auckland is abundant!
Hello from the scenic 12-hour train from Auckland to Wellington, where I am finally writing the first blog of the actual trip to New Zealand. Our time here has been packed, so there’s lots to catch up on. We arrived in Auckland on Sunday evening (1/28, or 28/1 as we are quickly getting used to – we had a bit of a visa birthdate snafu due to this switch!) and were promptly greeted by being sprayed with pesticides like little crops (this is not an exaggeration – it was literally misting onto all of us out of the little AC vents on the plane). New Zealand does not play any games with foreign soil, bugs, or seeds hitching a ride into the country.
We had planned to spend our first week in Auckland, staying in a central area so that we could get our phone service, bank accounts, and tax numbers that will enable us to work and live the rest of the time here. We had connected with WWOOFing hosts to stay in the city for a week and help with some building and yard projects. WWOOFing is something I’ve wanted to do since high school, when I read my friend Anna’s blog about spending a summer on a farm in Maine. I was a bit worried that perhaps I had romanticized exchanging largely physical labor for lodging/food, but so far I am loving it! And unlike the working holiday, which is generally only available to people under 30, WWOOFing is something you can do at any age, and I hope I will take advantage of that at different points in my life!
Going into our trip in New Zealand, we had read numerous blogs and guides that essentially said not to bother spending too much time in Auckland. While I guess I can understand this if you’re on a two week vacation and want to prioritize time in New Zealand’s incredible natural wonders, I thought Auckland was an absolutely lovely city. Bordered by the ocean on two sides, a vista of water and a hill or beach from which to view it are never far.
We stayed in the Mt. Eden neighborhood/suburb of Auckland (about a 20 minute bus ride from downtown) with a semi-retired couple and their cat. For me, the theme that kept coming up over and over again was abundance. As soon as you enter their driveway, there are flowers and plums and herbs spreading from every grow-able area. This opens into a verdant garden with more herbs and vegetables, before giving way to what felt like a small forest of trees, plants, and flowers. The first food we were greeted with was a giant stalk of bananas from the neighbor’s tree, and almost every meal we ate included fresh food from the garden, from homemade jams to herbal teas to tomatoes in every shade.
Instead of summarizing our week in chronological order, I’d love to share the many ways our projects kept reiterating this feeling of abundance!
Abundant resources: Our primary job was helping our hosts finish building a carpentry shed to do projects like making hand-carved wooden gifts for a family wedding! It quickly became clear how resourceful our hosts were. They are always saving or on the lookout for scrap wood or other materials to use in their projects. Almost all the wood we used, as well as the insulation and the wood that will be used for the eventual deck, was reused or recycled in some way.
Abundant learning and skills: We did a lot of learn-by-doing alongside our industrious hosts! They had clearly picked up knowledge and skills from projects they had done in the past and were willing to make a few mistakes to learn how to do it themselves rather than just hiring someone (they also knew when to call it and get some professional help, too). I was inspired by just how much you can learn to do on your own if you’re willing to give it some time and resources in a way that seems to really pay off in the long run. By the first morning, we were using a drop saw and putting up dry wall, and by the end of the week we understood how to build a trench to connect power to the shed and drain their wastewater into the garden!
Abundant labor and support: We were a bit worried going into the trip that our lack of expertise in building and carpentry would make us less helpful WWOOFers. While I can’t say we didn’t make mistakes, our hosts were gracious (“oy, it’s just a shed!”). Time and time again in my work both abroad and in the U.S., I have been struck by how sometimes expertise is what’s needed, but sometimes just another body, another mind to bounce ideas off, and another person to share conversation with during a day of work are just as valued. Since both of our hosts had recently been injured, they especially appreciated that we were able to do some of the literal heavy lifting, and our being there gave new momentum to a project that had been on pause for some time.
Abundant flora: We spent about half a day repotting and giving some TLC to their collection of orchids. The home was actually the childhood home of one of our hosts. Their parents had potted nearly 1/3 the number of orchids years ago, and the plants have continued to grow over time. Since the plants are thriving, we had to repot several of them to give them more room to spread out and grow. We used pots that we retrieved from the neighbors, who were moving away and had tons of gorgeous, massive terracotta pots to spare. The environment in the Auckland region absolutely lends itself to abundant growing of so many types of plants (as we’ve learned, sometimes too abundant, especially when it comes to invasive species!)
Abundant food: Beyond just what was grown in their garden, a lot of the other food we made was homemade as well. Yogurt is the gift that keeps on giving! They bought amazing organic (and super affordable) milk from the farmer’s market to replenish their yogurt every few days. They made their own mayonnaise and chutneys and cream cheese and breads and crackers. They often had so much abundance in the things they made from their garden that they had to share them with neighbors and friends to get through it all.
Abundant, reciprocal relationships: I was really inspired by how the hosts connect with their WWOOFers. They had recently travelled to watch a rugby match with some of their former WWOOFers. One person had ended up staying with them for nine months during the pandemic, and they shared how they had really appreciated the extra company during the intense New Zealand lockdowns. Throughout my life, I’ve met a few people/families who make a habit of having regular guests in their home, and I really admire people who do this well and seem to have richer lives for it.
There are ways in which being young can feel like scarcity. In the effort to establish yourself, there is so much that feels like it needs to be conserved in terms of money, time, and resources. So much needs to be built to work towards something like comfort and ease. This is part of the reason the New Zealand decision felt challenging. It felt wrong to willingly choose not to prioritize conserving and growing resources in this period where I feel like I’m supposed to be building the foundations for the rest of my life in a very specific way. And yet in WWOOFing, I find myself in a position I have so many times in my life: of enjoying food in someone else’s home, experiencing things I might have not without their generosity, having all my needs met and more for this moment, and wondering how I ended up in this position. In the past, people’s generosity honestly made me feel guilty. I felt like there was this karmic ticker tape, and I was so clearly, probably irreparably, in the red. From a young age, I have often wondered when I will reach the point of security that I feel like I can return the type of generosity that I have been afforded so much of throughout my life.
As it turns out, having more resources does not inherently make you feel more secure or generous if you’re still in a scarcity mindset. That day will never come for me unless I make it so. After all, one who is generous with little will be generous with much, and one who is scarce with little will be scarce with much.1 I am grateful to have had it modelled to me in numerous ways, both leading up to and during the early stages of this trip, that an abundant life does not come from guarding resources for yourself. Often it comes from sharing life with others, and being surprised by how what you have in excess, someone else might need (and vice versa), and you all end up better off because of it. Robin Wall Kimmerer describes this “gift economy” in Braiding Sweetgrass. “From the viewpoint of a private property economy, the ‘gift’ is deemed to be ‘free’ because we obtain it free of charge, at no cost. But in the gift economy, gifts are not free. The essence of the gift is that it creates a set of relationships. The currency of a gift economy is, at its root, reciprocity.” She quotes Lewis Hyde saying “’objects . . . will remain plentiful because they are treated as gifts.’” I’m honestly doing a disservice to the chapter (“The Gift of Strawberries”) by only picking out two quotes, so I’d recommend a full read.
I know a lot of the things I talk about in these blog posts are somewhat obvious, things that lots of people have already figured out! But sometimes you have to experience more of life to understand these things more deeply for yourself.2 My values, including the what, why, and how, have formed considerably during the last decade of my life. I think part of the reason I was in a difficult place preceding this move is that the how that worked for me in my early 20s (notably, pre-pandemic) has not always translated to my late 20s. My deeply rooted values have not changed significantly, but how I am going to live them out will and, in fact, must change over time (who knew). I am a sponge right now, absorbing ideas from the lovely people I am spending time with for how I want to live my life as I continue to evolve through the stages of early adulthood. And I’m grateful to be doing so in such a beautiful place.
Since we left our hosts on Sunday, we’ve gone on quite the adventure of a 4-5 day trip of the central North Island (think bioluminescent caves and geothermal areas). We somehow managed to get our logistical stuff completely managed while in Auckland, so we’re ripe to start thinking about where we’ll settle for a longer period and get jobs. Until then, we’ll be WWOOFing, this time dogsitting three golden retrievers and doing some other projects just outside of Wellington. More updates and hopefully some kind of summary or video of the road/train trip to come!
P.S. Yes, Chris and I are absolutely hurtling into the homesteading mindset after one week of WWOOFing.
P.P.S. Our first hosts love the beach! And they took us on two different beach excursions during our time with them. The most striking was the black sand beach in Piha, about an hour west of Auckland. We couldn’t believe that we had almost the entire gorgeous beach to ourselves.
I genuinely thought this was a proverb, but I looked it up and it seems my brain has mashed together some combination of Sunday school teachings and other adages. If anyone has heard of this, I would love to know. For those of you I’ve trapped down here in the footnotes anyway, I’ll also add that I think generosity can come in many different forms, and this adage is more useful for personal reflection than larger social commentary considering class-based inequality (yes, the sociologist in me did go down a rabbit hole reading studies about generosity and class).
This was actually the thesis of my personal anthology on cliches that I wrote as a junior year requirement in high school, so I’m just chuffed (see, I’m already speaking Kiwi) that my teenage musings still hold up 12 years later.