A moment between becoming, arriving, departing, loathing, longing and general human acts that form our young lives and resonate in our older ones, we all hold a concept of home. It's a physical space, an emotional centering, and even an alienation depending. Home is a concept all humans carry. Consider Jon Day's warm memoir of pigeons and our innate homeland longing.

New Zealand's most beloved and famous author of the 20th century, Katherine Mansfield (October 14, 1888 – January 9, 1923) knew from a young age she wanted to be a writer and moved to London for school. Her modern short stories are witty, incisive and very unexpected.

Katherine Mansfield in 1916. From the Alexander Turnbull Library, New Zealand.

The Letters And Journals of Katherine Mansfield, published by her husband after her death at age thirty-seven, are equally complex and layered. They are pulled from scraps of paper, recipes, observations, and notes on napkins—everything that travelled from Mansfield's consciousness through the pen. Her casual observations of New Zealand as a land of beauty, intrigue, and ecological variation resonated most beautifully. 

Kaingaroa Plain On the journey the sea was most beautiful, a silver-point etching, and a pale sun breaking through pearl clouds.

There is something inexpressibly charming to me in railway travelling. I lean out of the window, the breeze blows, buffeting and friendly, against my face, and the child spirit, hidden away under a hundred and one grey city wrappings, bursts its bonds, and exults within me. I watch the long succession of brown paddocks, beautiful, with here a thick spreading of buttercups, there a white sweetness of arum lilies. And there are valleys, lit with the swaying light of broom blossom. In the distance, grey whares, two eyes and a mouth, with a bright petticoat frill of a garden, creeping round them.

I love how Mansfield observes her home in such detail, arresting all else and taking it in through the senses.

Monday 

The manuka and sheep country – very steep and bare, yet relieved here and there by the rivers and willows and little bush ravines. It was intensely hot – We were tied, and in the evening arrived at Pohue, where Bodley has the Accommodation House, and his fourteen daughters grow peas. We camped on the top of a hill, mountains all round, and in the evening walking in the bush, to a beautiful daisy-pied creek – fern, tuis, and we saw the sheep sheds. Smell and sounds, 12 Maoris – their hoarse crying – dinner cooking in the homestead, the roses, the Maori cook.

The last time I stepped off the plane in New Zealand, I was immediately drenched in the scent of the extraordinary manuka blossom from which the eponymous honey is made. It is one of the most extraordinary experiences, captivating, overwhelming and arresting in pure-scented heaven.

Te Urewera National Park, New Zealand. Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

Thursday 

In the morning rain fast – the chuffing sound of the horses. We get up very early indeed, and at six o’clock, ready to start, the sun breaks through the grey clouds. There is a little dainty wind, and a wide fissure of blue sky. Wet boots, wet motor oil, torn coat, and the dew shining on the scrub. No breakfast. We start, the road grows worse and worse. We seem to pass through nothing but scrub-covered valleys, and then suddenly comes round the corner a piece of road. Great joy, but the horses sink right into it, the traces are broken; it grows more and more hopeless. The weather breaks and rain pours down. We lose the track again and again, become rather hopeless, when suddenly far ahead we see a man on a white horse. The men leave the trap and rush off. By and by through the track we met two men. Maoris in dirty blue ducks – one can hardly speak English. They are surveyors. We stop, boil the billy and have tea and herrings. Oh, how good! Ahead the purple mountains, the thin wretched dogs, we talk to them. Then we drive the horses off, but there is no water; the dark people, our conversation – E ta, haeremai te kai – it is cold. The crackling fire of manuka, walking breast high through the manuka.

The journal entries come from a period between 1907 and 1910 when Mansfield, who was then in school in England, returned to New Zealand. She knew the visit would be short-lived and that her career would be made in England and Europe, perhaps that gave more of an idyllic gleam to her observations.

Outside, the stars and the utter spell-magic mist moving-mist over the whole world. Lying, her arms over her ahead – she can see faintly, like a grey thought, the moon and the mist. They are hardly distinguishable. She is not tired now – only happy. She can see the poplar tree mirrored in the water. The grass is wet. There is the faintest sound of crickets. As she brushes her hair, a wave of cold air strikes her - damp cold fingers about her heart.

The sun comes. The poplar is green now. The dew shines on everything – a little flock of geese and goslings float across the river. The mist becomes white, rises from the mountain ahead. There are the pines – and there just on the bank – the flowering manukais a mass of white colour against the blue water. A lark sings, the water bubbles. She can just see ahead the gleam of the rapids. The mist seems rising and falling.

And now the day fully enters with a duet for two oboes. You can hear it.

The compulsion and details of home seep in through the senses and sit in the bones, infiltrating the sense of self and the formation of the writing mind. A contemporary of Mansfield, Caribbean-born writer Una Marson, also travelled to London to pursue a writing career. She wrote similarly of her beloved Jamaica in detailed, sometimes nostalgic ways. Marson reimagined a colonised homeland as an anchor for the self. 

"A page of the digitised Mansfield Journal featuring thoughts on a return voyage to New Zealand." From the University of Texas Archives.

Almost a century ago French philosopher Gaston Bachelard defined home as inhabited space. I've always believed that if we sit long enough, we can feel home in the shadow of a tree. The roads we travel, the land, the flora, and the aspects of self, all beautifully rendered in Mansfield's journals.