My entire living space right now is about six feet by six feet, the size of the rear of the camper van made up like a miniature queen bed.  Melissa is next to me, earphones plugged into one of her Netflix adventures. I give her grief for watching them, but if I could get Game of Thrones, I’d be bingeing with the best of them.

We’re inside at 4:00 pm because, for the first time, it is raining.  It’s been raining all day.  We drove from our campsite outside of Invercargill to Mossburn, a speck of a town about an hour from Queenstown.  We’re pretty much done with the need to get somewhere or to see something.  We could have stayed an extra day or two at the beach, but with the rain, I’m glad we moved on.  Our final stop will be where we began, a high-end camper van site in Glenorchy with coffee (yes!) and a parlor that feels like the lobby of a nice mountain lodge.  We plan to treat ourselves by hunkering down there for our final three nights with Gertie. 

We are, for the first time in weeks, at a site that, although quite nice, does not have any spectacular natural feature begging us to get out and explore.  We’re in a large flat pasture with some interesting animals sporting stylish hair cuts.  The view of the mountains around us would be spectacular but for the low hanging, Seattle-in-November clouds that have settled down on us like a thick blanket. The pitter-patter of raindrops on the camper van coupled with the cool temperatures makes me ache for a nap, which I am not energetically resisting.  

Maybe it is part of human nature to want to sum up sections of our lives, to put a name to a period of time as if the name could contain everything about that era.  It’s not unlike the way CNN has done a series of documentaries about the last five decades.  Why do we think in decades?  Did the free-love radical sixties really end on January 1, 1970, immediately trading in bell-bottoms and peace signs for leisure suits and disco? I find myself trying to put this sabbatical into neat categories as well – Southeast Asia, Yoga Camp, Milford Trek, and now the camper van era giving way to something else.  

I have, as I’ve said in a previous post, found myself very much in the moment on this trip, but right now, I find myself very much in the moment and still.  Rain and clouds do that to me.  The stillness gives me the space to realize all those subtle things I have experienced on this trip, the things that took a back seat to the overwhelming natural beauty of this place.  For sixty consecutive days, Melissa has not been more than a few hundred feet away from me.  To put it another way, for sixty consecutive days, Melissa and I have been within hand-holding distance every minute of every day with only a few short exceptions. I haven’t felt cramped.  I haven’t felt the need to get some space.  You’ll have to ask her if she feels the same way. I think these last sixty days have been as close to a literal interpretation of the biblical saying “one flesh” as I’ve ever experienced.  How can this be?

In her post, Mountains to Sea with Gertie, Melissa noted how being surrounded by natural beauty makes it easy to be happy.  It lifts us beyond our everyday selves to someplace higher, or more real and vivid, or maybe less confused.  As my friend Jim Rock commented, something about traveling, being a titch uncomfortable is mentally and emotionally freeing.  I could not agree more.  In Seattle, if my toilet backs up, I’m in a tizzie even though I have five other toilets that work.  In the middle of nowhere in New Zealand my only self contained toilet leaks and I fix it, and Melissa, knowing that I will fix it, enjoys a second cup of coffee, and I enjoy laughing about the fact that I am fixing a toilet while she enjoys a cup of coffee.

I am a better person on this trip than I have ever been in my life.  I feel like the person I always wanted to be.  I strike up nothing conversations with the first person I meet at the camper van site and end up feeling like I’ve known the person all my life. The feeling, it seems, is mutual. Melissa and I struck up just this kind of conversation with the seventy-year old Kiwi couple in the site next to us last night.  A little later, after dinner, the woman, Maureen, knocked on our camper van door to tell me she was worried about the mole on my cheek.  She wanted to make sure I had had it checked.  I’ve had it since birth.  Reassured, she turned in for the evening.

We’ve written paragraphs about the natural beauty of New Zealand for obvious reasons, but we have not written as much about these subtle, wonderful, kind interactions with perfect strangers.   They happen every night, in every camp.  It’s as if all the wonder and beauty I absorb during the day radiates out of me at night.  I’d like to find a way to bring this back with me.  Like Jim said, however, maybe it is more than being in a beautiful place.  Maybe it is also part of getting away.  It makes me wonder though, what am I getting away from, and why would I go back?  

If there is a downside to feeling this happy and alive, it is the few times I check in with the news and my heart breaks. The insanity is so real from this perspective, so crushingly painful.  It is like watching a speeding train with all my friends and family aboard roar ever faster towards a washed out bridge, and everyone on board that train, no matter how well intentioned, just keeps shoveling coal into the engine.

Being happy is being in love with Melissa, and with the world around me.  Being happy is knowing that I am worthy of love because I have found a part of myself that I love.  Being happy is being grateful for this specific moment in a camper van with the rain coming down without consideration or weight given to all that came before or all that might come after.