"The shore is a place without seed, without nourishment, a scavenged death place. It is the wasteland, too salt for growth, where the sea puts up its dead. Shored seaweed does not take root but dries and piles, its pods splitting in the sun, while bleached land plants crack and turn to bone. Yet because of being a nothing, a neutral place - not land, not sea - there is freedom on the shore, and rest. There is freedom to search the nothing, the weed pile, the old wood, the empty shell, the fish skull, searching for the speck, the beginning - or the end that is the beginning. Hope and desire can rest there, thoughts and feelings can shift with sand grains being sifted by the water and the wind. I put my bag down there one evening and rested, leaving a way for the nothing, the nothing that can become a pin-prick, a stirring. I took warm clothing from my bag and waited through the night for the morning that would become a new beginning. (Roimata, chapter 1 p18)"
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Patricia Grace
Patricia Frances Grace (born 17 August 1937) is a New Zealand author of novels, short stories and children's books. She was the first female Māori writer to publish a collection of short stories, Waiariki (1975) and has since written seven novels, seven short-story collections, a non-fiction biography and an autobiography.
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