Serendipitous

On Tuesday I drove south to Timaru - city about 70km down the road.  It has a sandy beach called Caroline Bay, and is the place where the plains of Canterbury give way into rolling hills that reach right down to the sea.

Timaruvians make a big deal of that sand. Most of the Cantabrian coastline is shingly.

Donating that antique silk nightdress (older post) to the museum there was the only objective of my trip and as I am not into shopping I didn't hang around.  I did however stop in Temuka on my way back north. Temuka is not a huge place but it does have a pottery - a place that has made itself famous in the region for imaginatively decorated, handpainted ceramics.  I have quite a few examples of large platters, serving bowls and ovenware which I have purchased from there over the decades. I called in knowing they run a cafe and feeling I could do with a coffee and a look around.

In fact the place looked less interesting than in the past. They seem to have moved to mono-tone dinnerware (plates and bowls in earthy, brown green, slate or blue) and less of the colourful serving ware. Leaving I noticed that I had parked outside the Temuka museum. The door was open, so I walked in clutching the linen nightdress declined by the curator of the bigger museum in Timaru. The place was clearly undergoing refurbishment, but two women were there who accepted with delight the garment on offer along with what I could give them of its history (it came from within the area they represent).  They had been about to lock up when I arrived.

Serendipity. 

YAM-aunty suggested that about the grit mill (post a couple of weeks back). It got me thinking that I have lived a serendipitous life. Someone with whom I studied meditation about 40 years ago called it Support of Nature. She believed that if our hearts and minds were open to it, the world had a way of delivering what we needed more or less when we needed it or could make best use of it.

That might just be a way of describing being resilient, resourceful or adaptable - of being able to make use of what is available, of seeing opportunity, or not being too fixated on there being only one solution to any problem.  Whatever it is, whatever one chooses to call it, my life has been blessed with it.

I came out here to build a house and 4 months on have made little progress and identified a truckload of hurdles, but I have got a van, and a caravan, a pile of tools, electricity being connected to the site in early March, a plan for getting a septic tank in and connected to the sewage system in that community, and am about to order a small relocatable home to move onto the site and live in while we deal with some of the hurdles. The main hurdle is going to be getting the builder I want. There are builders and there are cowboys.... The builder I want is currently working on a palatial mansion that could take 14 months to complete!  He was however good enough to give me a road map of the stuff I can do myself - there being more than one solution to this problem.

Good stuff will come out of this even if it is only events to make blog posts out of. Prepare yourself for posts that involve a lot of digging in one form or another.

Some photos of weird lilies because I have no idea how to illustrate a post about serendipity.