living life like it's golden

Home. What does that mean? 

There are many factors involved with experiencing a feeling which we might call coming home. 

It can be with a person. You just click. You're comfortable with them, like you've known them your whole life, and you don't have to pretend to be anyone or anything. 

It can be with a place. The place you come from. The place you have gone to that fits you and fills you.

Home might depend on what fills your soul at the time.

I think every culture has a sense of what home means to them in terms of country and belonging. Language, geography, accent, cultural references. They bring people together in a collective understanding and sense of place and time.

174 years is not long in the big history of countries and people and collective consciousness. And as soon as I type 174 years, I do want to acknowledge that the Maori were already in New Zealand with a connection to the land and with a strong and vibrant culture before the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840.  

And still. New Zealand is young. You can see it in its sharp landscape. In the fact that it is still moving and reforming, both geologically, politically, socially and culturally.

When I think of home, I think of that ball of light that fills my heart and takes over my lungs; that feeling of rapture that I came from here: this tiny country with a tiny population that plays with the big kids.

Music, design, art, innovation, sport, engineering, and other domains I am sadly ignorant of. We make our way, we little flightless birds, onto a world stage. Still unashamedly flaunting our fush and chups and suxty suvens and yiss and our penchant for crazy kiwiana.

Cringe if you will, but any New Zealander born in the seventies or eighties is absolutely nodding their heads in recognition of these phrases. And feeling, at the same time as shuddering, a sense of belonging.
 
Australia may have called itself the lucky country for a while. And there is no doubt it was. That's what lured New Zealanders across the ditch. Better pay, more opportunities.

But our hearts remain in New Zealand. And we just need a wild beach, some L&P, fern fronds, pohutukawa, whitebait patties, a Steinlager Pure or even a Speights, maori place names, and we feel at home.

At home, the sun caressing our faces, living life like it's golden.