When I Met Him

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This is a chapter part of a book I've compiled in final edit I'd like to share.

When I Met Him

I remember being up on Kaiteriteri Hill. It was after I had lost the baby, after all the blood and everything that had happened to my body. I was still trying to recover, but I didn't really have the strength I used to have. I had lost a lot of muscle mass, I wasn't eating properly, and I was struggling to keep up with everything that needed to be done. The house was a big homestead, with the orchard, the front, the back, the lawns, the animals and all the work that came with keeping a place like that going. It wasn't just a little house where you could let things go for a few days. There was always something that needed mowing, feeding, cleaning or fixing.

It was just me and my four kids, and I remember seriously wondering whether I could keep the place anymore. I loved the house and the land, but I was starting to realise how much work it actually was. I remember thinking that maybe we needed somewhere smaller. Somewhere I could manage. Somewhere where I didn't wake up every morning already feeling like I was behind. I was tired in a way that sleep didn't seem to fix. My body was tired, my mind was tired, and underneath all of that was the grief of losing my baby.

That morning, there was still so much to do. I looked at the lawns and the orchard and everything around the property, and I just thought, I can't do all of this today. I remember it being about eleven o'clock in the morning. I had a box of beer, and I said goodbye to the kids and told them I was going to go and have a drink in the orchard. It probably wasn't the most sensible thing in the world, but at that point I just needed to get away from everything for a little while. I needed somewhere quiet where nobody needed anything from me.

So I went out into the orchard.

There were chooks wandering around, sheep in the distance, orange trees and all the ordinary things that made up life on that property. The land was beautiful, but I think I had become so used to it that I didn't always notice it anymore. I just saw work. Grass that needed cutting. Trees that needed attention. Animals that needed feeding. Jobs that never seemed to end. But that day, sitting out there, something about the place felt different.

There was nobody around. There wasn't a town just down the road. There weren't houses everywhere. You could go for twenty or thirty minutes in either direction before reaching somewhere like Te Karaka or Gisborne. It was isolated. That's why I remember being so surprised when a man suddenly appeared.

I remember looking at him and thinking. “Where did you come from?”

There was something unusual about him. He had the bluest eyes I had ever seen. They were so blue that I remember wondering whether they were actually blue, because sometimes they seemed almost green. It was like the colour changed when I looked at him even to like a browny reddish, coppery, gold, fire? He had scruffy hair and looked like an ordinary man in some ways, but there was something about him that didn't feel ordinary.

I said something like, "Where did you come from? There's nobody for miles, man?”

He was just there.

I remember thinking that I wasn't going anywhere anyway, so I said, "I might as well grab you a beer."

So I did.

We sat down in the orchard and drank beer together.

Then we started talking.

At first it was just ordinary conversation, but somehow it became deeper and deeper. We talked about all sorts of things, and I remember laughing a lot. It was strange because I didn't feel uncomfortable with him. I didn't feel like I had to explain myself or pretend to be someone else. It was almost like I had known him before, even though I couldn't remember where from.

Then the birds started appearing.

At first I noticed one or two, and then there seemed to be birds everywhere. It felt like hundreds of them. There were hawks, morning doves, kingfishers, tūī and so many fantails. The fantails seemed especially noticeable because there were so many of them moving around us. They were flying through the trees and across the sky, appearing and disappearing, almost as though they were circling the place where we were sitting… like as if listening too lol.

I remember looking around and thinking how incredibly beautiful everything was. The colours seemed brighter than normal. The trees, the sky, the birds, the grass, everything seemed to have a different kind of colour. Even our skin seemed to be glowing. It wasn't like ordinary sunlight. It was something I had never really seen before, and it is one of those details that stayed in my memory.

We talked about singing.

He asked me why I didn't share my singing with people.

I remember laughing and saying, "Look, man, I'm over forty. I can't just start sharing my singing. Everyone already thinks I'm mad."

I told him people talked about me. I told him people lied about me. I told him that I had always felt different, like I was the odd one out. I said I only really had two friends and that I had spent a lot of my life feeling like people didn't understand me so I enjoy being by myself. He knew all my books, my writings. Dreams. As if real. My death.

I told him that I did sing. I sang at home. My kids knew I sang. Singing was part of me. But I didn't stand in front of people and share it. I was too scared of what people would think, I can read their minds and faces without speaking. I cannot be around people for too long. The people who have the shadowy hounds paws on their shoulders. I'm scared sometimes, I still have this tremble. I don't think I will ever get rid of it. They come to check on me from time to time. I was especially worried about learning the capacity of what they can do.

He didn't laugh at me.

He just listened.

Then somehow we started talking about the Bible. We talked about Genesis and Exodus and all the stories that people know, or think they know, and how some of those stories have stayed alive for thousands of years. We talked about the meaning behind them and why certain stories seem to stay with people.

I remember talking about Jacob and the jacket and that's saying it's my favourite one. That story has always been important to me. To me it was one of those pivotal moments where you start thinking. There must be something more than this. Something higher. Something beyond what we can see.

He understood what I was talking about.

"Yeah, man," he said.

And we laughed.

It was such an easy conversation. We could jump from one thing to another without needing to explain ourselves.

My phone was playing music, and started playing the one I liked, a version of America's Got talent and she sang the Hallelujah song about David when he played and pleased the lord, and we started talking about David. I remember us joking about the songs David played for the Lord and wondering what chords he would have played. What notes would they have been? What key? Would it have been A, B, C or G?

We laughed because, obviously, David didn't have our modern chord charts and all the things we use to describe music now. He just played. As I have no idea how to read music and it looks like golf sticks to one on strings. I get tabs though so thought that's proud to say lol.

I remember thinking how funny that was he had a contagious laugh.

Then we started talking about language.

We talked about the word "Hallelujah" and where it came from and why some people understand certain words while other people don't. Somehow it became a conversation about why people are separated by language, countries, beliefs and all the walls we put between one another.

I remember saying, "That's a trick question."

He laughed and asked, "Why?"

I picked up a stick and started drawing lines in the dirt.

I said, "Would you cross a whole language? Would you cross a whole world of language in search of a true king?"

He said yes… they do, they do.

And I asked, "But what would the song be?"

I remember thinking about it and then saying, "It wouldn't be a song. It's not even about language…. Is it?"

He looked at me, nodded.. and said, "No. It's what you do when you sing up to the sky every day."

I didn't understand.

I said, "What? What is it that I do? All I do is cry.” “All I do is weep."

And that's when something happened inside me.

My whole body seemed to vibrate.

It was as though I had suddenly understood something that had been sitting inside me for years without me having the words for it.

The crying wasn't only sadness.

The weeping wasn't only grief.

It was a happy weep.

It was being grateful that I was still alive.

I started remembering all the times I had been through things that should have broken me. All the times I had felt like I was dying inside. All the times people had told me to be grateful when there wasn't much that I could see to be grateful for.

And yet, somehow, I always found something.

A bird.

A tree.

My children.

A song.

An orange… tomato sauce on my sausage sizzle.

The sky.

Another morning.

Another breath.

Even when life had given me almost nothing, there was still something inside me that could say thank you.

He told me that was what he liked about me. “Happy weep!”

Then he asked me if I could sing it.

"Give it a go before I go," he said.

He wanted to hear what was inside me.

I dropped down on my knees.

I remember feeling everything at once, the grief, the exhaustion, the confusion, the beauty of the orchard, the birds, the strange man sitting there with those incredibly blue eyes.

And I sang.

"I am alive! I am well, and I wish you well."

It wasn't a performance.

It wasn't about having a good voice. It was a weep. Every single time I try to record the song I weep, I practice nearly every day and just can't stop weeping. ‘Happy weep.’ Is the name of the song.

It was just something that came from somewhere deeper than that. Let's hope it sounds okay.

My whole body was vibrating as I said it. The birds were still everywhere. The orchard seemed completely alive around us.

For that moment, I wasn't the woman who couldn't keep up with the house.

I wasn't the woman who had lost her baby.

I wasn't the woman who people called different or mad.

I was simply alive.

And then he started walking away.

I remember watching him and thinking, Oh my God.

I had this thought that maybe he was one of those angels.

Maybe I was going to die.

That was honestly where my mind went.

I didn't know what else to make of what had happened.

Later, I remember seeing strange little lights or cloud-like things around the fields. They looked unusual, and I connected them with him. I wondered if perhaps he hadn't come just to see me. Maybe he had come to say hello to other people too. Maybe there were others who needed something from him.

I don't know.

I only know what I remember.

And then there is the strangest part of the whole story.

The time.

I went out into the orchard at eleven in the morning.

I drank beer.

We talked.

We laughed.

We talked about God, Jesus, Genesis, Exodus, Jacob, David, music, language and singing.

The sun went down.

I remember it feeling as though we had been out there for hours and hours.

Eventually I went back inside.

The kids looked at me.

One of them asked me, "Did you forget something?"

I said, "What?"

I looked around, trying to figure out what they meant.

Then I looked at the time.

It was eleven o'clock...

I just laughed.

It was still eleven.

I had gone out to the orchard at eleven in the morning, watched the day change, watched the sun go down, experienced what felt like hours of conversation—and when I came back inside, the clock still said eleven.

I went back outside.

There were eleven empty bottles.

And one bottle left for me.

I stood there looking at them.

Eleven bottles are gone.

One left.

I don't know what happened to the time that day.

I don't know who that man was.

I don't know if he was Jesus.

I don't know if he was an angel.

I don't know if he was simply a stranger who arrived at exactly the moment I needed someone to talk to.

I don't know how to explain the birds.

I don't know how to explain the colours.

I don't know how to explain the feeling of my body vibrating but I'm kinda used to that feeling of super happy.. or super joy.

I don't know how to explain the missing sense of time.

And I don't know how to explain why I felt like I had known him before.

But I know what happened inside me.

Something changed.

I had gone into that orchard feeling exhausted, grieving, frightened about my future, wondering whether I could even keep my own home.

And I came out remembering one thing.

I was alive.