A beauty-full octagon building made with strong native timbers, large windows allowing the natural light to filter through the shadows at different times of the day.
The manuka forests standing erect, bowing only to the sweet kiss of the warm breeze that skitters across the crystal-laid roof of our home.
The gentle, panoramic view of the calm waters of the Bay, with a smudge hinting at land across the lagoon, with long white clouds resting their weary load on the top of the peaks of the other national park we're graced by.
The peace of the day.
The ever present cicadas sing their three day love song, no trains, planes or automobiles flatlining a persistent hum....none of a refrigerator, TV or radio station blurring the present time of being.
The solar panels lounge in the heat, sucking in the light, slurping it deep into the body of Tui T'Mala.
And as the ever persistent skies of summer turn white with tones of grey, an ever present nagging feeling in my belly says 'I told yah so!"
Waking for the first time this morning with no power would not normally facilitate such a deep response. In the past, phoning the power company, neighbours or landlord to rectify the problem ... or rather pass-it-on, would have sufficed. This dark morning's glower however, was all up to me.
Placing candles around the breakfast table and pulling out seaweed crackers and hastily creating raspberry chia jam for the children's fast breaker, gifted me the most extraordinary of looks from routine-rutted clients at my walk-in diner.
The head torch produced a choreographed drama of donning head gear for similar effects by my voyeurs.
'Mama's being weird, let's be nice to her today.' A whisper slipped from my eldest's lips.
My forhead lighting up the inverter box told me that we had indeed run outa power in our batteries. The one's that we're meant to care for and nurture with sunlight, keeping their bellies filled for future power usage.
Ooops!
The red light persistently winking at me, not letting on. The answer was not found in the book of jargon either, a concise life-history of our solar system.
Seeing the lesson immediately helped me to identify the problem and attempt to solve it.
If we keep putting energy out without caring for our back-up systems; not filling them with love, sunlight and peace ... then when our first port of call runs dry, where do we go to fill-up?
Indeed.
I have been there before.
And a physical or mental breakdown is the usual response. Whether that lurks in the form of a cold, mental instability or dis-ease. Without nurturing our dear selves with whatever makes us tick, with a lie-in, a night out with mates, a weekend climbing or splashing out on a retreat, we too can run outa power and grind to a halt.
In today's case it meant working out how to isolate the inverter from the batteries, to stop our greedy household appliances guzzle the sweet nectar of life and suppling generated power to the support system of our powered up home.
Without this we've no green smoothies or juices, the dehydrator has it's siesta while the crackers and breads fizz and ferment in the afternoon, as the sun delivers it's fanfare of an otherwise overcast day.
No power to google the problem's solution, only trust and common sense that leaving the generator on while I 'popped' into town, a four hour vacation from the simple life, would not over tax the battery supply but at the very worst would use up all the fuel.
And that was the answer.
After several weeks of nagging intuition, prompting me to look into this up and coming headache, I managed to find the time to declutter my overflowing brain for long enough to flick a couple of switches, illuminating the present and heading outa the door throwing whole fresh foods at the children and heading to market for the day.
With a cacophony of delights in town and friends positively enthused about the glowing autumnal day, the morning horrors of damaging our powers life support system faded into the non present and I sucked up the abundant energy exchanged in conversation, simply shopped for organic seedlings to plant in my ever growing kitchen garden and watched tour tribes children fill themselves with the power of love, sunshine and friendship, banking it in their holding systems to draw on in future gloomy days.
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