It’s 1998. Annie has had to come out to Rabbit Island again to bring me petrol. It’s happened too often for my liking, and probably hers, but I never ask her. There’s an edge of madness in my forgetting. I’m at rock bottom, the empty petrol tank a visible reminder. I think she gets my need to escape the world out on this beach, and I let that thought be enough. My desperate want is to be worn away to nothing, to let this season of grief have me in its grip.
There's a driving force that takes me out into the winter elements. I need to feel mamma earth's raw judgment on my body. I crave the sensation of cold rain drilling my face, to feel the savage slash of wind-blown sand on my bare legs.
I am a wanderer who has lost the ability to read her life. My fingers are too numb to hold the edges of this unravelling story. All that I know is obsolete, redundant and estranged from any reality I had imagined.
I have to run away.
I yearn for a gateway, a place in time and space to step through. In 1998, Rabbit Island was that place. It becomes a sacred pilgrimage into the underworld of my being.
Within all the madness, I know this much to be true. I don't want to be without another woman's voice while I piece my story back together again. That knowledge alone is both confronting and comforting. How can I bear to be witnessed in my shame and failure yet still show my face to her?
I have no answer to this.
But Annie understands this woman’s need to mourn the ending of a relationship more than I do. So she is patient with me as we walk, a quiet presence while I spill out my grief, my anger, my shame, onto corrugations of sand, into the wind, my keening chants stirring up the sea. She becomes my guardian most mornings while I descend into the underworld, a compassionate companion whose gentle guidance shines a light into the folded shadows of my psyche.
This particular morning I am on my own. After I have dropped the kids at school, I drive my vintage blue Honda hatchback out to the silent landscape of Rabbit Island. Over the white bridge, past the green pines, turning left at the t-intersection, navigating through the labyrinth of one-way roads to the sand's edge and park.
I check to see if others are walking the beach this early in the morning. My next-door neighbours were running along the sand the last time I was here. I was careless with my observations, letting them spill into judgement as I watched them scar the land with their neon-coloured running shoes. It's never surprising to me on these days to witness their casual disdain for a previously untouched world. I am harsh with my opinion. There are no pleasantries left in me for humankind after another battering of emotion leaves me blurred with exhaustion. I stay in the car, paralysed by the fear of being seen, having to explain why I've left him.
But on this day, I see no one walking the beach. The ocean is alive, pulsing with anticipation. Winter light shivering across its silent face—grey dark clouds shadow and obscure cold sea puddles, each wave reaching for the shore. Everything is peaceful and quiet, a meditation for one returning to her-self.
Finally, I can breathe out.
On the rough ground, my bare feet step lightly. Sharp stone points grounding me, reminding me I am here now, as are we. Walk softly, each pebble calls. Walk carefully; we are the rocks, the stones binding the earth together. Step lightly on our faces. So I do.
I feel an urgent calling to the beach spiral through my body. A memory thread breaks loose from my battered heart and dangles, exposed. If I pull it, a story will follow. I need to get to the beach now to let it spill out.
Chaotic emotions are fragmenting my mind, burning holes in the thin fabric of my sanity. I am crazy in this hell I have created.
I climb the small dune, my toes curling to grip the shifting sand, trying to get a toehold on the earth. But I stumble, off-balance. The sand cushions my knees. It’s no surprise that I am off-balance. My whole world is off-kilter. I scramble through golden rustling grasses over the dune onto hard-packed sand. Stumbling again, gravity pulls me downwards into a humble shape, my forehead kissing land.
Rising to my feet, I see to my left, in the distance, small temples of driftwood—bones of the earth, offering transparent shelter to a weary woman. The wood bleached with ancient stories woven through ebbs and flows of the ocean, ravaged by time, washed by turbulent tides. The hands that built these structures are long gone. Their unnamed legacy is standing tall, intricately balanced on shifting sands.
I am not up to this task of forgiveness.
I watch the land. My glance roams the salty landscape - shifting sands move, blown by stormy winds into the face of this grief-walker. I close my eyes, retreating towards an inner landscape. One that is gnarled, weathered, uprooted and wild, I am a woman seasoned by grief in a landscape that moulds me, shapes me, and mirrors me in its ever-changing edges.
I open my eyes again. The outer world is laid bare, paths eroded by water, wind, and rain till all that's left behind is waiting to be retrieved. I am a hungry forager, gathering little treasures, heart-shaped stones, pretty shells and small sea-weathered sticks. They go into my pockets, raw nature carried home to adorn the grieving altar.
Twenty-two years later, I’ve returned, arriving on a bleak winter’s day; its cold isolation strikes me. There is no recognition.
Memory is a strange creature. I listen for familiar wave songs, for silence and wonder whether my name is shimmering below the surface of the earth. I cannot find any marks or clues showing the way of my journeys on this beach. Unnamed, erased, the remembered past is no longer present. I have long passed through this gateway.
Yet for a moment, my whole body slides into reminiscing; it’s a self-indulgence that raises the tiny hairs on my merino-covered arms. A slight frisson of emotion murmurs an invitation, a seductive whisper to tumble again into the underworld. There is no answering call; that woman is long gone.
We are all evolving landscapes.
So many people come out to the Island now. Their footprints etched onto grassy knolls, each set of tracks leading to little encampments of brightly coloured playthings scattered across the cold soft sand.
The natural landscape looks ravaged, pockmarked with distress. Rough roads buckled by tree roots, green pines wounded, bleeding with sap—empty holes where once was a proud forest. Rubbish scattered from overflowing bins, slowly shredding the pristine nature of this place.
I can feel a hunger for the old beach. The way it was in 1998. The place that saved a woman from destroying everything she knew. I can see where humankind has tried to shore up a dissolving dune, where massive floods have torn away its natural hospitality. The symphony of its wave music and echoes have altered into a silent hum, dampened by deep wounds within its landscape.
I miss the wildness of its previous existence. Time has weathered, shaped and sculpted the beach edges into softened versions of itself—a changing landscape.
And I cry; so much has changed.
What I bring to this beach is a remembered past. Somewhere on this beach is the landscape of my mythology, memories braided through its trees, dunes and water. Rabbit Island, or Moturoa as it is known, held space for the raw communication of a woman riven by grief. My trail of tears hungrily lapped up by wavelets, washing her eyes clean—a woman who walks this beach forgiven and restored.
How can we ignore the call to be guardians of place? We are wound into communion with it, despite ourselves. The minute we step onto its shifting sandy surface, we engage with nature: a natural world that reflects the seasons of our life.
I can’t help but reflect on how I might find my place in the cycle of scripts and dramas in this world we live in. How I might add my voice to the generations that demand presence and understanding for who they are and what they strove to establish for our arrival on this land, this genius loci, a spirit of place.
Guardianship is a precious and honourable tradition asking of us to tend to the geography of our longings and to befriend the elements as a rite of passage.
Our call to the land and the arc of her reply invites us to respond from the heart. We are the kaitiaki of the silent lands. We are caretakers, and stewards, holding in trust the earth for all who come behind us. Aren’t we?