Rachael Ayres is a lifelong learner, wild dreamer, sourdough baker and traveller who loves solitude, words, ideas, fibre arts, walking long distances and spending time with family and friends. She is a member of Auckland’s Titirangi Baptist Church.
One of the first rules of writing is to consider your audience. So who is reading this? I really don't know. Someone must be reading or it wouldn't be published, right? But who are you?
A reasonable assumption would be that you might be Baptist. But that doesn’t rule out non-Baptists. I have attended a Baptist Church for the bulk of my life (after a childhood at the Salvation Army), but I identify more as ‘Christ-follower’ than ‘Baptist’. As I see it, one is a subset of the other. I read things from other faith traditions and so I suppose it is fair to wonder if the audience is wider than only Baptists.
Is it more likely that you are younger rather than older? Oldies still go for magazines and newspapers, don't they? But is it true that young people don't read any more?
Are you reading this on a computer at a desk or your laptop on the couch or on a phone on the go? What are you interested in? What are you passionate about? What do you love? What have you been reading and seeing and overhearing and enjoying and struggling with and being provoked or challenged by? Why would you read something a 50-something unemployed Pākehā female has written? What, if anything, would you ask her?
Who are you?
It's a genuine question. If you’d like to answer, you can contact me at [email protected]. I'd love to hear from you.
And who am I?
When I was a child, people would ask what I wanted to do when I grew up. My problem was that there was no ONE answer. I couldn't choose between being a mother, a librarian and an author.
After multiple miscarriages and thinking the first dream might never become a reality, I experienced the joy of becoming a mother. Eight times in under twelve years. There’s nothing like the wonder of childhood to alert you to God’s goodness in the simple things of life. And now I get to experience it all over again, just recently being blessed with the new and different joy of being a grandmother – twice in two months.
But back to my childhood dreams. When I was at school I often spent lunchtimes in the library. When I came to creating my own home, no matter how small a space we were in (think eleven people in two motorhomes), it had to include books. Now we have over 60 meters of bookshelf around the house full of treasures that we have collected and read as a family and shared with others in our community. I have done the work of a librarian even if it hasn't produced any dollars. I have not had a paying job in a library - that's what people mean when they ask, "What do you do?", isn't it? It's code for "how do you earn money?" Over my life I have earnt money by babysitting and frying chicken and flipping burgers and nurse aiding and cleaning for friends and teaching English as a foreign language and nurturing littlies in a kindergarten.
However, rather than defining myself by what I do, I prefer to think about what I love. I love learning. Beauty. Dreaming. Baking sourdough stuff. Organising. Knitting. Crocheting. Poetry. Long distance walking. Home education. Creating a handmade ethical wardrobe. Reading. Languages. Ink drawing. Watercolour. Thinking. Travel. Music. Theatre. Observing. Wondering. The poor. Creation. Cities. Communication. Co-operation. Sunrises. Prayer beads. Journalling. Intergenerationalism. Looking for the fingerprints of God.
Sometimes loves have been just for a season - living in Poland for two years as communism fell, cheese making, house design, curriculum design, keeping chickens, running Sunday School, home kindy and homeschool groups, assisting refugees, travelling for fifteen months with the kids and Grandpa, doing research in Spanish for a book publisher in Laos.
For almost thirty years people have identified me as a homeschool mum. My baby has just turned 19 and left home a year ago. That role has come to an end, and again people are asking me, "What are you going to do now?" Well, maybe I will get to be an author after all.
Image credit: Rachael Ayres
