We are both sitting across from each other, crying on the train. How did we get to this? The ability to love each other so deeply, yet continually leave each other for long, long stretches of time. I don’t know - one foot in front of the other. The giving and the taking, the growing and the breaking. I am in love with you and your land and your family and our dreams. Bits and pieces of them that we are weaving into a most delightful tapestry.

You sat on the bed last night doing your hair, talking wild about how we can finance our life with entereprise - with courage and with an Irish, not Kiwi base.

A long journey stretches out ahead of me and I do long for Ōhau - the river, the forrest, and the way the sun lights up the valley each morning and each evening. These are places where I stand - where my soul is fed - where I know I must be. And, I realise that I can land this call to the wild anywhere - Ireland being a particularly special frontier of wildness, freedom and deep wisdom. I will sit with this liminal space of richness, of your mother country, the loss and disappearance of the same as I fly south for the Winter - as I hunker down to the dark and depths, to fires and children, men and their necessary solitude.

And I will, God willing, raise my eyes to the north again - be pulled by that invisible light to again hold your hand in an Irish summer - speak a few more secret words building a life with you - and then we shall see, we shall see.