decisions. She also regularly connects with nature spirits and devas through meditation - she lived in Findhorn for 16 years and this is why Findhorn originally became well known - people couldn't believe how huge the fruit and veggies were and it was becauise absolutely everything was done in harmony by connecting with all the different nature spirits. She shared one story in which she and Bruce had warned a tree in advance that they would have to cut off 2 of it's branches. Several weeks later they performed the cutting and realized they would have to cut one more branch...which they did and watched in awe as over the next few hours the tree started 'bleeding' sap only from that last cut - the other two stumps that had been 'warned' before were fine.

Before I knew it Sunday rolled around and Kiwi and Karl and two other burners - Knuckles and Payphone picked me up and off we went to Stoney Batter - an area full of volcanic rocks that exploded from a volanic erruption and lie scattered on green rolling hills and also home to an historic defense installation and tunnel system from world war two. Being in a claustrophobic network of tunnels in pitch black that used to be a site of war activity is not high up on m list of fun things to do and beign o sensitive to weird energies that I involuntarily tap into meant that I got pretty freaked out. But then I was out in the open on a windy hill top after climbing out of one of the tunnels while the others were still inside and blissed out for a few moments dancing in the wind with Rah - saying out goodbyes to each other as travelling aournd NZ with ahula oop is one thing and India is another. Yes, I know it's silly - my hoop has a name and we have a relationship with one another and if you've never owned a hoop you wouldn't understand but Rah was pretty special. My hoop keptmy company all throughout my travels, rescued me when I didn;t know what to do with myself or needed a release, enabled me to get in touch with my spine and promote the flow of energy up and down, create beauty and inspire others. So Sonia who was woofing with me at Anneke and Friso's became Rah's new owner and I hope it will bring her much joy.

So after deciding to stay on Waiheke for my final night in NZ and have a quiet one and avoid Auckland and my heart being dragged around because of what was there, after a glass or two of Kiwi's ubiquitous chardonney, that old familiar feeling of needed to get into trouble and open the doors of chaos took over and a few hours later found myself pulling up into the harbour with Karl, both more than slightly merry after gulping down Scrumpey cider and me stupily taking ritalin which when added to a combination of me, booze and being manic is a bad, bad idea. And sure enough I turned into a little tornado and turned up at the party and immideatly found myself wrestling in te dirt with a certain someone after telling myself to leave them be and suddenly 2 hours had passed and I hadn't even said hello to anyone and things continued in this manner until the following day when I realized how mindless and thoughtles I had been, particularly to certain person whose feelings I had ignored and hurt and what with a lack of sleep and severe hangover and feeling guilty and disconnected from myself weird at once again being thrown into/creating a situation involving polyamory, I left New Zealand with a heavy heart, questioning my constant tendency to throw myself from one extreme to another, my sporadic mania episodes which I only ever handle with self destructive means and how this ends up with me feeling disconnected to myself and burnt out.

But what an opportunity awaits...a month of doing exactly that.. of connecting to myself, physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually...through my yoga practice. A transition of going from a month of exploring connections with new friends and lovers to once again becoming deeply internal and reflective. A transition of going from the past 5 months of relative ease to pushing myself and challenging myself physically through my asana practise, intellectually through learning how to teach
and studying yoga philosophy and theory and of course the emotional challenges and spiritual learning opportunities that come hand in hand with this.

One month of yoga teacher training in McLeod Ganj and then one final chapter of a month of travel with no set plans and this journey comes to an end...

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Photos

yum
my big vat of creamed Manuka honey

jarring honey...
...and blissing out

The dome
my magical fairy tale home

me & Hippie
after a mornings work harvesting over a hundred kgs of tomatoes

my newly found fairy god mother
discovered in the Corogate Cafe

blissing out...
...in the forest of Narnia

Lori & Bruces home
A few final days of wwoofing in Waiheke's eco village

Stony Batter
Last Sunday with Kiwi, Karl, Payphone and Knuckles

mwuah!
Kiwi love