The hills of the central North Island of New Zealand are a blanket of verdant greens and golden yellows.

From the deep, black green of the dark pine forests, to the brown green of the giant ferns and every shade of kiwi in garden and grove. The quilt is divided into perfect patchwork sections by the even stitches of fencing, running over the high mountain passes, between sheep and deer fields, and across the central plain of a valley between cows and horses. The squares are embroidered by the delicate terraced lines, beaten into hillsides by the trimmed hooves of ewes leading their little lambs between green pastures and cold rivers fed by icy springs that tumble, laughing, over the pebbled grooves that run deep between the hills. Long, pristine beaches with a rainbow of white, brown and black sand lay like a ruffle along the hem of the island; the fancy fringe on an ancient elegance. Smoking thermal pools and the occasional snow topped mountain presiding over the steel blue of Lake Taupo round out one of the most diverse landscapes we’ve had the privilege of exploring.

We’re falling in love with New Zealand.

Yesterday we spent a lazy afternoon exploring Roydon Downs, a hidden gem not far from Papamoa Beach on the Bay of Plenty.  We’ve been camped out with new-old friends who split their time between living a quiet life in their little slice of heaven, and sojourning their unknown places with their two lively little sprites. They’d lived here six years before they found this spot; it’s a well kept local secret.

A farmer with a long view on life has spent his time developing several hundred hectares of rolling hills into a park. At first he built for his children, and then his grandchildren, and then for the people in general. He’s got cabins that he rents for next to nothing, pigs and chickens, miles of well maintained forest treks, a ropes course he’s built deep in the forest and a water slide carved into the hillside, not to mention a long, fast flowing creek, next to which he piles a heap of inner tubes for kids to carry up to the waterwheel and float down in.

The best part: it’s free. There is the tiniest charge to stay in a cabin, but to come out for the day an play is his gift to the community. I love that.

The children spent the day howling down the hill on the rubber slide and running the rapids in the ice cold river, screaming in delight through their chattering teeth. I sat on a rock in the sun and knit on Hannah’s sock, talked politics and education with our new friend, and laughed as the kids drifted by with reports of high adventure had upstream.

These are the days in life worth living:

The days in which I get to squat in the dirt and feed chickens out of my hand with a blondie girl whose two front teeth are almost grown in, and pick blackberries in the sun with my fast evaporating big boy, and listen to the girl with one foot out the door play her guitar for her new little friend with only the trees and mountains to listen in. These are the days that I take a deep breath, and a snapshot for later, harder days and embroider into the fabric of life in vibrant colours to keep my heart warm when I’m old and my big adventures are happening in my mind instead of at my feet.

I spent the day silently shouting my gratefulness, because this day was a gift, a precious gift, from a man I’ve never met: the owner of the farm.

Does he know the gift he is giving? Not just to his family but to his community, the people who escape their collective rat races to recharge in his forest on weekends, and the journeying, like us, who could never have predicted that our feet would carry us over the bridges he and his sons built, and lovingly maintain, under his towering redwoods? I am inexpressibly thankful for his vision, for his legacy, and for the immeasurable gift of an afternoon, on the far side of the world, that has been being prepared for my little family for longer than I’ve been on the planet.

It has me thinking about the gifts I could be giving, fifty years hence, if I think ahead and invest my heart and my hands in this moment.