What is it that stops you now?
Is it the possibility of failure? You’ve survived failure many times before, so why
would this be different? Perhaps you have tied too much to your ability to speak, to
understand. Because it is more than understanding a language — it is making sense of
yourself.
And perhaps there is nothing more frightening than reckoning with yourself.
If your life were a movie, you’d jump off the Point now, despite the cold and being fully
clothed. You wouldn’t even pause to take off your shoes: the camera would zoom in on
them as you pushed yourself up and off, the camera following behind you off the edge.
The footage would slow as you made your descent — perhaps a shot or two of you as a
child would be cut in to make the point that you had grown into your bravery. And as
you sank into the water, you would hang suspended there in the dappled shadows, at
peace until your need to fill your lungs would tip your head up towards the light. And
then it would cut to you surfacing again, laughing — that circle in your life completed at
last. You faced your childhood fear and now you can face anything.
How disappointing it is then to still quake at the edge of the Point — perhaps more
afraid now than as a child, even though you don’t really have more to lose. Why do you
think that because you’ve never jumped from here you lack courage? Why have you
returned to this place at all?
You know that you are brave. That this is not the cliff you need to conquer. The sevenmetre
plunge from the rocks to the lake is not the leap you need to complete. You seek
a different kind of immersion — not in the cool clear water below, but in the waters of
your soul.
Breathe out.
Breathe in.
These new kupu are reclaiming space in your synapses. Did you need as many tools to
create these paths as you do now to modify them? Examples, metaphors, stories, context.
You try to remember if this is what it was like when you learnt your first language, when
the pattern, shapes and sounds finally became clear and you understood. An example:
you know mārama because you think of te marama — understanding is as clear and
bright as the full moon.
Sometimes you lose track of words and kupu, mixing them up in your head and on your
tongue. It is hard to break old habits — the mispronunciations you learnt as a child, the
way you hold your mouth letterbox thin, so all your vowel sounds flatten into one. You
dig the heel of your hand into the tight muscles at the base of your jaw to free the space
for these more expansive vowels that round your palate.
To start with your r’s sound more like d’s until your tongue is strong enough to flick into
a trill. Sometimes your mouth aches like you have been laughing and laughing — it is
the pain of joy.
There are things that you’ve just learnt that excite you — connections between word
and place and history. You had thought that Bulli Point was named after cockabullies —
the small fish were plentiful in the water there. Or perhaps someone was feeling poetic
and thought the jumpers swimming back to the cliff looked like a school of the fish.
Now you know it is a corruption of a kupu: perhaps Te Pōroro, the name of the marae
that once stood here. Or perhaps of the poroporo that grows along the cliff edge. Even if
it was named for cockabullies, that too is a corruption of kōkopu. You have a list of these
words — biddybid, Otago, Tolaga — and some of the stories of how the kupu slid into
the space between Māori and English. That space that strangely still exists now.
You decide that you will call this place by its name — it is the smallest courtesy, and you
know how annoying it is when people get your name wrong, turning you into a star, or a
number, or a week, pronouncing you wrong.
