Joining the "Dots"

Imagine dots as Individual cocoons of information. When you join these cocoons, it creates the potential to create an environment to enhance one’s knowledge or inform. I have learnt that making something visual or using analogies beneficial.

Actioning the above process has been part of my world for as long as I can remember. Whether it be with my studies, projects or crystallising ideas, this formula works for me. It is fun yet challenging because you then need to create a connector between the cocoons so material within can emerge in a fuller expression. Yes, just like a butterfly!

I took this photo when I was at a retreat in Nepal.

Yesterday I worked with father and aunty Rita’s letters and joined the "dots" with his voice recordings undertaken in 2001. Therefore, my endeavours currently are taking all this material and applying the above process.  Part way through I thought, my goodness me I have set myself a task. The back-end work invariably unseen but where the magic can happen.

In the last few weeks a couple of my perceptions have been contradicted. Those perceptions have arisen from a lack of information about father’s parents over time. Secondly, better understanding the history of cross cultural marriages within New Zealand.   

Therefore, writing this manuscript has been an awakening for me on many levels and no doubt will continue to do so. The scholarship of Angela Wanhalla’s ‘Matters of the Heart, A history of Interracial Marriage in New Zealand’ is insightful and beneficial.

Today I added more of fathers recorded voice into my manuscript and chuckled while doing so. We had been discussing his father. Something I could not recall him doing so in any detail. The one and only time I met grandfather Tere, he was an elderly man in the Rawene Hospital in 1961.  I was eleven (11) years old at the time.  

I mentioned to father while recording, that I remember being surprised that his father did not have any tattoos on his arms, like you do. Secondly, I remember thinking he wasn’t very dark, which also surprised me. Next thing father chuckles and says, heck no, but he had a moustache followed up by, no daughter he was quite fair. Once again, [father] chuckled and said, oh daughter, laughed and shook his head at my memories - so off the mark!

So where did this perception come from? I did discuss this with Paul over tea and came to the conclusion I had made the assumption that and his siblings I got to meet, were dark, in my eyes. Bit like the tattoo and the assumptions around that. I am still smiling as I complete this posting :) 

Go well!