Flying full from this sacred feeling, sensing whenua, softened by the grace of whanau cradling hearts close.
Time slows, truths shown under moonlight tikanga, ancient knowledge for modern magic making, love staking claims over lagoonèd souls, only claims of care and community, eternities’ resonance, serenity.
– Open Tony
Heading to Aetearoa New Zealand, at the beginning of the year, little did I know how much I would fall in love with the land and its peoples.
Enspiral is a community I have known for several years, ever since their members started staying with us in San Francisco, at our Embassy SF and Red Victorian locations, when they were passing through the Bay Area.
Last week, I joined them for their summer retreat at Camp Wainui, near Wellington, in New Zealand.
The theme of the gathering was “How can we be good ancestors”. To help ground us in this question, we were honored to have, as a cohost, Caro Taueki-Scott, a Maori leader and Enspiral community member, who was also part of my ‘home-group’ (of the 50 or so of us, we were gathered into smaller home-groups, whanau, of 4–5, who we would more regularly check-in with).
Below is a transcript of a poem I shared during the final evening’s “Listening party”, which borrows some of the Maori words that I learned, in both an intellectual and embodied way, from Caro. It is a poem I originally penned a year ago: Looking back now, that was the beginning of a process of discovery, expression, and weaving of serendipitous, timeless threads in my head. I am deeply grateful to the Enspiral community for gracing me with space to get them out of my head into this recapitulation:
An Enspiral Poem
Reflections on 3 key words from this time:
Stories. Courage. Ancestors
Stories
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with Desmond, and the Word was Desmond.
Logos. To name. To write. To share. To take joy in making meaning with the multitudes, those who would listen and resonate.
Trinities. Triads. Third culture philosophies.
Our selves. The Enspiral around us. Tikanga to sustain us.
Sovereignty, and the freedom to choose, to define, and to discern from symmetry, new patterns from awa, our water and will.
The physical substance of the whenua that nurture us, and for us to nurture back in turn.
The communities that give us collective meaning; our collective values turning identity into understanding and true awareness of our soul, our roles, where universal secrets unfold into the openness of belief, where faith can come to define our goals: I believe in us, that you will play your part too, as we join one another to build this greater whole.
Parent. Child. Holy Ghost.
Creator. Manifest. Spiritual Guide.
We are given the power, the strength, to name, to articulate, to define light from darkness, good from bad, meaning from chaos, value from apathy.
How might kaitiaki and the systems we use to create together, to make decisions together, legislate together, relate to the ability for systems to concatenate together, join our fates together, and from there, the collective value systems we will build together.
What decisions and determinations are the domain of private parties, the policy-realm of public officials, or the aegis of the ether in between? Club goods, common goods, public domains, gutting the corporate sector of their key pillars.
Where do centers of self governance come into the picture?
How do machineries of decentralization represent a new set of risks and opportunities as we ponder….?
…Transparency. Accountability. Monitoring, and graduated sanctions, seamless resolution of conflict, compassionate and humane enforcement, seeking out the better angels of our natures.
Elinor’s works, her re-sung legacy.
Polycentric Governance.
The relevance of blockchain ecosystem consonance. Beyond dissonance between different layers of the stack, we find our deliverance from strife and mental servitude. Beyond slavery to surveillance capital, we seed resistance to the prediction productization of our minds, our wills; we build the strength to say no to the gilded personalization of these pretenders to the panoptic overlord thrones. Fuck that game.
Patterns of politics and probities. Collective and individual duties, principles.
How do we belong and truly identify? Take pride and promote well-governed moralities?
Bring your poetry. Bring your practice. Point the way to how we prosper, find peace, and empower. Empathizing with the people, their stories in the telling, the local multitudes of the imperfect tense, who were going, or seeking: Historic gerunds, continuing, repeating, they were and have always been in the process of becoming, and being, and now, in this present, let us see them, arrived, perfected in our collective sight: Your voice matters, has mattered, we hear your choice, we have heard, your fears we share, they have been shared, your hope is near to our hearts.
Mind the gap, they say, on the London Underground, mind the justice gap, the economic gap, mind the spiraling Gini Coefficients that threaten to collapse the Jenga tower of inequality that we poke at, so gingerly. Hearts and minds, in our chosen future, will be seen for all they can be, and we will sweep away these corrupted building blocks of an unjust world, and laugh at the game they played, because with our collective virtuosic experimentation, improvisation, and joyful creation, together, we will have built the bridges to a better future.
Courage.
Fear is not something to be banished. It makes us human. We fear because we love, we fear because we care, we fear because we give meaning to the world around us. To be without fear is to be less human.
To turn not away from fear: To be aware, be alive, to be leaning into it.
This is courage: To be fully human; to ask, always knowing that you might not receive.
The universe would not have chosen us if it didn’t see something in us. To be seen this morning, in the light of tree-washed wonder… We see it in each other, we see it in ourselves. We always have. We always will: Not fearlessness, but the ability to overcome fear.
Being willing to admit fear, to be vulnerable, takes such courage, takes such love.
To be vulnerable does not mean to be weak. It means to be ready to ask for help, to fight fear, and to share courage, so others can see, lend their strength, give their love, to be human against inhumanity, to embrace sadness, darkness, as the negative space that makes the picture of who we really are.
We go away, but we are never gone. We create little pieces of home where we find love. Home is always with us, wherever we may go.
Ancestors.
We wander far, these days, from those who first nurtured us.
Ancestors, defined conventionally, premised on bonds of blood, relatives through birth, the physical act of making love to make real. What, though, beyond bonds of love, the freedom to love… beyond the physical making, have we not all the compassion and strength to look beyond to ‘true’ selves? And to create the physical, the spiritual, and personal environment to remake, and relegitimize, so that surroundings might make anew, with awa, and make meaning, with mana, to share the grace of self, belonging, and home, beyond blood.
