#potiki

[bermudianabroad]

...because of being a nothing, a neutral place  -- not land, not sea -- there is freedom on the shore, and rest.   There is freedom to search the nothing, the weed pile, the old wood, the empty shell, the fish skull, searching for the speck, the beginning -- or the end that is the beginning.   Hope and desire can rest there, thoughts and feelings can shift with sand grains being shifted by the water and the wind.

Potiki by Patricia Grace

[bookcoversonly]

Title: Potiki | Author: Patricia Grace | Publisher: Penguin (2020)

[zeeteewizzle-blog]

When your big cousins got your back. #Potiki #OnesieForAOneYearOld

[crowcialist]

Lately I find myself more and more in need of a reminder that, by and large, the point of doing things is doing things, not *having done* things. I got on this track a few weeks ago, reading The Atlantic’s staff reviews of books they read in 2015. Here’s editorial fellow Naomi Sharp:

Reading Moby Dick has become important to me because it requires the patience I worry I’m losing. Melville will pause the narrative to spend 10 pages anthologizing the different categories of whale, and the subcategories of those, at which point it becomes tempting to scan the paragraphs mindlessly and wonder when I’ll get to A Hundred Years of Solitude, or watching Pulp Fiction, or a thousand other things I should have done by now. And then I’ll come across his description of the mealy-mouthed porpoise (“He is of quite a neat and gentleman-like figure”) or of fish without spouts (“I deny their credentials as whales”) and be reminded that the point of reading is, in fact, reading—not having-read.

I’m all too-familiar with what Sharp describes, having tackled Melville’s book for the first time this summer (and fall...). It truly was an exercise in patience, in waiting for a payoff that you’re not even sure is coming. 

But there are so many books on my to-read list that even when I’m reading more immediately rewarding texts, like Patricia Grace’s Potiki (which I’m working through now), I find myself checking how many pages are left, or wondering if I’d like another book on my list even more. I’m a huge critic of people who make broad generalizations about the worthlessness of my generation, but I do think we’ve become bereft of anything resembling an attention span. Or maybe that’s just me.

I need to stop counting how many pages are left and let myself get swept up in stories like I used to. I need to start finding joy in exercising, rather than having-exercised. In writing, instead of having-written.

I’m going to hike this country south-to-north in the spring and summer. I really need to remember to find the joy in hiking, rather than in having-hiked. Otherwise it’s going to be a long five months.

[jadeekins]

The old woman sang of a time gone ahead, and of those already walking ahead of her on the pathway. Her eyes were reddened as though they bled. And her songs, like the pathways, were interweavings of times and places and of all that breathed between earth and sky.

[greeniegurls]

Potiki having korero with his baby cuzzie Atua.

[greeniegurls]

20 April 2012. (by greeniegurl)

My babies kicking back on their new camping chairs. oh and playing outside on a beautiful Australian day.

[greeniegurls]

17th April 2012

It's been a good day. It's my nieces 21st birthday today, man I wish I was back home right now celebrating with the rest of the family. I'm homesick, homesick for my family, for my sisters, nieces and nephews, I'm homesick for a good hearty feed of boilup, for a in ground hangi, so miss been around my family but I have to do what I gotta do, I have my own family now and they are where my top priority lies.

My Taimana spent most of today laid up in bed, she fell ill this morning while having her cup of tea, suddenly she had the highest fever, threw up all over herself and the shivers took over her all in a matter of minutes so I threw hwe into a nice warm bath (to clean the spew off of her) then tucked her back into bed with a movie while the boys and I continued on with the day.

Storm hit this afternoon, that blemin shot up out of nowhere too, thunder n lightning and then the rain, that was nice but I hope it don't stick around too long.

So it's 9pm now and my baby Potiki has just woken up and the lil shite is wide awake.