Cloths of Heaven

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven, William Butler Yeats

Well. It’s been a while longer than I had hoped, but finally here I am again. Writing, reading, slowly starting to come alive again. It feels so good to be back.

I suppose I should start with the obvious: this space has undergone a bit of an overhaul since I last wrote. So much time spent cleaning up and tweaking tiny design details that probably no one will notice but me. I hope you like the overall effect. I wanted to make room for new projects, new dreams, a new season of life. In a format that would give emphasis to my words without compromising my photography. It’s exciting to me, something I’ve been waiting to embark upon for such a long time now. And this is just the beginning. Let me know how you like it.

And in the interim – let me bring up to date with what’s been going on in my life! I began writing this post over a month ago, but it’s been challenging to carve out time to sit down with it and actually finish it up. For the past few months now everything has felt like a struggle, I’ve been in one of those phases where I just go to work, get home and eat, go straight to bed. After the exam I sat (and passed!) in February, I came back to a really busy six weeks in a job that was still very new to me, easily working an extra eight hours a week on top of my roster just to get by. It’s been a time of adjustment: getting used to weekly clinics, holding a consults phone, preparing regular presentations. I’ve learnt a whole lot, but other than the four-day Easter weekend, I’ve not actually had any time off to stop and rest for over seven months. The exhaustion is real. If you’ve reached out to me or been in touch recently – even if you didn’t hear anything back in reply – it’s probably gone a long way toward keeping me afloat. Those times in which we need friendship and support the most are often the same ones in which we have no strength to open up or respond.

Right now I’m sitting outside on the deck in shorts and a long-sleeved t-shirt, catching the last of the low (3pm) afternoon sun while K tries to tame the garden, the air heavy with damp soil and cut grass. Yesterday we took Asterix for a ramble in Cornwall Park and bought ice-creams from the Creamery at the foot of Maungakiekie ( – One Tree Hill). But my fingers are almost too frozen to type, my legs now in shadow and my (bare) feet blocks of ice. Autumn arrived with a chill several weeks ago now, temperatures dropping by ten degrees literally overnight. And yet the trees are still alive with birdsong, the air so fragrant I could drink it. I’m reminded of that passage from Autumn, by Ali Smith, about the trees revealing their structures and the catch of fire in the air. I can’t bring myself to go warm up inside. Besides, the rainy season has set in now, there won’t be many afternoons like this.

The last warm weather that we had in fact was Easter weekend. We made a last minute decision to take the 40min ferry trip over to Waiheke, a little island with a micro-climate of its own. I had planned a walk that I had done before, heading north from the tiny ferry terminal up and around the coast of a little peninsula, climbing to high view points and dropping down to sea level, passing countless tiny beaches until we reached Owhanake Bay, where we made our way inland and up to Oneroa village. It’s a beautiful track that we had entirely to ourselves, but I hadn’t counted on such incredible weather – by the time we got to the end of it we’d had to ration our 1.5L of water and only narrowly avoided heatstroke…. which feels unbelievable given how cold it is now. After a picnic on the beach I went swimming in among the little boats bobbing up and down in the bay, K keeping watch over me. We finished up the day with another walk up to Mudbrick Vineyard, to watch the evening fall over the misty city skyline.

What else? There have been a few other beautiful walks, of course. I might save some of those for separate posts: Nihotupu Reservoir, Piha, Waharau Regional Park – and my local favourite the Puhinui Stream Forest Trail. But honestly, in the past few weeks I’ve barely had the energy even to get outside. The choice of Cornwall Park yesterday was a deliberately gentle and sheltered one, I just didn’t feel up to being out in the elements.

Otherwise I have spent a great deal of time reading, the details of which I think I also might save for a future post. But the excitement of it I will speak to here: I have wanted, for the longest time, to really immerse myself in books and literature again. In the way that I did during my undergraduate degree. I have never had the opportunity to study English literature and there is so much about it that I’m drawn to, so many periods and movements that I want to learn more about, so many authors I want to read. It’s a path I’ve never really let myself go down to any great length since I started studying medicine, really because it has always felt like an indulgence in comparison to the studying that I needed to do to keep up with all of my medical training. But now that I’m done with medical exams I finally feel free to explore, to go down all the weird and wonderful rabbit holes that I come across, to just follow whatever I’m drawn towards. I don’t have the words to convey how much of a joy it is for me to finally do so.

If all of that sounds fairly tame, it’s because it’s a challenge to know how to recuperate when free time is so scarce. You might think I would do better just to fully rest – to sleep as much as possible until I finally feel refreshed again. And in fact there have been weeks where essentially that is all that I’ve done: getting up later in the mornings, going to bed as early as possible after work, sleeping in for hours at the weekend. But I find that just amplifies the feeling that my life has been reduced to nothing other than work: get up, work, sleep, repeat.

I often think of the concept of recovery in a sense that I first heard explained as the process of regaining what has been lost or taken from you. The loss here goes so far beyond simple lack of sleep. I started studying for the first part of my college exams in August 2019, sitting it in February 2020. I then moved on to preparing for the second part scheduled for June 2020, but which ended up postponed and split into two separate exams held in November 2020 and February 2021. That’s nineteen months straight during which a great deal of my life was given over to medicine. Nineteen months of studying before and after work, spending the weekends at my desk or going into the hospital on days off in order to practice. It served the purpose of getting me through in as little time as possible, but at a cost. So of course it follows that there is a great deal more to “recover”. The loss of freedom and adventure, of exercise, of reading for pleasure, the loss of ways of thinking that are not germane to the practice of medicine, of conversations with friends, of downtime with my partner, of any time at all with my family.

And so it’s a balance, really. Between getting enough hours of rest, but also slowly re-integrating those things that once brought joy and self-identity. Slowly building them back in, opening the body and mind to them, beginning the process of regaining what has been lost.

Final things that have brought me joy recently, before I wrap this post up: watching a live narration of Blue Planet with a score performed by the Auckland Philharmonia (- no words for how incredible an experience that was, so grateful for the roster swap that allowed me to attend!), stocking our freezer with homemade meals, driving home from an amazing interview with Kazuo Ishiguro at the Auckland Writer’s Festival, windows open and flooding the car with night-air, music loud; fresh bed sheets(!!), time invested in myself, Easter egg hunts, pure beautiful morning and evening light, feedback from supervisors, buying myself Poison to celebrate passing my exam, the new series of Grand Designs, home-baked banana bread, home-brewed ginger tea.

Sending you my love, write and let me know your news!

-Z x

— every day when I log into my computer I get this message.