Gagging the Nagging.

What is happening with our Garden of Eden and how am I doing?
I’ll tell you it is still quite an adventure.
Doing exciting projects like this definitely relies on our relationship working and I so clearly see how gagging the nagging works.

So where are we at?
I loved Waipu and the properties we have seen up North, but as none were available to us we are moving on.
“What to do next”, “where to” and “was the whole Northland expedition a waste of our time” were the questions I was left with.

Instead of nagging John about how it all failed, and as everything is against us we might as well give up; I shared my concerns.
To deal with those, we looked at what actually happened, what we learnt and what to do next without allowing a full drama to be played out.

Very cool and very effective.

What I learnt was that there are beautiful pieces of land in unexpected places, as long as we just go, look around and use networking. Going to have a look was NOT a waste of time and effort.
Never having lived near real dense bush, I never thought about possums. But everybody we talked to in Waipu had huge possum problems as the area has extensive forests and the possums literally eat you out of house and home.
People had a real fight on their hands to keep their garden produce and fruit for themselves.
That did concern me and I got to see that living near dense forest is not as easy as it seems.
On top of the possum problems the soil up North was not too hot either.

So instead of getting all negative, resigned after our efforts and seeing only the impossible, John and I debriefed the situation and simply said; “What next?”

While thinking about what to do next, I remembered the remarks of two friends.
One kept asking us about considering going South and I kept ignoring that remark. Going South means driving on a very congested motorway, so it never appealed to me.
Then another friend kept suggesting using a pendulum over a map and see what would come up that way.
To her I used to say “yeah, yeah” and thinking “no, no, too hard.”
The trouble with the pendulum suggestion was that I don’t have one and don’t even know how to use one.
Learning about it seemed too much trouble at that time too, enter Witch Impossible ?

However being kind of stuck and looking for a solution brought to mind those friend’s remarks and the gold in listening for possibilities.
Great stuff to learn from your own blog .

So what if I don’t know how to use a pendulum? If she knows, she can do it for me and then teach me. All I have to do is ask, don’t I? Hmm.
Off I trot to the phone and next thing, John, I and friend are sitting on the floor with maps all over the place and swinging the pendulum.
If you have never seen one in action it is worth having a look; it is amazing how they work.
And low and behold, no indication for a place up North but boy did it swing “yes” in an area south of Auckland, between Waihi and Paeroa to be exact.

Ha! Both our friends were in alignment.
First amazing fact.
The trouble was that as far as I knew, there is no network for us to tap into about that area.

Are you ready for the next dadadada…..drum role please?
The Friday, right after the pendulum episode we had friends for dinner.
We talk about what we are all up to and John and I shared our weird and wonderful pendulum experience.
Next thing one of them pipes up and says; “We have family living in that area. It is beautiful and the soil is so fertile. You plant a tree and in seven years it bears fruit and those huge avocados I just gave you are from there.”
You can imagine that I nearly rushed to the kitchen to get the garlic. This is too unbelievable!
After the shock we talked some more and I got very excited.

To top it all off, another friend I met the next day told me that her parents used to live there and had an orchard!

Whoo, cool stuff I’d say.

And that is where we are at with our Garden of Eden.
We have done a lot of things and it is still very unclear how it is all going to pan out and in what place we eventually will end up living.
The good bit is that I am not in the least perturbed, anxious or nagging John and that means a lot to me, our relationship and our moving forward.

In my former unenlightened life I would have got anxious and I would have slipped into a dark mood of ‘nothing is possible’.
I would start to nag about his ideas and why he isn’t happy with what he’s got, forgetting that I started this whole idea of living on the land outside the city.
In my anxiety I would have forgotten all the fun we had while looking at all the places.
All I would see were the lack of results.

Oh how easily I could have slipped down this slippery path.

BUT, not now.

Instead of indulging in emotional nagging, I gagged the nagging and shared my concerns so we could deal with them and get on with the next steps to make things happen.

To honor all these signs, John and I will be off looking around the Waihi and Paeroa area soon and go on, tell me you have friends there too?