Expat Life: New Zealand: Bloom where you're planted.

"Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it. You must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it."

-Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat Pray Love

A conversation I was having with a friend on tumblr really made me wrap my head around my life at the moment. This week I will have been in New Zealand for a month. I have to remind myself every day that I live here, I'm not just here to visit like I have been many times before. It's hard to believe that this place I had always dreamed about living is now quickly becoming home. My family and I traveled to New Zealand for Christmas twice when I was a kid and ever since then I had always spent my art class days in grade school drawing pictures of palominos, sheep and kiwis amidst crayon mountains. I wrote little stories about a girl who lived in New Zealand with all her horses (it might be a few years before the horses appear in real life haha) and hoarded all my mom's coffee table books about New Zealand in my room so that I could pour over all the photos before I went to sleep some nights.

Every time we moved countries, I always longed for the place we had lived before. At one point it was Des Moines, then it was Jakarta, then Manila. As a kid it always took me a while to love the place we had recently arrived, but then I would fall in love with our life there and not want to leave. My mom would always say, "Bloom where you're planted, Sarah" and I grew to disdain that saying mostly because I needed the time to mourn the place I had just left. I always wanted to be somewhere else and that place was always the city I had just moved from or it was the dream of New Zealand.

As a kid we have so many dreams, so many things we want to be when we grow up. When I was six I wanted to be a cowgirl mostly inspired from one of my favourite book, Pecos Bill. At eight years old I wanted to be a horse racing jockey and at twelve I wanted to be an Egyptologist. At thirteen, we had just moved back to America from the Philippines and I was so homesick for Manila that the first year we were back was agonizing. That year I got my first digital camera (before that I had an awesome Barbie film camera) and I used that camera and the many I had after that as therapy to get through the culture shock of being back in America from a part of Southeast Asia that I considered home. Through the lens, I found beauty in Florida among the morning fogs, the summer thunderstorms, the gulf sunsets and I learned to love the place that would be home for six years. I could always trust the stability of how a camera worked, yet was always in awe of what I could capture digitally or on film. There was always something to be explored. Every flea market, fruit stand, beach, city street, neighborhood and open field had some kind of personality that had to be captured on film. When I got my license I took off down Corkscrew Road, often by myself, with a friend or my little brother, Ben and we'd search for hidden fields and open quarries to take photos. We'd turn my little bug down old dirt roads that led to rivers and Cypress trees, their creaking that sounded like haunted house's bedroom doors. It was about discovering a hidden place outside the city, a place that we liked to think belonged to us. There were tracks from giant wild boars, deer and alligators all amidst the gentle, watching eyes of Great Blue Herons and white Egrets. When I moved to Gainesville to attend the University of Florida I did the same exact thing. I jumped on my bike or my bug and headed out to every state park I could find with a camera in my passenger seat ready to help me fall in love with this new town I had just moved to. I grew to love Gainesville because of this as well and I really hope that everyone who is ever a part of UF explores their surroundings in that amazing little town.

My decision to move to New Zealand was not just about childhood dreams, it was very much about love. It was about another human being's soul that became one with my own and I could no longer live without. I was three years into my BFA, with two years left (long story), student loans looming before me and I simply woke up one day and asked myself, "What the hell am I still doing here?" I knew the answer; that deep rooted, American, societal pressure that you must go to university after high school or you will not ever have a decent job. The funny thing is, my parents never went to a four year college after high school, yet they both ended up with amazing careers and my dad at one point held the title of CEO and gave my brothers and I the most awesome Asian child hood we could have ever imagined. Because of them, I treasure my childhood as a favourite adventure novel, full of memories of places I still cannot believe I was blessed enough to travel to at such a young age. They never told me I had to go directly to college I realized, it had always been my own drive and perseverance that landed me in one of the best universities in America. One thing I have always loved about my parents is that they always told me I could do and be anything I wanted to be and as long as I was happy, they would be as well. I realized I could finish school in New Zealand, I could finish school anywhere at any point in time. I am young and this is my one and only life I have to live, I think I just finally realized that I was actually in control of it and steered it in the direction I wanted to go.

So that morning that I woke up and asked myself why I am still here and not with the love of my life in the country of my dreams was the day I decided to move to New Zealand. Our wedding was planned in three months. I threw/gave away most of what I owned, packed my childhood memories into boxes that are now collecting dust in my parent's house back in Georgia (until they move once again) and filled five suitcases with the essentials of life -mostly winter clothes and my favourite Star Wars parapharnelia- in anticipation of another New Zealand winter. And then that was it. It seemed like in the quickest week of my life, I was married to my best friend surrounded by my favourite people in the whole world, honeymooned in Costa Rica and then I was here, in New Zealand, here to stay with visa in hand.

My mother's voice saying "bloom where you are planted" doesn't annoy me like it once did when I was angry at the world for taking me away from the place I knew was home to some strange, new world where I had to make friends all over again. This time, it was my choice, my dream, and I feel blessed beyond belief that whether by God's grace or life's twists of fate that I wish I was able to tell nine year old Sarah of the past that she not only was going to have the courage to live her dream but she would also find that one other person in life who has the very same soul that she does and that he was now hers forever. I have my parents to thank for pounding that saying into my head so much that it annoyed the crap out of me then but is appreciated now. Yet I still cannot believe where the fates of life have led me. I am still in awe that when Josh and I drive down the main road some nights back home from dinner at his mum's house we can see the snow capped Southern Alps glowing in the distance from the reflection of the moon amidst a black sky and a visible milky way and that we walk our new baby girl Asher on a beautiful path on the edge of gorgeous cliffs that will forever be one of my most favourite places in the entire world. It's hard not to be in complete awe every day by the beauty of this place and the funny cultural differences that once in a while make me nostalgic for the country of my birth but mostly just make me more and more interested in my new home.

I think in the end what I'm trying to say is that I'm blooming, that I began blooming here the first time my nine year old feet set foot on New Zealand soil. There was never a question of whether I'd be happy here or not, despite the fact that I do miss my friends and my family a whole lot. The only question is, will the restless wanderluster that lives inside me be hungry for a new place in the near future? The only thing I know for sure is that I will never be done traveling the world but New Zealand will just be my home base from now on. I have learned that the most important thing you can do for yourself is to blot out all other opinions and follow a trail to your own happiness and like Elizabeth Gilbert said, "You must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it."

Here are a few photos from our life lately: