🥝 A Big Adventure

Setting off home and a year of drawings of New Zealand

Mar 08, 2024

‘[Wendy] — So, your adventures are over.
[Peter] — Oh no. To live. To live would be an awfully big adventure.’ — Hook, film directed by Steven Spielberg

In what is the best version of a Peter Pan story ever created (always from my humble point of view), at the end of the film Hook, old Peter, a lawyer and father of two, looks at how Toodles flies around in joy over the rooftops of London for having found his marbles (after all) with his family next to him. He’s just defeated Hook and is back home after his big adventure. Granny Wendy looks at him and says: ‘So, your adventures are over.’ Peter smiles enigmatically looking at the horizon and responds: ‘Oh no. To live. To live would be an awfully big adventure.’ (minute 2.30)

Our big adventure in Aotearoa New Zealand has come to an end, but the adventures haven’t yet finished: at the time this post is published, we will be with some friends in Fiji (2) for a few days for our Season Finale, and after that, my partner and I will travel to Australia, where we plan on doing a road trip from Brisbane (3) to Melbourne (4), where our final flight will depart to London (5) - home.

When reflecting on this past year here in The Land of the Long White Cloud, I find that there has been almost too much adventure and little time to pause and reflect. Some people love the thrill of new things. I, personally, can enjoy it - for a while, but then I crave more consistency, my routines, my places. London. It’s all really about having (creative) seasons - change is as important as rest. A too-long Summer becomes sometimes tiresome and exhausting. We need the time to sit, rest, assimilate what we have experienced.

New Zealand has been, though, a fantastic place to learn a new way of seeing. We’ve seen so much beauty in so little time. Now I am looking forward to settling back in and having the time to reflect on all these adventures.

These are some of the drawings I enjoyed the most doing this year, and some of the places we visited, the memories we created. A year of Kiwi Chronicles, a year of Aotearoa New Zealand: