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After a few days off for the butt to settle down, and for antibiotics to build up in my system, Phil and I spent our Sunday in the moko pod.

Starting on my right side, Phil first drew in the outlines for the waistband wrapping from my stomach around to my lower right back.

Then he inked those outlines, with me lying on my side, looking out the sliding glass doors.

In the foreground, I saw the spaced boards of the narrow deck, greyed with age and weather. A patch of bright green grass flailing in the variable wind. Scattered across the flood plain, still-scrawny shrubs, which will grow into native trees to match the forest on the far side of the Waiwhakaiho River. In the distance, sheep grazing in a meadow. Each time a ewe moved, her lambs raced after her—a one-two movement, repeated over and over again, as if each time a ewe moved, she left something behind, like an elastic shadow that had to catch up to her.

Overhead, a large hawk gamboled on the wind, enjoying flight more than hunting. In the far distance, exposed grey and ocher layers of sedimentary rock in the high cliff eroded by the Waiwhakaiho River on the outside of a large meander. And above the cliff, the layered straight lines of grey and cream clouds, as though the sedimentary layers extended into the sky.

Two black and white ducks lumbered from the river, landed on the grass to graze among the sheep.

A moving form of brown and grey caught my attention. I couldn’t identify it in the far distance, but it kept bobbing. Slowly consolidated and emerged as a human form, walking towards me, still tiny in the distance, gradually getting bigger as I watched its progress. A large rectangular net, framed at the end of a pole, rested over his shoulder, like a giant pool screen.  It caught the wind, made walking difficult.

Phil told me he was likely a fisherman out catching white bait in the river—tiny, transparent eels, which are a local delicacy.

When Phil had inked the outlines of my waistband, I stood so he could draw in horizontal marker lines that would allow him to draw and then ink pakati lines around my waist and across my upper right thigh and belly.

Mark arrived around 11:30, and miked Phil and I up. As Phil drew pakati lines, I had a conversation with him about playing in R&B bands, about doing moko, about learning Maori as an adult, about teaching Maori culture in middle school. About his family background; his farther is Maori, his mother is not. About working with Rangi, about being on my healing journey with me. About putting a puhoro on someone who isn’t Maori. He was initially reluctant, I found out, but Rangi told him to wait until he heard my story, and my reason for wanting the puhoro. And then he was pleased to come along with Rangi on my healing journey.

The conversation, and my need to frame questions to ask him, took my mind off the pain, and I managed almost five hours on the table today.

We finished the waistband on the right side, and all of the shading on the right half of my body. You’ll see what we did today, the dramatic progress we made, in the series of photos below that sweep around my body from back to front on the right side. In particular you can note the koru (spiral) ending of the waistband at the edge of the back, which leaves my lower back open.

We’ll do the left side tomorrow in a similar manner, going as far as we can down the front of the left leg with pakati lines.

We should finish in two or three days more moko.