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  • Breathing Light - Issue #37-of drawing pins in the map of the past and the power of whakapapa

Breathing Light - Issue #37-of drawing pins in the map of the past and the power of whakapapa

May 15th, 2022

In this issue

  1. My Artwork of the Week

  2. Frontispiece

  3. Waiata mo te Ata-Moth Song, Moon Song

  4. Drawing pins in the timeline of our lives

  5. Fevered Mind Links (to make your Sunday morning coffee go cold)

  6. Endpapers

My Artwork of the Week

“You are one person, but when you move, an entire community walks through you- you go nowhere alone”

― Rupi Kaur, Home Body

In 2015, Wairua, the invisible wind of Spirit which had been directing my life since my birth, filled the sails of my life and carried me north to Hokianga in search of my ancestral connections.

In 2018, by force of circumstance and opportunity, it carried me back south to Fiordland and a deeper understanding of my whakapapa/ancestry.

For a few months, I didn't understand why I had opted to move, to relocate to a distant corner of the country. Then things began to happen.

I would make the twenty-minute drive down to Manapouri, sometimes for something to do, and other times because I felt compelled to go and spend time beside what was becoming a wahi tapu (sacred place) for me. There was something about the lake which drew me back again and again. For a long time, I could not understand why I kept returning; other than that I must.

What continually drew my attention was a little puke (hill) set on the lake edge, dwarfed by the vast and relentless mountains around it. It sat there, like a bush covered Sphinx, staring at me whenever I drew near. Somehow, I felt a significance here that spoke directly to me. And I knew it had something to do with my whakapapa, my ancestral line.

One afternoon we decided to make a short journey into the mountains, climb over the Borland Saddle and visit the lake's south arm.

A warm front was receding when we reached the lake edge, and the late afternoon sun was pushing fingers of light down through the rolling, roiling clouds.

The small hill, known locally as The Monument, was hidden and diminished by the enormous mountains behind it. Yet, despite the power of its older brothers, somehow, it maintained a powerful presence.

It called to me, asking me to make its likeness.

Later I would find out its Waitaha name, Koromatua.

And I would realise that it represented the southernmost drawing pin on the map of my ancestral line.

Frontispiece

We are a continuum. Just as we reach back to our ancestors for our fundamental values, so we, as guardians of that legacy, must reach ahead to our children and their children. And we do so with a sense of sacredness in that reaching.

-Paul Tsongas

Atamaarie e te whaanau:

Good morning everybody.

Isn't it strange? We usually don't want to know where we come from when we are young. I suppose that is because we can only see the future stretching away ahead of us. It's as if we are at the beginning of a journey rather than nearing its completion. So, when our parents or grandparents want to talk about "where we come from", most of us are usually relatively uninterested.

It's only when it dawns on us, usually in our 50s or 60s, that we are closer to the finish line of our life's race than we are to the start that we begin to reflect upon our life voyage and the lives of those whose journey has directly influenced our own. We become more interested in our ancestry and wonder how much our unique genetics have influenced our journey and how we see life.

In her book Dwellings A Spiritual History of the Living World, Linda Hogan puts it this way:

"Sometimes I hear it talking. The light of the sunflower was one language, but there are others more audible. Once, in the redwood forest, I heard a beat, something like a drum or heart coming from. the ground and trees and wind. That underground current stirred a kind of knowing inside me, a kinship and longing, a dream barely remembered that disappeared back to the body. Another time, there was the booming voice of an ocean storm thundering from far out at sea, telling about what lived in the distance, about the rough water that would arrive, wave after wave revealing the disturbance at center.

"Tonight I walk. I am watching the sky. I think of the people who came before me and how they knew the placement of stars in the sky, watched the moving sun long and hard enough to witness how a certain angle of light touched a stone only once a year. Without written records, they knew the gods of every night, the small, fine details of the world around them and of immensity above them.

Walking, I can almost hear the redwoods beating. And the oceans are above me here, rolling clouds, heavy and dark, considering snow. On the dry, red road, I pass the place of the sunflower, that dark and secret location where creation took place. I wonder if it will return this summer, if it will multiply and move up to the other stand of flowers in a territorial struggle.

"It's winter and there is smoke from the fires. The square, lighted windows of houses are fogging over. It is a world of elemental attention, of all things working together, listening to what speaks in the blood. Whichever road I follow, I walk in the land of many gods, and they love and eat one another. Walking, I am listening to a deeper way. Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands."

Sooner or later, we will reach a place on the road between Then and To-Come, when we will pause, reflect, and realise that the remarkable journey of our lives has not been the acquisition of "stuff".

Instead, we have been collecting the harvest of the past and fashioning these threads into a work suitable for handing on to the future and those who will follow us.

Waiata mo te Ata-Moth Song, Moon Song

“Maturity entails a readiness, painful and wrenching though it may be, to look squarely into the long dark places, into the fearsome shadows.

In this act of ancestral remembrance and acceptance may be found a light by which to see our children safely home.”

― Carl Sagan, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

This poem, from my book Raahui-A Walk in the Shadowlands, has always been a personal favourite. Sometimes our guides come to us not as human beings, but as other creatures.

Moth Song, Moon Song  

On day thirteen

a solitary, hovering moth

sprinkled with the moon’s magnetic shimmer

and dancing to the glowing tune

of her own glimmering self-purpose,

carved blue-white scripts of light

on the sensuous, velvet sigh of the night.

She fluttered me west,

over languid mountains,

with upturned, dreaming faces

and sinuous, silver-veined rivers in veiled valleys,

under barely-brushed clouds wandering east

till we came to the edge

of the shimmering ocean,

to wait and mourn

as the bright-faced moon

lowered herself slowly

below the rim of the world.

Drawing pins in the timeline of our lives

“I wrap myself in Mother’s cream pashmina and look in the mirror. She stares back. Resemblances run deep in our family. Ancestors lay claim and features are passed on like antiquities, every new life an ode to another.”

― Gurjinder Basran, Someone You Love Is Gone 

I have said many times in my photography workshops that every picture we make, have made or will ever make is autobiographical. It is a mile marker on the long journey from the drawing pin placed on the map at the beginning of our timeline to the one anchoring the silver thread of our lives at the other end.

A wise friend, who is a very gifted artist, puts it this way:

each day, when I step into the studio, I have to face myself.

The photographer/artist looks at his work and, if he has sufficient self-belief, then decides whether the work has any value (good or bad) rather than relying upon the approval of others.

Once he has dealt with any technical issues, he has to face whether his work is or is not authentic.

In other words, is it true?

Does it make sense?

Does it resonate on a personal level?

Or is it a frothy flummery of banal illustration?

However, while we may only ever give the autobiographical nature of our work an occasionally suspicious sideways glance, the fact remains that each time we look at our photographs, we are looking in the mirror.

What happens when we decide to go direct, to explore our history deliberately through the photographs we make?

What happens when we decide to make our life-walk the subject of our art?

When we decide to look inwards.

In English (and most European languages), we use the words ancestry or genealogy to map the paths of our ancestors and work out who came before us. We usually represent these as a two-dimensional diagram.

In Te Reo Māori we use the word whakapapa.

If we break the word apart, we get whaka (to make or do) and papa, which means earth, the domain of Papatuuaanuku, our mother, the Earth. Thus whakapapa describes our umbilical connection to Her; ancestral, geographical/physical, mental and spiritual. It also includes those who have gone before us and those who will follow us.

We are thus one breadcrumb in a long line of breadcrumbs.

However, while the European concept of genealogy is essentially human timelines, it is different for Māori. Whakapapa is not simply human-centric but includes all things, animate and inanimate.

Everything has whakapapa. Everything.

The stone you found on the beach has whakapapa. Its location, size, and wear on its surface tell the story of its journey from there to here and, by extension, the story of all its whaanau.

So a piece of pounamu (greenstone) lying on the side of a river in South Westland has been on a long journey from its conception deep within the womb of the mountains to its birthing onto the planet's surface. It has journeyed down the mountainsides to the rivers which are carrying it to the sea, shaping it as it travels. The very fact that it is there tells you its origin and eventual destination. It has whakapapa.

Plants have whakapapa. Trees have whakapapa. Animals have whakapapa. All things have whakapapa.

However, beyond the whakapapa of specific things lies a greater whakapapa, weaving multiple storylines into a greater whole.

The word becomes a phrase; then it becomes a sentence; then it becomes a paragraph and a chapter, a novel, a library, and a collection of libraries.

Genealogy restricts us to human timelines.

Whakapapa asks us to consider all timelines and how they and, by extension ours, are woven together into a tapestry of infinite curiosities.

And how do we make art that talks to that?

One day I was sitting on the side of a hill above Omapere, on the south side of Hokianga, in Northland. Taawhirimaatea, the atua/god of the winds, was pompously huffing and puffing his way in from the west, exhaling glowing shafts of golden light onto my ancestral land. Across from me was Pukerangatira, the small hill which is the drawing pin in my timeline in the North. It is not a particularly impressive hill, like Aoraki or Ruapehu, but it represents where my ancestors arrived and settled.

First, the great waka (voyaging canoe) Matawhaorua, captained by the Polynesian navigator Kupe, arrived around 875AD. On board was a sailor named Tiirairaka (local dialect for fantail), who stayed behind when Kupe returned home. He was my original tupuna (ancestor).

Some generations later, Kupe's descendant, Nukutawhiti, returned in Ngatokimatawhaorua and established a settlement nearby at Pakanae, the genesis of the great northern tribe Ngāpuhi. I reflected that my immediate ancestors were all buried in the urupa (cemetery) here.

As I looked across the water and beyond, I could imagine all those whiri (threads) being woven together by a Great Hand to create a story more than a thousand years long.

Fevered Mind Links (to make your Sunday morning coffee go cold)

Witnessing a growing wasteland, Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee seeks the threshold that could bring us back to the place where the land sings—to a deep ecology of consciousness that returns our awareness to a fully animate world.

For as long as I can remember, I have been on a quest to heal myself. From a very young age I can remember feeling different from my peers. I was always painfully shy and paralyzed with insecurity and fear, which left me in a constant state of self-criticism.

Contracts, text messages, ex messages, and shopping for electronic devices: Astrologers tell us to steer clear of such activities when Mercury appears to reverse course in the night sky, going from east to west in “retrograde” motion.

Turn your slow cooker or crockpot onto High. Cut the onion into 6 or 8 wedges and lay them on the bottom of your crockpot. Scrub or thinly peel the carrots (remember skin on means more nutrients!), cut into 5cm lengths and place on the onion. Rinse the corned beef then pat dry.

“It is we who are passing when we say time passes,” the French philosopher Henri Bergson insisted a century ago, just before Einstein defeated him in the historic debate that revolutionized our understanding of time.

Goudier Island is a windswept speck of dark rock located off the northwest coast of the Antarctic Peninsula. Two prefabricated wooden buildings and a metal Nissen hut, all painted black with red trim, stand near the waters of Port Lockroy.

Howdy folks! This post has been months in the making. Scouring the hell that is the McMansion Trenches of Virginia for only the best (worst) houses for your viewing pleasure generated some truly awful contenders.

“Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never ­being satisfied,” Zadie Smith counseled in her ten rules of writing.

Something happens when you are in a garden, when you garden — something beyond the tactile reminder that, in the history of life on Earth, without flowers, there would be no us.

End Papers

Man does not weave this web of life. He is merely a strand of it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.

Chief Seattle

Each week, when I set out to write the newsletter, I'm never sure what will emerge. But, the newsletter knows its own mind, and I'm happy to follow along and help it become.

I've done very little photography over the last week, and so I resorted to rifling through the back catalogue, looking for an image to include here. Inevitably, when I do, an image which has lain dormant in the shadows comes to the surface and raises its hand.

A couple of years ago, I went for a walk along the lake edge on the Kepler track.

On my way back to the car, I noticed a small community of fungi growing on a rotting log. So, of course, I stopped and made several exposures because that's what a photographer does. Then I filed the photographs away and forgot about them.

Lately, I've noticed an abundance of fungi growing around the town. First, of course, there are the inevitable Smurf-house mushrooms, amanita phalloides, lurking in the shadows under the pine trees. However, the closer I look, the more I realise how many different types of fungi there are. In many ways, this small community, a family, all seemed to coexist happily, sharing the abundance of the forest and supporting each other. In many ways, they are their own civilisation, and clearly, they all talk to each other. And clearly, they all seem to get along.

If only the same could be said for human beings.

I think I will go for a walk this week and spend time with fungi.

I know I have much to learn from them.

E te whaanau, may your week be filled with love, light, wonder and learnings from the wisdom of Te Taiao, the natural world.

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