bliss.

If the person who wrote your favourite novel and the person who wrote your favourite poem were both on stage, where would you look? On whom would you focus?

This was my dilemma today, as I watched Patricia Grace chair a session with Joy Harjo. I mean, as the writer of Baby No-Eyes chaired a session with the writer of 'Perhaps the World Ends Here.' I found that I learned as much from and about Patricia and I did about Joy through the riveting and rich conversation, and I was not the only person in the room with a few tears by the end of the poetry reading.

Joy talked about the importance of place but how her elders recognise she has a role to play as a traveller, as someone who takes journeys, and someone who travels far away and brings back stories. My friend (and amazing poet) Maraea leaned over to me and said 'that's like you.'

I sat in a room full of writers and readers and listeners, while it snowed outside on my lovely harbour. And thought 'this, this is what I do.' This, today, is at the very centre of this part of my life. When all is said and done, after I've worried about recruitment/ retention/ success of Maori & Pasifika students, after I've taught countless students the difference between a short paragraph and a long sentence, after I've strategised about how to increase the number of Maori/ Pasifika/ women/ brown scholars at university, after I've gone to meetings about iwi education plans, after I've done what I can for English in high schools and for Maori in Indigenous Studies, after I've argued and fought and cried and worried and fought some more, after all of that, this is who I am. The girl who loves Patricia and Joy. 

In a day and a half I am hopping on a plane, but for now I am at the centre.