August 2nd // Southern Hemisphere Longzo Day
CK asked me what my plans for the day were and I gave a very abridged answer because we only had a little bit of free zoom minutes left, and I forgot maybe every detail about our day’s plan anyway. So! Here were / are my plans for the day:
We intended on getting up at 6:45am to watch the sunrise for 7:15am over the bay our van is parked beside, at Island View reserve in Whangamata. But we woke to the noise of very heavy rain and wind gusts that shook the van we live in, so decided to snooze for another hour until our Palz Zoom.
Then I got to see our friendseses amazing faces on zoom which made my heart very happy. This is largely the only birthday plan I had that I followed through with approximately on time and I’m super pleased about it.
For the day I had planned on either: going kayaking to Whenuakura (the english colonialist calls it Donut Island, bc it’s a ring-shaped tip of a very extinct volcano crater) which is about 600m from the shore so a relatively handy trip for someone whose gammy* back is allergic to kayaks, or if not that then I’d do a handy lil trek through Wentworth Valley to gawp at two celebrated pretty waterfalls.
We did neither of these things because it was stormy as all heck out and multiple weather warnings were issued later in the day. One of these was for gales and the other for ‘squalls’ which me and Mark had a nice time trying to guess the definition of inside our van nest, we’re still not one hundy percent sure that we know. There was some mega heavy hale which sounded even more world-ending than the rain (squall? dat u?) and shortly after that when the rain came back with its reassuring endlessness, I drew a tarot card for the day and got The Sun. I am the sun.
Then I fell asleep in the middle of the day for three whole hours, which I’m still calling a nap. It was class.
It felt like the day itself called in sick, which was the perfect thing. I will put an expectation on myself to do something ~significant~ without being able to hear myself think about what I want so much of the time and I am grateful for an external source completely halting that automatic process. I got to talk to my great friends and have a huge snooze and it was the dream scenario.
It mildly concerns me that I’m so exhausted chronically, it feels like shades of fatigue but it’s so subtle that it’s almost sub-perceptual, it feels tricky to really notice it clearly, something you have to be not fatigued to do. I know it makes sense that being in a new place while living in a van in the wintertime and constantly moving around as well as planning, deciding, figuring and focusing are inherently tiring activities, but it feels like it’s an unusual amount of tiredness still. A tricky thing to figure out when either long-covid or depression could be triggers that I can’t determine because they’re not diagnosable as causes, and ocd brain tells me I’m over-blowing things while at the same time not letting me stop chronically worrying. Also, everyone’s very tired all the time, so it feels like it doesn’t matter. But it really does matter and I wish it could be different for all of us.
My main regret is that by falling asleep I didn’t get to spend so much time with Mark on my birthday. The first artwork I’ve put up inside this van is the card he gave me.
We drove our hermit shell house into Whangamata town centre (v small, mainly just a street of seaside town shops largely all closed up during the off-season. one of the bars we looked up was called ‘Whangamata Summer Bar’ and it is marked on the maps as ‘temporarily closed’) and we got ingredients needed for van dinner, I also cashed in the 6 blips I won on weird NZ scratchers (€3.33 under the NZD-EUR exchange rate at time of writing) at the shop I bought it in. I mentioned to the clerk that I was saving my winnings for some games of pool and she seemed authentically delighted that it was my birthday. She is the only person in this country I mentioned my birthday to, which felt exactly correct. The Leo sun shines on you, scratcher clerk.
We played one game of pool very badly in an incredibly empty sports bar then bounced back to our parking spot at Island View reserve freedom camping. Mark cooked an incredibly tasty van curry and I started typing the words you’re reading now (hi!). After that I spoke to both my parents on the phone individually for about an hour each, which was nice to try to do.
The full moon in Aquarius during the Leo sun was a primo gift from the universe. Thank you, the universe!
We slept early even though I had already slept for three fucking hours in the middle of the day, and I slept really well even though it was cold as fuck outside. The tips of our noses get really cold in this van at night, which is a cute but as yet solutionless problem.
Thursday morning: suprise! It’s still my birthday in other parts of the world! Timezones are the gift that keep on giving. What the fuck is time anyway! It keeps giving me a bad time when I try to think about it.
I woke up and felt truly relaxed for the first time in a while. I tried to spend time messaging people and then made us tea + van porridge when Mark woke. It is less stormy this morning.
When I had a moment to myself I felt the impulse to draw my birthday tarot spread, while it was still August 2nd in parts of the world that are of great significance to me. I did the five-card star spread and The Sun was the root. I am loving awareness.
I will add more about infinitely more interesting days I’ve had here soon but not now because I want to go walk on the beach with Mark, and marvel at Whenuakura from afar. We will at some point bop out to it, a gift to our future selves.
*gammy twice auto-corrected to Tammy here; a strong NZ name
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