🥝 South Island
Analysis is a secondary function. The awareness happens first as a pure connection with the object of your attention. If something strikes me as interesting or beautiful, first I live that experience. Only afterward might I attempt to understand it. — Rick Rubin
They say you haven’t seen the true New Zealand until you have traveled to its South Island. And it’s true. There is so much beauty in here. The land is almost untouched, virgin. Mountains surround you everywhere you look, very blue lakes appear along the way.
We have recently made two separate trips to the South Island.
The first one happened after Christmas and during the New Year and we looped around the top north of the island for about 10 days in a Suzuki Swift. We flew to Christchurch (1) and from there covered Kaikoura (2) where we saw a Sperm Whale, Marlborough Sounds (3), Nelson, Abel Tasman (4) in the New Year, the West Coast, and Arthur’s Pass (5) before returning to Christchurch.
In the second one, which we did recently, we traveled a bit further south, covering during a week Milford Sound via Te Anau (1), Queenstown (2), Wanaka (3), Mount Cook and Lake Tekapo (4), and up to end in Christchurch again (5).
Two aspects I noticed during the road trip made me more observant and alert to what I was seeing and experiencing.
The first one is that the landscapes, their colour, and light, were changing constantly, with every half an hour along the road being a whole new visual experience. This activated all my senses.
Secondly, the beauty of all this untouched wilderness overwhelmed and humbled me. Even now, back at home, I find myself reflecting on all this beauty we witnessed. Instead of sketching on the spot, and as Rick Rubin says in the quote above, I chose to fully immerse myself in the experience, connecting with the place, almost like absorbing the essence, the energy, the life of the place. I looked, and looked…
Interestingly, after both trips, the sensation was that time had expanded, almost as if we had spent weeks instead of days traveling.
Juan José Millás (I have recommended some of his books, he’s one of my favourite Spanish writers and thinkers) was recently, precisely talking about the perception and relativity of time on the radio. He distinguished between chronological (external/outer) and mental (internal/inner) times. His point was that we’ve become slaves of the chronological time, the one we impose on ourselves to perform social duties: minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years. In doing so, we have minimised, some even suppressed, our mental, internal, inner time — the space where we expand, transcending reality, connecting perhaps with something higher and more creative within ourselves and with nature.
Perhaps this is a lesson learned: practice expanding your inner time through observation, connection with the place, taking photos, drawing, or simply being.
Reflecting on our trips to the South Island, I realize that our chronological (external) time seemed to vanish while our mental (internal) time expanded. This is likely why each trip felt longer than it actually was.
No drawings, pictures, or photos will do justice to the beauty we’ve experienced there. Here’s a collection, though, of some of my favourite ones that I hope will transport you to this beautiful side of the world.
I am hoping to find some time to analyse - draw, revisit, re-draw - this experience in the next weeks. In Rubin’s words: to attempt to understand [the experience].
We are currently at the end of a chapter, in an in-between place and places.
The journey continues.
✏️✨
Happy sketching!
Ana