Tanya has been cycling weekly in the last month, and a fine Sunday last week tempted Charmaine to go with her to visit two lovely lakes near Ranui. Both have been landscaped and planted creatively with native wetland species. In addition to these two lakes nearby, another treasure in the West is the Twin Stream project […]
PROUD TO BE OLD, PROUD TO BE GAY
October 19, 2014 by Leave a Comment
We’ve seen two wonderful films in the last month: Hip-Hoperation and Pride. HIP-HOPERATION Hip-Hoperation features women and men from 65 to 95, and young Otara people in a top New Zealand hip-hop group. It also shows the relationship growing between young and old, first on the Otara group’s visit to Waiheke and then in Las Vegas, where […]
living in different worlds
September 19, 2014 by Leave a Comment
This month we’ve been living in three vastly different worlds within Aotearoa Read more in the other postings : ..a cooperative community ..a city of contradictions ..an election
Artist in Residence
August 19, 2014 by 2 Comments
We are delighted to be hosting at Earthsong our friend and artist, Nic Moon, from Nelson. She is creating an amazing indoor Earth Forest on the walls of the new Ranui Library currently under construction. Each day we marvel at the different phases of the project, starting from the gathering and mixing of local clays to […]
Atiu Island
August 19, 2014 by 1 Comment
We’ve been lucky to spend a week of our winter on Atiu, which is a small island three-quarters of an hour’s flight north-east from Rarotonga in the southern Cook Island group. It’s a volcanic island 11 million years old, with a central plateau slowly rising from the sea, a raised fossil coral border (makatea), and a […]
Arts on Atiu
August 19, 2014 by Leave a Comment
We discovered amazing artistic talents on Atiu. While chatting to an elderly couple at the local store, Nga and Paiere Mokoroa, we were invited to visit and see Nga’s exquisite heritage tivaivai (a type of patchwork quilt developed in the Cook Islands). We also visited Andrea Eimke, a German woman who set up Atiu Fibre Arts studio […]
People on Atiu
August 19, 2014 by Leave a Comment
We met several interesting locals during our stay. We visited Mata Arai in her coffee plantation, and then her home, where she showed us her hand processing of the beans and served us a pikelets with a brew of freshly ground coffee. Birdman George (George Mateariki) took […]
Matariki …
July 19, 2014 by 1 Comment
Matariki, a time for reflecting on the past and planning for the future, has given us helter-skelter weather in Tamaki Makaurau since the 28th of June. Fogs to help us see old Ranui street signs in new ways, sunny days to encourage the garlic shoots, still mornings to frame spiderwebs, wild storms to drive us inside. We tried to walk at Te Henga […]
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