Well an interesting day today, I spent the morning with the Tokelau community very exciting and learnt so much from them, it was their island community performance in the morning and dance which is on right now to end their Tokelau language week, its a Saturday night and I am at home. I was due to go visit a friend of mine his Aunt who he's lived with all his adult life has passed away. Very sad we are close friends or so we like to think this I will discuss at a later time. But his Aunt was so nice to us, we loved visiting her when we went to hang out with our friend. So it has been a mixed day of emotions and more so because my mother died today five years ago.
My mother was amazing and while I write this I am in inner turmoil there is so much going on with my life that I wished she was here, she always as most mothers do had answers to everything and although most will say mothers don't have ALL the answers my mother did and she did largely based on her Christian faith. Which is why I wished she was here because everything she said always left me at peace, she gave truth that made absolute sense and peace that surpasses all understanding, which leads me to the image associated with this post.
As mentioned earlier about funerals my friends' Aunts death is but one of 10 funerals I've had to attend in the past two months, and yes I'm emotionally shattered, but shattered due to defeat as I've come to learn that I can't try and understand everything. I have a problem and that is that I try to understand everything around me. With the funerals that I attended 7 were family funerals all on my dads side. In each of them I discovered just how big my family was and how as my father would say 'you are related to everyone' from my dads island or groups of them total 15. On the death of a close family member, who I only discovered how we were related the day of the family service and was devastated at the discovery, it made me realise that my western nurtured mine had to comprehend the fact that I am related to everyone from the Cook Islands. My dad used to say this to us as a protection of us to ensure we didn't date or worse marry a Cook Islander, if there was any truth to it when we were young we were ignorant of it but as we grew dads insistence intensified, was it due to the fact dad didn't like Cook Islanders or was it true we are all related. Now as I'm older it was probably both. But that's not the point of this blog, the funerals highlighted an irritation most people have of me and that is that I always try to discover how I'm related to people. You see when I was young simply saying your my aunty or cuz or uncle etc wasn't enough for me. I had to know exactly how I was related to people. I remembered when I was 8 my dad introduced me to a lady and said she was my aunty, it was outside St Benedict's church off Symond St in Auckland city (on a side issue, St Benedict's church has a long standing history with my dads family, it was one of the few churches my family went to back in the day, its significance stemed from the fact it was the only central city church that held Catholic services in the Cook Islands language, my family at the time all lived in Central Auckland. I really love this church - it has a strong history for Catholics in Auckland, firstly because it used to have a primary school on site but has long since gone and was long gone even before I started going to the church well over 30years ago.)
That lady was my Aunty U'a my dads first cousin, now I made the big mistake by asking her how I was related to her to my dads horror. You see the island way is that you don't ask questions like that, it is considered to be extremely rude. In the island way family is family, sometimes a blood tie is not important (of course in later blogs, this is not the case especially when determining land rights). Now my dad just said to me in anger that day that it 'JUST WAS' that we were related. From that day my dad and I always had to discuss how I was related to people, I think he came to realise that I was different in that way. I need to understand things. I have always been that way. I never take things at face value especially people. I watch people and analyse then. I usually know a lot about a persons personality by the first 10mins I encounter them. The best type of people for me are those that refuse to be read or understood. I find them the most interesting and intriguing. This is just people. I like to understand history, history is the best, then everything else in the world around me I try to understand. But the best of course is people.
Until of course trying to understand how I'm related to people of which there is over 50,000...I resided to my 'dads' fact, that I am related to everyone lols. I am happy it just makes me think um boring what now hahaha, I have to find something else to discover in relation to my dads people and I think I've found it but its a secret for now.
I read something somewhere which aligns strongly to my situation, when you try to understand something when you get the answer your life takes a new direction, that's stating the obvious but it certainly has for me and I am happy.
