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Hi everyone,
I've moved my blog over to Substack, where you can sign up to receive irregular posts from me by email! Or browse the archives. My substack has the very modest name of: In which I attain unimaginable greatness named after one of my poems. Maria Radioactive
21 Nov 23 I am forbidden from babies for the night. There are no babies I cuddle in my life so it's a pretty low cost demand. Today a doctor injected radioactive dye in two places, above and below the nipple, and then did lots of scans and photos which could show them which lymph nodes my breast drains to. Or something. It's latish I am tired. Anyway, I think the dye helps them detect the most likely lymph node that will have cancer should the cancer have spread. Which is unlikely. Since finding out the lump had cancer, the various points at which there could have been unexpected bad news, there has been no bad news. The MRI found nothing further. The doctor had told me they did not expect to see more tumours, or to see that it had spread. There was nothing unexpected. There is a a single lump for them to remove. Tomorrow is the lumpectomy. Such an excellent and ridiculous word. And the day of the operation has got tied into preparing our 14 year old for Thailand. It is 10.13pm and just after 2am her friend E's father will come and pick her up and drive E and my Lexie to the airport. Lexie is trying to sleep. I told her to try at 9pm and if she woke up that was okay but otherwise I'm to wake her at 1am. I am a night owl so I'll stay awake.. Everyone else is in bed already. I have stacked the dishwasher, and tidied the lounge and tidied our bedroom in preparation for my recuperation. A wee gift to myself, to overcome my untidy tendencies and present myself with the calm space. Also my poet friend M. had sent me flowers. and those ones I wanted in my room and flowers look better in a tidy room. The other thing that is happening tomorrow is Maggie's last ever school exam. The last schoolish thing she'll ever have to do. I said to Joe, tomorrow Lexie has a flight, Maggie has an exam and I have an operation, what are you doing? And Joe said Sudoko. It will have to be a hard one won't it? said Maggie. 2am is the latest I can have anything to eat. I mean surely most people aren't awake at 2am but it happens that tonight I will be awake to check my child is all sorted and to hug her goodbye and I will in fact be awake at 2am and wonder if I should in fact eat something just because I can. There's a stillness isn't there? When everyone else is asleep in you house. I'm in our lounge. It's a 1960s house, the room is all sharp angles. It's got milky green walls, and a flowery cover over our screen which is above a grey brick fireplace. I made the cover out of a beautiful sample of material an ex-boyfriend gave me. His Mum was an interior decorator. A teal couch, blue buckety chairs, red carpet, pop art style posters Joe did for Maggie's Ruby Redfort party, my mother's paintings of the house I grew up in, with the light coming through those net curtains, more pictures. I'm not one for beige. Now it's summer I've put all the pot plants in the corner we usually keep wood in. Shimmery white on white curtains embossed with Chinese dragons. The coffee table my Grandad made from an old shearing shed and on it pink alstoemerias from my sister's new garden. There's a globe. Do other writers do this? Return to the basics, over and over, the room you're in? Like yogis return to the breath. I return to the fine black dashes on the yellow and pink petals of the flowers next to me. The globe which happens to have India facing me, and below that China and the South China Sea, and just out of view I know, because I looked before, the Gulf of Thailand, and the curling river through Bangkok, that our younger daughter is soon to travel on. 23 Nov 23 The lumpectomy Yesterday was sunny and bright and hot. I wore jeans to the hospital and an old striped blue sleeveless shirt that was soft with age even when I bought it from an op shop. I wanted something that buttoned down the front in case pulling stuff over my head got difficult. I had the post-op bra on, no wires. I wore jandals. I resisted being formal because it was a hospital. It was a vibe someone would say. I'm popping into the hospital, getting the thing yanked out, home for a late lunch mood. I was casual as. Everything was scheduled to start at 9.30 but it was a busy day at the hospital. Nothing happened for hours. I had to borrow Joe's jacket because the waiting room was cold and we were waiting a long time. At 11ish maybe, I get called to an room where someone explains they're running late, they get me to do paper work. They explain things. They take my blood pressure, they weigh me. We wait some more. It's a small room not intended for MRIs but they use what they've got. There are four clinicians inside. Joe is in one corner on a chair. I am told to lie on the bed. A radiographer give me local anaesthetic then pushes a wire into my breast via a needle. It's tricky. The wire leads the surgeon to the cancer. My cancer is difficult to get to through my breast's dense white tissue. The wire may be too flimsy. The needle is also white so it's difficult to see on the MRI. But I see the cancer, and I see the tip of the needle trying to push through. Then the radiographer has to pull the needle out while leaving the wire. She thinks she might need to do it again but it works. I have an actual wire sticking out of me. She tapes it down. She draws a big x on me with a vivid pen. X marks the spot. Then we go to another room and I have another mammogram. The machine where it all started. This one to check the wire is in the right place. It is. More waiting. I am starting to feel sick. A headache and a bit out of it. Maybe it's just the hospital. I meet the anaesthetist and ask her could the local make me feel sick, she thought not, but when I said I hadn't eaten or drunk since midnight, she gave me a glass of water and a lemonade ice block. It helps a bit. More paperwork. The same questions over and over. Waiting again and then I have to take a pregnancy test (all girls and women from 11 to 60 have to do this). Then I am put into another room under a warming blanket because it helps with recovery. More paper work. More waiting. I overheat so they turn the warming blanket off. The surgeon, who I have met several times now, comes into chat. A line is put in my hand. It will be for the general anaesthetic and for the pain relief. I am about to be wheeled into the surgery, Joe who has been with me kisses me and we go. Everyone, this is Maria, the nurse says as we go into the operating theatre. I say hello. They arrange me and the gown so they can access the breast during surgery. They connect a tube to the line. You'll start drifting off soon someone says. Fat chance, I think, I'm still perfectly awake. Then I am awake and someone's saying it's all done. More tests I think then wheeled to a recovery room and Joe comes and I still think for quite a long time, that I will be going home. But I am a bit off and if I move the breast is very sore, and the nurses say we will have to make a call soon as this room is closing at 6.30 and then they say you might need to reconcile with staying and I think yes, this pain is not a pain to take home. Joe says goodbye. I am wheeled into a room in a ward and curtains are drawn around me. My cubicle has a window and I am looking out on buildings and hills. I don't know if I can sleep. Nurses come in and take my blood pressure and temperature. I put on my post surgery bra and it makes everything more comfortable. I wake at 5.30 cold and I can move without pain and go to the loo and ask for a blanket but I am so much better and the pain is more a dull ache than the whamming kind of pain. I have to drink lots of water to get my blood pressure up. I eat breakfast. Joe collects me. At home there are more flowers, and Maggie on her first day of having no study, no exam, no school ever before is just getting out of bed. Get up get up! Freedom we yell at her. She tells us she'd like to clean windows on high buildings with an abseil. We are parents and take it seriously and talk about courses and certificates. Why, she says, does there have to be certificates for everything? Why can't they just send me up there? Are we taking this too seriously, I ask. And it's just that maybe you want to do this once? Yes, she nods laughing. I have Life360 on my phone and it is connected to Lexie's phone. She's in Bangkok. I can see where is and has been on a map. I message her hi, and say the operation went fine, but I had to stay the night in the hospital. That I hope she's having a blast. She writes back Cheers and nothing else. But I discover her host family owns a restaurant and went from the airport to the restaurant and Lexie loves food especially Thai food. My emissary though she would deny it. Who wants not much to do with us, who thinks it just a fluke she is ours. She is fierce and funny. Who once clung like a baby monkey around my neck, who is loving and dramatic, social and charming and rather pretty. But she's a teenager and she's Lexie, and her current job is to hide all of that. Yesterday I had the MRI. One of my sisters sends me a video of the very first MRI. The man who invented it built himself a chamber and climbed into it and he was locked into it. He didn't know if he'd have a cardiac arrest or not. It reminded me of the chamber a trapped man builds himself on a never changing house in Elizabeth Knox's Mortal Fire. He builds it to try and escape. I wonder if Knox was thinking of MRI machines. I have been warned about the noise. I am lying on my front and rolled into the chamber and there's a fan blowing and when the scans are happening there is continuous banging noise for one minute, then three minutes, then six minutes. I don't know if it's real or not but I feel like there are different waves of the banging, a jump in the rhythm where I feel one cycle is taking over from the other. I start putting words into it. I change the words. The wind blows on me. My head feels odd and hot. Can I feel the magnetic force? Is that possible? The internet says no. I buy a post-surgery bra. I visit my mother. I have a headache and today read that when you have contrast dye injected for an MRI that can cause mild headaches and nausea. My operation is on the 22nd of November. There's pink peonies on our coffee table in a green vase. They could not be more pink, more full of life. Wednesday 4th October I go for my two yearly mammogram. There is a very friendly receptionist unfazed by me being flustered and a bit late. There is a small changing cubicle, and a pile of gowns. Some in beautiful Pasifika florals, some in bright pinks and blues. There is a machine with two big plates and dials and buttons. The radiographer or is it the nurse gets you to stand in a certain spot, this foot here, this arm above your head, lean forward. Rest your head here. She arranges your breast just so. Gently pulls and pushes it into place. Then the plates come together and squash your breast flat so they can take the x rays. Three photos for each breast. Tuesday 10th October I get a message to call a number to arrange a follow up to the mammogram. That means the x rays have picked up something they need to look at closer. I am not too bothered. Two years ago I got a call back and had a panicked day or two worrying and thinking the worst. Back then Joe and I drove over the hill to the Breast Screening rooms near the Hutt Hospital. My breasts, I learn, are dense, meaning it’s hard to see what’s going on. On closer inspection the something they saw in the mammograms were harmless areas of calcifications. We go home smiling. This time there's an appointment available tomorrow so I take it. Wednesday 11th October I figure it’s something similar this time and drive over the hill by myself. All the staff at the clinic are friendly. All the staff are women. This is women’s business, profound women's business. I am passed between female nurses and female doctors and female radiographers. All so careful with me, so filled with care. I am told there is an area they are interested in in my left breast. There is a lot of taking off my bra and shirt and putting on a gown. Each time I enter a room for a procedure I am asked my full name and date of birth. Each time I am asked which breast is being looked at. It’s probably to check my understanding, check my consent, but I think of the legend of the man who had the wrong leg amputated. First they do another mammogram on my left breast from different angles to the one last week. The arms, and legs and leaning and jostling of the breast all over again. My cheek against the cool machine. The plates coming together. I hold still. They take their photos. Then back into my clothes. A short wait. Next they do an ultrasound where they spread warm gel on my breast and pass a sensor over it like when they check babies in your womb. You can watch the whole thing on the screen. 'You have very busy breasts,' the doctor says. 'It’s hard to get the right images.' She gets them though. There’s a star shape she shows me. I see it. 'That’s something,' she says. 'We’re going to need a biopsy. I’ll send you to the nurse to explain.' I get back into my clothes and go to an office and the nurse explains that the star shape is either a radial scar, something common in the breast or a cancer. They can look the same and the biopsy tells them which. And whichever it is, I’ll need an operation to remove it, because the radial scar can hide other things going on. 'If it’s a cancer,' she tells me, 'it’s disappointing but by no means a disaster.' I ask questions. I sign more consent forms. I’ll probably get the results in two days. Another trip over the hill. Imagine if I didn’t have a car. Imagine if my work wasn’t flexible. Imagine if I was looking after little kids by myself. For me it’s annoying but not really problematic. Back into a changing cubicle and into the gown for the biopsy. They numb my breast skin with something that stains it bright pink. Then an injection with the anesthetic. Then the biopsy needle. I can feel it but it’s not painful and I can watch it on the same screen as before. When the needle is in the right position the doctor takes the first sample, a bit of a jolt, a clunk, like getting your ears pierced. Painless. Odd. The doctor takes five samples, she leaves a tiny metal marker and a tiny ribbon so that the surgeon can find the area again. She shows me the samples floating in a test tube. Strings of something slightly yellow. I am shuffled to another room for a final mammogram that shows the markers are in the right place. I’m sent on my way. They have offered me tea and biscuits during the day. They’ve checked I‘m not panicking, they've asked if my heart is racing but I feel fine. I drive home. I text Joe. I haven’t told anyone else. Why worry them? When Joe gets home we agree it’s unlikely to be cancer. We're optimistic types. I look up pictures of radial scars. Joe will take Friday off and come with me.I mean it is a thing, it could possibly be bad news. I’m pretty unworried though. I go to sleep easily. Sometime in the night I am suddenly wide awake and certain it is cancer. I lie thinking about what I saw in the test tube. There was a lot of it. This means it is big. I know I don’t really know that but I think it all the same. I think about the star shape amongst all the busy-ness. I re-interpret everything any staff member told me and decide they are trying to tell me it is cancer without telling me it is cancer. Everything is a code. I think about my breast and what might be in there. I think about how cancer grows. The cells splitting. I read a book to distract myself. Thursday 12th October In the morning the worry has shrunk again. My friend Riffka moved to the village a few months ago. We have known each other for decades. Weaving in and out of each other’s lives, we share feminism, she writes and makes art and is a musician. We talk words and womanhood. She’s very dear to me. Since she moved we have kept meaning to hang out. Is today the day? she texts. I’m between contracts. Today’s perfect I text back. I go to visit her in her new house which turns 100 years old next year. For a long time Riffka's not been that well. It’s not the kind of suffering that’s visible. Being unwell means she’s lost a lot of weight and people give her compliments. You're looking so good. She knows it’s because she’s skinnier than she used to be. We rage. We talk about a higher spirit. Riffka thinks she believes in one but it’s the wrong words. I say I believe in the earth and in bodies. Riffka says yes that's what I mean about the wrong words. We talk about maybe the higher spirit being in our bodies, in the earth. We eat cheese and crackers and some kind of pesto on her doorstep where we can see a strip of ocean through trees. It's kereru season. We eat tart black olives and throw the pips into the garden. ‘It might be the time to think about the divine feminine,’ says Riffka. ‘I’ve always cringed at the goddess thing, but maybe it’s the right time. Maybe it’s important. The female spirituality thing,’ she says. 'I think maybe my goddess is all the good things." I say. 'All the good people doing good things.' We’re part of nature, we agree. Just another mammal. Our animal bodies are us. Part of the problem is when we try to separate humans from the rest of nature. There is a kind of arrogance in deciding that we are something else. I tell Riffka about the biopsy. She's the only person other than Joe to know about this. I tell her I will be finding out the results tomorrow. I tell her about the night time worry and the daytime pragmatism. ‘Day and night, they’re like two completely different planets,’ she says. It’s true. I often can’t sleep at night and each time I find myself awake it is like I am returning to the same dark garden, to the same patch of quiet. A garden I forget about in daytime. Riffka walks me home and we have another cup of tea. We decide she should stay for dinner. Joe makes most of it and Riffka makes the salad. She re-meets my children. We talk for hours more. This is what makes sense with Riffka and me. A kind of punctuated equilibrium, long periods of stasis interrupted by deep interaction. Maybe this will change with her living nearby. Riffka says this first time of us talking is part of landing in her new home. It’s been a rough road. ‘It’ll be okay,’ we say. ‘It’s going to be a beautiful summer.’ She’s just discovered Anne Clark. If I ever knew about her I’ve forgotten. We listen together to her. She’s an 80s punk performance poet who breathes her words out over experimental electronica. She’s still going strong. How did we miss her? we ask each other. She’s awesome. ‘We should do this,” I say. 'Your music my words, your words. We should try.' I lie awake in the dark garden. I think this might be the last night of me being someone who has not had cancer. This might be the last night before profound changes in my life. This might be the ‘before’ and tomorrow night I may be someone who has cancer. I am not sad or angry or stressed. I am just intensely aware. The night, the sheets, my skin, my breasts. Friday 13th October Joe drives. We drop the kids off to school and appointments. We go on the new expressway and motorways. We talk so hard we miss a turn off. ‘I have,’ I tell Joe, ‘decided to treat all the possible outcomes as alternative plans. It makes me feel more in control.’ Plan A is that it is the radial scar. I have the operation and all is well. Plan B is that it is a small removable cancer. Plan C was only demoted because it's very unlikely, is that it’s nothing at all and I need no operation. Plan X, Y and Z are right down the bottom but all involve the cancer having spread and me writing one magnificent final book before I die. One a diary of my last months and weeks so closely observed, so luminous, it is heralded as a great celebration of life. One a book of exquisite poetry. One a book of political and feminist essays so beautiful and accurately observed the hopeless dinghy of the progressive left sees sense at last and rights its course. I am known, posthumously Joe offers, as the woman who saved women. I decide this book is called This hill to die on. My versions of death are very glamorous. ‘It is surprising that cancer is not more common,’ says Joe as we drive. ‘Explain,’ I say. ‘Cells evolve to divide. They're going to try and divide as often as possible.' says Joe. 'Most life is single cell organisms that control themselves. Multicellular organisms like humans are freaks because our bodies have to take control of the cells . They have to override the cells' tendencies to keep dividing. In cancer the body has just lost control, the cells stop responding to it, and revert to type,' he says. I think about cells dividing and dividing again. The appointment is at 10am. We arrive at 9.58. I know the multidisciplinary clinical team was to meet at 9.30 to discuss results. They run over time but just as I am checking with the receptionist if they have forgotten me I’m called in by the 'disappointing not a disaster' nurse. We’re back in the office and I’m introduced to a specialist doctor. He tells me that they have unfortunately found a small cancer. He tells me the process from here. I ask a lot of questions. He answers them. He leaves. The nurse tells me more things. I ask more questions. She stays with us until I am finished. Until I have asked all the questions I want to. She gives me her card so I can call her and ask more questions. The nurse says the disappointing not a disaster phrase again. I say you said that last time and it’s a good phrase. 'It is a good phrase,' she says. Other things I learn. It is the most common kind of breast cancer. It is slow-growing. They found it early. They know how to treat it. The cancer looked from the ultrasound that it is 12 millimeters but the mammogram showed possible changes up to two centimeters. They need to figure that out. There will be an MRI to get more information and confirm the star shape they found is the only cancer. The MRI makes sure the surgeons have as much information as possible. They do not expect the MRI to find the cancer has spread. I hear the specialist’s voice saying that, and lock in my memory so I can recall it. His intonation. His slow careful way of saying it. After the MRI there will be the surgery, then radiation therapy every day for three weeks. Five minutes a time, because if you did more than that your skin burns. If the cancer has spread (looks unlikely, not my expectation, says the specialist) it will be a mastectomy and no radiation. The course of radiation is a one time thing. If the cancer comes back in the same breast it will probably be a mastectomy. It is the kind of cancer that feeds on estrogen. After the radiation therapy, I will be on estrogen blocking pills for five years and possibly for five years after that. The chances of it coming back are only slightly more than if I had had no cancer. I ask "why, if it feeds on estrogen, are women more likely to get cancer as they get older and their estrogen has dropped?' ‘We don’t know,’ says the nurse. ‘There’s a lot we don’t know.’ ‘But you’re a woman' she says. 'Even when your estrogen goes down you’re always going to be a woman. That’s never going to change and you keep producing estrogen. Even the lower levels of estrogen will feed the cancer. 'Suppressing estrogen can reduce the risk of the cancer coming back. It’s negotiable,’ she says. ‘If you hate the effects of the pill, we'll just talk about it.’ We discuss times, and appointments, and which hospitals do which things: the logistics of it all. I feel fine about it. I wonder if I will feel shock later. Right now I feel grateful that the screening picked it up. I feel grateful that the logistics will be annoying to me but not debilitating. If I am not working in the city it will be a 90 minute commute each day to the city hospital but we will be okay, we have a car, we can afford public transport. I am not doing the kind of contracts where losing a bit of work time means not enough money for food, or it means being sacked or losing my shift. For some, on the edges of things, occupying that space of just enough to get by, this disappointing diagnosis would be a disaster. We’re done. Joe and I find a café and hot food. I try the words out inside my head. I say I have a small cancer in my left breast. I am not saying I have Cancer, roaring with its capital C, which feels big and amorphous and life changing, which sounds as if my body is beholden to this new thing forever. which sounds incurable and deadly and sad. Instead I am saying, the words, still so new, that I have a small breast cancer. Something discrete and singular. Something annoying that can be plucked from me and removed. It’s likely true and it's manageable. I keep thinking about how, at every step, the thing I don’t want to happen has happened. The call back from the regular mammogram, the ultrasound prompting the biopsy, the biopsy showing the cancer. We humans think in patterns. I have to remind myself that it is not a trajectory. This is not a cascading series of events each triggering the next bad thing. The MRI will probably find nothing. That is my expectation says the specialist in my head. The regular screening is doing its job. It found an early stage cancer that can be removed. I want to tell someone else. I need to announce it so I am glad Riffka knows. I text her. She writes back. Oh dear Maria. Holy Moly. So so good you found it early. Cup of tea soon eh? Thanks love I write back. Yay for the power of feminism fighting for breast screening! The goddess has just saved my life yo! Joe and I look in op shops. We look at nice pottery in Japan Mart. I love some small bowls with blue and brown stripes together. I compose a text to my family and when we get home I send it. I have just got the results of a biopsy that showed a small cancer in my breast. I explain it’s been caught early, it’s the common kind. It’s treatable. No phone calls I say. Don’t panic I say. My siblings all write back nice messages. And I had a funny feeling this might be going on says one sister. Four nights ago I dreamt I had breast cancer says the other. My older daughter arrives home. I tell her. It’s fine I say. They can get rid of it. While I am telling her my Mum arrives at the door. When she’d got the news she’d jumped in the car and driven for most of an hour to come to me. ‘It’s very lovely but you didn’t need to come,’ I say. ''I'm fine. ‘ I know, I know’ she says. ‘But you would have come if it was one of your daughters’. My other daughter arrives home. I tell her. I want my daughters to know cancer can be a small thing, and it can be taken away. Later: ‘Is plan E it's a small cancer but I blog about it all?’ I wonder aloud to Joe. ‘Is it ghoulish to blog about it? It doesn’t feel like suffering, it's worrying and interesting but it's not grief and it's not suffering. But is it suffering porn?’ ‘Not if you don’t let it be,’ says Joe. ‘I don’t want this to be a dramatic story,’ I say. ‘Narrative-wise, I want this to be a bit boring. Doctors find and successfully remove a cancerous growth, and so on and so on,’ I say. But I want to write about it because it’s mine. It brings me to my animal body. I am my body. Biology and evolution are wonders to me. More complex and delicate and profound than any religion. The body is miraculous and mundane. It's all body. Mind, brain, soul, body are all held in the body. Body too are my breasts that fed my babies, is my estrogen, are my cells: the ones that know when to stop dividing, the ones that don’t. Public Service Announcement All New Zealand women between 45 and 69 can sign up to free mammograms. If you've moved around a bit you might not be in the system and might have missed reminders. It really might save your life. I think it's very likely that it just saved mine. 
In favour of Helen Lehndorf's A Forager's Life
In Wellington, in the 1990s there was a time when every public meeting would be attended by two or three people who would wait until question time, shoot their hands up, and proceed to talk about the problem of over population. It didn’t matter if it was the gulf war, or native forests or violence against women, underlying all those problems was over population. And when told that they must ask a question, not just make a prepared speech, they would say Ahem my question is does the speaker believe that underlying the problem at hand is the issue of overpopulation, as evidenced by etc etc. In this view of the world the problem is people. And as climate breakdown has became more widely understood there are now even more groups who view people entirely as a problem. Some go further and advocate voluntary extinctionism. The planet is better off without us, we caused the problem, they argue, let’s go, let’s stop breeding, let’s die out. The wilderness will return and the great balance of nature will be restored. Helen Lehndorf is not one of those people. Helen Lehndorf in life and in this beautiful new book A forager’s life does not pit planet against people, plants versus us: capitalist, nihilistic zombies. Rather Helen is wise enough to know that communities, that people, problematic, flawed, culpable as we are, are also our only hope. We can not and should not wish ourselves away. Helen is humane, a humanist, a wilderness lover, a wasteland lover, a cook, an eater, a community builder, a daughter, friend, lover and mother. This book traverses her life, and it’s a life filled with community. Helen’s ecosystem is of people and plants, food, family, friends. She doesn’t choose sides but gathers all of it to her. The weeds, the friends, the families, the compost heap, the wild herbs, the conversation. She forages the lots. The commons are the community are the commons. When we read this book we look at the world with Helen’s eyes. Brown owl, her Mum called her, watching her brown-eyed daughter watching the world. We are with Helen when she’s four years old bursting with the importance of a new magnifying glass, looking intently through it at leaves and ladybirds and the hairs on her arm. We’re with her as an adult looking through a coveted hag stone, a stone with a perfect hole created by moving water, looking at how it frames the world in new ways. We’re looking with her eyes and everywhere we turn there is community. Helen’s family of origin: a father who took her hunting, her soup-making mother, her adventurous brother; Neighbourhoods that shared anything going spare; older witchy punk women who kept an eye on baby punk Helen and her friends, who taught them feminism over cups of glamorous herbal tea; her idealistic university friends with whom she spent hours talking through life’s big questions; her husband Fraser and eventually her children, her permaculture group, the women she writes with; other mums she forms a group with after advertising, after leaving posters around town pleading, talk to me about justice, let’s grow food, let’s drink tea--a call into the wilderness of suburban Palmerston North. Helen’s living off the land is no Thoreau retreat into the wild woods (actually not that far from his Mum’s house who allegedly brought him sandwiches). This is not spurning one’s own kind. Rather it is choosing to turn more determinedly and more wholeheartedly towards both the land and towards the people who can help her navigate it. Helen never loses sight of the fact that the same systems that have devastated the environment have also uprooted and disenfranchised communities. Helen writes here of losing a favourite foraging spot to development, but she is, as always, talking about something bigger.. My side was the guerrilla-gardening side, the seed-bombing side, the community side, the urban foraging, plant-medicine-making, heritage-variety-saving-side. My side cared about old trees. Too often it felt like my side was losing. It was hard to look at the devastation. This book reminds us that we can still choose sides. We can choose the systems that cause environmental and community devastation. We can choose the cynicism of voluntary extinctionism. Or we can choose as Helen has, the hope and possibility of foraging, of community, of radical reciprocity. I’d like to end with Helen’s own words of an occasion, such as this, in which a momentary community is formed, to celebrate, with people who have never met in quite this configuration before. Because to get through these times, whatever these times are, whatever getting though is, we need to be opportunistic, we need to seek what nourishment we can, we need to find and forage each other. Helen thank you for this book, beautifully written, compelling and about the stuff that matters now more than ever. The dining table was laden with colourful potluck dishes. When it was time to eat I stood on the back porch and rang a loud dinner bell. Our friends lined up in a queue that spiralled out of the kitchen, through the laundry and into the garden. The site of this long dinner line full of beloved friends holding empty plates to be filled from our collective efforts made me happier than I felt in years. Potluck food, friends strumming guitars around the fire, lying on picnic blankets among the romping weeds. Humble, but to me a kind of heaven. Buy A forager's life online or it's absolutely everywhere in the bookshops. It's Sunday again. One week later. There are 782 community cases now. New infections have dropped. Auckland, where almost all the cases are is a level 4 lockdown. The rest of the country is at level 3. During the first outbreak in New Zealand, last year, before there were mass visualisations and multiple types of graphs I started putting the numbers in a spreadsheet and creating my own line graphs. New cases, total cases, deaths. It was a way of digesting the information, the 1pm briefings, and feeling a little bit in control. When we got to see family again, I discovered my brother had done exactly the same things. Plotting the numbers creating the graphs. Even though graphs are everywhere now I still have been doing my own. A weird kind of meditation, like learning poetry off by heart, bringing the numbers closer. One woman died of Covid yesterday.  The day before yesterday a man grabbed a knife in an Auckland supermarket and attacked people around him. He was openly supporting ISIS type ideology, threatening terrorism and he was under constant surveillance, within 60 seconds of the attack he was killed by police. 7 people were injured. The government knew he was a threat but could do nothing.
Joe Biden, US president, has been pulling US troops out of Afghanisatan after nearly 20 years. Taliban have taken over. Just yesterday they say they overcame the last region of resistance. There's been a rush to get out any non-Afghanis, anyone who can leave. The Taliban are saying they will respect women's and girls' right so long as they comply with Shariah law. But the women are frightened. The women judges are frightened because men they put in prison have been released and are looking for them. The women are frightened that once again the girls will not be allowed to go to school and any women leaving her house will need to be in full burka and accompanied by a man. Women staged a protest yesterday, demanding the Taliban recognises women's rights. It dispersed quickly when the Taliban came to the protest and fired their guns into the air. We're all watching a Netflix series called Turning point which looks at 9/11, but lots of the history of how it got to that point as well, and lots of the thinking by US leaders. Alex stays and watches the programme with us, which is interesting because she is often disdainful of what we watch. Something has sparked her with this one. She spends hours talking to her friends online and laughing. She likes lockdown school because it's more systematic, there's a list of things to do. Her school is loose and liberal and allows for plenty of freedom but my girl wants structure and tasks and homework. She is currently writing a story for school which must be set in a made up land and having a good time, discovering apps for world building and character development. Thinking about a sort of Antarctica 500,000 years hence I think , and the problems of continental drift, and what the people would wear, and how they would talk. In just a few days it will be 20 years since 9/11 and it was just a few days after that that US went into Afghanistan. I was working at the National Library and that day, the day of that terrorism the large TV was brought into the foyer and turned on, an event usually reserved only for major rugby games. We watched over and over the planes flying into the towers, and the buildings collapsing, and the smoke vast and billowing, moving like a dragon down the street seeming to chase the masses of people who were running and screaming like some cheesy disaster movie. There have been 216 million recorded cases of Covid now around the world, and four and a half million deaths.
We're in the lounge at home. Alex has gone to bed. Joe is looking at his phone and Maggie is reading a book. She is unwittingly channelling the 80s. Dyed black hair and a black jacket with patches safety pinned to it and chains around her neck including an old metal key. Old blue jeans ripped across both knees. It's warm and quiet. It is funny how writing has a sound. If I am to dive into the sound of typing, oh I dunno, the closest I can think of, is a very quiet, very scatty group of horses. Kind of determined when they're moving but sporadic. it's Sunday night and we're in lockdown again. Two Tuesdays ago there was a community case and that midnight the whole country went into Level 4 lockdown. No school or work. Just supermarkets and chemists and going out for the daily walks. Maggie walked 12 kilometres today and saw various people on the way. There was a furore in the media especially overseas about going into lockdown over one case. It was only 12 days ago and now it's 453 cases. 15 in Wellington and the rest in Auckland. A Covid-19 outbreak in Fiji started in April, there's been 45,000 cases of since, 19000 of them active. The total population is 903,000 and there have been 530 deaths. There are news reports on many days of another village it has reached. On this coming Tuesday everyone south of Auckland is moving to level 3, which doesn't mean much difference except the children of essential workers can go back to school and a few more shops open. Funerals and weddings can happen but only with 10 people or less. Auckland and north stays at level 4. Auckland and north will be an cut off because no one can move between levels. Vaccinations are being rolled out. Two million people have had at least one dose. One million have had two doses and are fully vaccinated. Joe has had one shot. The kids and I get our first in a coupe of weeks. There's talk of a possible need for booster shots. The delta variant is worse than the one before. More contagious, deadlier. There are groups of people who suffer long Covid where the effects are lasting for months and months and everything has changed for these people, fatigue and pain and brain fog. An epidemiologist, Michael Baker said we can't expect to go back to Level 1 as we know it. I'm the only one left up now. I can't sleep at night and can't wake early in the morning. A week or so ago there were a million recorded deaths from Covid-19. Yesterday, president of the United States, Donald Trump and his wife, Melania Trump, announced they had positive tests. Donald Trump is 74 and mildly obese making him at risk for Covid complications. He tweeted the announcement. Iti s being reported as a mild case. A few days ago he had the first leaders debate with Joe Biden, I didn't watch it, but apparently a total debarcle, and I sense a feeling from everyone, somehow irrelevant. That the most powerful role in the world is being fought over by old white men. The leaders stood apart and did not shake hands but they were in the same room. Biden has tested negative but it may be too early to tell. The presidential elections for the US are on November 3rd. At the debate Trump did not condemn white supremacist groups, telling the Proud Boys to stand by. He's tried to claim he did not know who they were since.
Trump is in quarantine and he won't be able to organise and attend his mass style rallies. He's cancelled all his outings. Just now an announcement that he's just flown by helicopter to a military hospital, Walter Reid Medical Centre. He's taking experimental medication. Joe Biden's campaign has taken down all disparaging comments about Trump. He's been snarky about Biden wearing masks and has had many many rallies and meetings where rejecting masks is part of the culture of his followers, oppressive nonsense. There's a few theories floating around about what could happen:
At the same time, the death of US Supreme Court judge Ruth Bader Ginsberg means there's a spot on the Supreme Court. Trump has nominated an anti-abortionist, Amy Coney Barrett to take the place. A power-grab in that if it goes ahead, will happen weeks before the election, and a way to stack the Court with pro-Republicans. People are worried that it set the scene for overturning Roe vs Wade, which said women could choose an abortion. Apparently that's the phrase people are using about Covid now. Living alongside Covid. Today WHO announced a record number of new world cases in a day: 307,930.
New Zealand had a cluster starting with four people a month ago. Now some scientists are saying it is more accurately described as an outbreak. We now have 96 active cases in NZ, People coming in at the border are put in managed isolation for two weeks and tested on day 3 and day 12, and sent to quarantine if they're positive. The outbreak is in the community, where transmission is from person to person. 37 cases are in managed isolation and 57 are community cases. One of the places there was an outbreak was a Christian church in Auckland where much of the congregation didn't believe in Covid, didn't tell people where thy'd been, and wouldn't get tested. In the last few days a woman has tested positive went to a Les Mills gym and went to three classes while she was unknowingly infectious. There are anti-lockdown protests happening in Auckland in breach of a requirement of no gatherings of more than 10 people. Jami-Lee Ross, formerly of National who accused leader Simon Bridges of corruption and turns out to be a predatory creep has started the Advance New Zealand party and spoke to the rally. The electioneering is in full swing, the election will be on October 17. Judith Collins is delighting in being cruel, her husband is on social media being awful about Jacinda Ardern. Collins brushes it off. We had 101 days with no new community infections in New Zealand. Our last new infection was 22nd May 2020, On 8 June, the last active case was declared recovered and at midnight we moved into Level 1, which meant no restrictions on gatherings, everything back to normal, the shops opened back up, restrictions were lifted, students went back to school. Border restrictions did stay in place. Only returning New Zealand citizens and a few exceptions have been allowed in. All arrivals go into quarantine for two weeks .People got tested on day four and twelve of their quarantine, and must test negative to be able to leave quarantine. At first it was self-isolation but then it was quarantine facilities, mostly large hotels. A few people escaped. Some people will have to pay for the quarantine, causing outrage among ex-pats
Worldwide, outside our border, the virus has still been raging. Worse than ever. For 101 days our cafes and bars open and noisy, our schools full, public transport crowded. But worldwide on 22nd of May there were 5,252, 237 cases recorded of Covid-19 and 344,446 deaths. 101 days later, on 11th August there were 20,489,472 cases and 743,417 deaths. Huge and deadly outbreaks in Australia and the United States. Latin America became a new hotspot for infection. News reports like Victoria's deadliest day yet. On 17 July, the New Zealand Herald reported that the US had broken its daily record of new cases six times in a month, including that day where more than 75,000 new cases were recorded. On 30 July, India recorded a daily record of more than 50,000. More than a million cases in Africa, Over the last week the Director General of Health, and the government amped up warnings saying it was only a matter of time before there would be another community outbreak and bam, on Tuesday just gone, 11th August, four cases of community transmission were announced. That night the PM announced Auckland would go into level 3 (schools closed, non-essential workplaces closed, social distances no gatherings of more than 10). and the rest of New Zealand to level 2 (maintain social distancing, no gatherings of more than 100). Everyone advised to wear masks. They have been contact tracing and testing like mad.23,000 test carried out in a single day. Since Tuesday another 33 community transmissions have been found. President Trump's brother is sick but they're not saying what with yet. Russia is deploying a vaccine that scientists in other countries are saying is not safe. There's a fear a bad vaccine in another country will put people off using one here. It's been really cold the last few days. Joe and I both grumpy and warmth deprived. |
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