reflection

Why I Hugged My UnVaxxed Friend the Other Day

Why I Hugged My UnVaxxed Friend the Other Day

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It’s tough out there right now. So many, many people functioning on fear.

I am a fully vaccinated anti vaxxer. In a perfect world, I would not go near a vaccination.

I have a healthy distrust of big government, big business, and big pharma. To be honest I would not trust any of them as far as I could throw them.

I chose to be double vaccinated, not for myself, but for my family and community. The decision was simple. Not that I liked making it one little bit.

But this is not a perfect world. We are all immuno-compromised because of the tainted air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat, the work we do, our unhealthy homes and workplaces, and the inequitable society and economy we live in.

If we put a lens to the disgusting chemicals that abound in our environment, a COVID vaccination and its potential side effects probably pale in comparison.

Exhaust fumes, pesticides and nitrates in water and food, chemicals in building materials, cleaning materials… the list goes on and on and on, and it has all been in the name of gross profit, well actually greed.

I write not to excuse or justify for a moment the use of vaccination. It is simply to set a broader context.

This is not to debate or to use the tired adversarial debate process, of who is right and wrong.

No one is right and wrong in this.

I got vaccinated because I spend a fair bit of my time with marginalized members of our community, those on the edges, that we now deem ‘immuno-compromised.’ They include my 92-year-old Dad, who I visit regularly as his care-giving service has been halved. I spend time with people from the disability community, who have no choice over their compromised health. I spend time with people of various ethnicities who through inter-generational trauma, poverty and suppression through colonisation have compromised health; physical, mental, and spiritual.

None of these friends and whānau have the same access I do, as a middle-class white pākehā with a small disposable income, to organic food, home grown food, herbal remedies, yoga and meditation programmes that all support my immune system.

There is plenty of science that clearly demonstrates those in lower socio-economic groups do not easily have the bandwidth or the environment to ‘pivot’ to healthier lifestyles.

If we could get what I have in these so called ‘alternative’ sources of good nutrition, spiritual and mental health to the wider population, we might shut down the Ministry of Health, Pfizer et al tomorrow.

After all, they do have a vested interest in people remaining sick, otherwise they would all be out of a job.

But we are where we are.

And we have a new minority that run the risk of being turned into lepers; the unvaccinated.

I get it.

When I go out and I see people not bothering with masks, sanitizer, tracing, or social distancing, I judge. I think, come on, get with the programme.

But I then move on to work to source some compassion in myself. The fear in their eyes equals the fear in the eyes of those fully vaccinated following the rules. And let’s face it the rules are messy, inequitable, and frequently don’t make much sense.

Tragically, there are so many hidden sources, political and ideological behind the information we are consuming. We have outsourced what we think and feel, not solely to government and business, but to the algorithm that is choosing the information we consume. We would do well to hack and disrupt the invasive memes that enter our homes and heads that follow an orchestrated coded agenda, and browse sources far, wide, and unpredictable.

The government’s PR campaign is growing tired.

In Aotearoa Labour and National governments alike have been manipulating the population with PR and media since the early 20th century.

A recent article in Memories magazine by the wonderful radio documentarian, Hop Owen, now in his nineties, tells the story of the introduction of radio to Aotearoa. At the time, a radio set in the home was the very latest technology. But its introduction was mired in political agendas.

Hop writes that in 1934 Auckland’s favourite radio station 1ZB was owned and operated by “Uncle Scrim” a former Methodist City Missioner, who knew well the misery of Auckland’s poor and unemployed. He gave a weekly talk called The Man in the Street that was obligatory listening for anyone in Auckland with a radio set. But an election loomed, and the reigning Coates/Forbes coalition (yes they had them even then) of the Reform and United parties (predecessors of the National Party) were worried Uncle Scrim would use his platform to support Labour, and the government Post and Telegraph department that controlled radio frequencies jammed his broadcast. He did get to broadcast his script the next day after a furore and it contained no endorsement of the Labour Party.

Labour won the election in a landslide victory, but it too would go on to try and control the airwaves. They made the way for parliament to be broadcast for the first time in the western world under a pretext that it would bring democracy to the people. They then went on to stage manage, and carefully select speeches, speakers and edited debates to better represent partisan government views.

It does not feel a long stretch 85 years later to the controlled daily PR briefings we endure from government ministers and health bureaucrats every day. And isn’t it strange that the signage and branding in vaccination centre booths is remarkably like those in polling booths? Just saying.

So where do we go.

We must dig deep in ourselves to source love, compassion, and acceptance. It takes work. It takes stepping through our fears and reactions. For me I now have a two hourly daily practice of yoga, breath, and meditation. That calms me. I have used lockdowns to expand my practice. I am growing vegetables and tending my garden more than I have ever done before in the 30 years I have lived in this spot.  I teach meditation and breath workshops online, for people in workplaces and homes to bring a bit of peace and harmony to the fear of the chaos of the world beyond our bubbles.

In my own small way, I wish to bring these immune system building practices to others, and one day in an evolved world, they will become the norm, rather than toxic food, air, water, chemicals drugs and adversarial politics.

We are so blessed to have a short time living on this planet. The natural world we live in is magical and amazing at every turn. If we can pause, wonder and be curious about its magnificence perhaps we can better source wellbeing. In front of me are a vase of flowers and some fresh fruit, they are exquisite. They are beautiful beyond compare. What human mind could ever design something so remarkable. We work to get close, with our imaginations and creativity. But we thrive when we surrender and let go to the fact, we are only a small speck in the cosmos. Our ills derive from getting way too big for ourselves, thinking we can control natural systems for our own benefit.

As western systems of governance, business and science are failing us, it is timely to turn to the ancient wisdom of indigenous knowledge sourced ( honoured and not appropriated) from India to North America to Aotearoa. Western science and thought are slowly catching up to the thousands and thousands of years of wisdom in indigenous science, that melds physics and metaphysics, and teaches harmonious living with tangible and intangible systems of our natural world.

My teacher Sri Sri Ravi Shankar puts politics and religion like this:

“The role of religion is to make one righteous and loving, and politics means caring for people and their welfare. When religion and politics don’t co-exist, then you have corrupt politicians and pseudo-religious leaders.

A religious person who is righteous and loving will care for the welfare of the whole population and hence become a true politician. And a true politician can only be righteous and loving.

Today both religion and politics needs reform. Religion must become broader and more spiritual to allow freedom of worship and to encompass all the wisdom of the world. And politicians must become more righteous and spiritual. “

So whānau, breathe. In your mind and your soul, hug one another, whether it is mentally or physically. Have compassion for all in this time of fear.

Source yourself in activity and thought that brings you peace.

Step away from the drama that pipes into our homes and affects our systems, manipulating adrenal systems, evoking cortisol, dopamine, and oxytocin without our control.

Take time to reflect, to meditate, to do nothing and whatever works for you to still your mind and relax.

In te reo Māori the achingly beautiful, timeless, prescient and connected language of this land,

Kia manawanui, kia māia, kia arohanui.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I Quit

I Quit

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I’ve called time.
At the tender or ripe age of 60, this is it. Enough.
I quit.
There is huge freedom in being a quitter.
I’ve given up.
I’ve let go.
I’ve surrendered.
So What?

To quit in today’s world usually has a negative connotation. That’s interesting. A quitter who gives up is often seen as a failure.

But the very word quit comes from two great concepts; freedom and silence.

It’s latin.
quit1
/kwɪt/
Origin
Middle English (in the sense ‘set free’): from Old French quiter (verb), quite (adjective), from Latin quietus, past participle of quiescere ‘be still’, from quies ‘quiet’.

It is time to unravel all that I have thought was important over the past few decades, because most of it wasn’t.
And I think as a species, we humans have been overthinking our importance and shaping the world to our own detriment. That is why I am quitting, giving up, letting go and surrendering.

Phew, it does feel a great relief.

I have been so attached to getting it all right for so long. Trying to solve every freakin’ problem with my intellect. How arrogant is that? But most of us do it. We think if we nut everything out, we can solve any problem. Well, who decided whatever it was, was a problem in the first place!

So to coin a hugely overused cliché, what is the roadmap?
Well for a start there are two very colonizing, limiting words.

Road.
We would well do without them. They have so limited our horizons, the ways we navigate. Yeah I get they were designed to make it easier to get around, and in a certain time that was probably a good idea, as to navigate rugged terrain limited our movement and access to opportunities. But at what cost? Now the road rules and negates so many other ways of navigating our world, that are usually far more harmonious with other species and the natural world. Bugger the road.

And Maps.
Maps started out to make life easier, didn’t they? But maps have way out lived their usefulness after centuries of use to dominate, separate, colonise, divide, own, rule. You get my point. And anyway, there’s GPS.

So goodbye road, goodbye map.
I don’t want a roadmap for the future.
What I do want is to quit, to find freedom, quiet and silence.

The world is already going through so much crazy change, any map or any road you might have is going to be obsolete the moment you look at it.

The massive challenges we face, environmentally and socially have been on the cards for many many years.

The thing was, when people started to talk about the future and the opportunities and risks of globalization, the use of resources and the wicked problem or enormous potential of developing the developed, developing and under developed world, it all became an ideological or intellectual debate.

Debate. Now there is another outdated concept. Oh dear, and that has been the supposed basis of democracy in the world, debate. I am really not sure whether ‘debate’ is a useful process at all. It’s an adversarial clashing of egos more than anything else, and has the world always ended up a better place in the hands of those who won a debate?

So we were all getting it wrong trying to fix everything with our heads, our logic. So arrogant.

We had taught ourselves to distrust, disown and discredit our intuition. It was witchcraft, it was ropey, soft, vague, dangerous, woolly, feminine, dangerous, unproven, hugely risky.
Well was it, is it?

My intuition told me a long long time ago that we needed to live more harmoniously with each other and with nature. I didn’t have the data, and to be honest, quantitative data has never really been my thing. But I could sense we were pushing it. Stuff was going to wear out. Surely life on this planet has always been about cause and effect. You use things and people up too much, and things will bounce back. There will be an effect, there will be an impact, and the force may well be far greater than you thought.

So here we are. Pandemics. Storms. Busted infrastructure. Stuff running out. People not happy.

My aim is to do far far less.

I quit work. I quit recreation. I quit consuming.
Undoubtedly I will do a little of all these things.
But I will DO far far less, and aim to BE far far more.
Much more meditation every day.
Teaching myself to think less and less and less.
Teaching myself to reflect more and more and more.
Teaching myself to love more and more and more.
Teaching myself to practice Festina Lente, to hasten slowly.
To be in balance with action and stillness.
Hmmmmm.
Ahhhhhhhh.
That feels good.
I quit.

Daylighting The Pipeline of Uselessness

Daylighting The Pipeline of Uselessness

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In the work of restoring streams and creeks there is a thing called ‘daylighting’. It refers to restoring waterways that have been diverted underground through pipelines and culverts. The daylighting occurs when they can once again flow above ground as water ways.

So with that in mind I want to talk about how we might bust open the pipeline of uselessness that is our education and career pathways for young people in Aotearoa New Zealand.

It is time to call it out. For more than 20 years we have established a pipeline of uselessness through education and workplaces in Aotearoa.

We have been educating people with information that does not turn into skills and does not equip them for jobs, workplaces and the world.

We have created endless tiers of management, where people do not produce anything.

Ask the majority of secondary, tertiary students, and employers if they think their education is equipping people well for work and the world, and they will offer you a resounding NO.

And yet it continues, on and on.

It all began to really turn to custard towards the end of the 20th century. As the new millennium dawned, some bright sparks in government decided they would jump on the neo-liberal machine and turn tertiary education into something that would make money… at any cost.

So to some extent, there were elements of this that were a good idea. Why not earn income from international students? And to do this one had to head higher up the rankings of universities internationally. Maybe that could be a good idea too.

However, as is often the way with government policies, it was a sledgehammer to crack a nut approach.

Around this time my own alma mata, AIT polytech, became AUT University, God Bless Them.

The transition showed just how myopically focused (and how much the same!) academics and bureaucrats can be. They made sure funding was all about research outputs and bums on seats, and sweet FA about quality teaching, or adapting curricula for fast changing world and employment markets.
Any sense of graduates gaining skills and mindsets for the new working world and fast emerging ‘gig’ economy were no where in sight.

And on their merry way they trundled through the 2000s.

Every year, tertiary education became less and less relevant to the market.

Every year more and more degrees and courses were created.

Every year universities, polytechnics and private providers spread campuses up and down the country, offering a multitude of courses that competed with one another, with pipelines to jobs that no longer existed, at least not in the form they were being taught.

Every year more and more graduates were ‘qualified’ for specific roles that were diminishing.

Every year, the expectations of graduates rose, as they sought employment in so called ‘management’ roles because these attracted better salaries, and after all that was their due, after paying thousands and thousands in student fees. Why wouldn’t you?

At one point it really came home to a group of us who were ex-industry professionals helping run a journalism programme that had become a degree at AUT when we noticed all the applicants for a media award for a ‘senior’ journalist were in their early to mid 20s. The career path to someone being ‘senior’ and then on to management had grown much faster, so that people could follow the salary band, all with limited experience.

And so we also started to see more and more of the “Peter Principle” , the concept dreamed up in the late 1960s as a satirical idea about managers rising to the level of their incompetence. The principle fast turned from satire to a sad reality.

And so we started to create legions and legions of managers every where, from government, to corporations to small businesses, to not-for-profits.

Everyone was a manager of something.

And to boot, the title and the role, the job description, the CV, the ability to be a manager was based on some inept psychometrics, in job interviews, and employment processes run by HR professionals that measured only very narrow elements of human beings and their ability and potential.

Argggh. I have sat on many an interview panel when all the assessment criteria were irrelevant and quite frankly useless, bearing no relationship to the actual job to do. Someone would end up employed who did not fit the job and was simply good at writing CVs and application letters and gaining qualifications.

Anyone with a foreign name or diverse life experiences usually had their CV tossed to the bottom of the pile.

And so for several decades we created tiers and tiers of managers, predominantly white and middle class, inexperienced in life, emotional intelligence or empathy, but increasingly skilled at justifying their existence by creating meaningless work; restructures, new strategies, staff reshuffles, KPIs, reports, blah, blah blah.

This is nothing new of course in a colonial society, but it reached epidemic proportions over the past 30 years.

And now here was the further twist. These legions of inexperienced ‘managers’ were now making government and corporate policy, to employ more and more people like themselves, who had no experience at the ‘coal face’ but could write reports, and invent KPIs and measurements that all looked quite good on paper, and might get an A as an essay or uni assignment, or as a bright new shiny output of policy or strategy, but did not turn into the delivery of any useful services for the public, or the economy. These outputs never turned into any specific actions or changes.

And so on and one the roller coast trundled throughout the first decade and a half of the 21st century.

Every year, local and central government grew another floor of managers, more and more tiers of management. I believe Auckland Council has six or seven tiers of management today.

My goodness, what does Tier 4 do as opposed to Tier 7?

And in the hallowed halls of the council, people talk rather reverently about some on a higher tier as if they are a demi-God. Well I guess they wield more power and definitely bigger budgets and the ability to hire and fire, but divine presence?

So we wonder why the public service is in disarray and the corporate world terrifyingly out of touch with their customers and the public.

For a start they are increasingly faceless, lost way behind an automated customer service line. Their names, and their direct line phone numbers are never to be found. To face up and take responsibility is no where on the horizon, not even as a KPI.

I have painted a desolately picture here, and despite this I remain an optimist that these horrendous can change.

There are increasing glimmers that there is more and more awareness that these systems are broken. We hear more and more talk about adaptive leadership, empathy, authenticity, vulnerability and human centred organisations.

Here and there the talk turns to reality.

It does take a mindshift, not new skill sets. And there is a vast different.

Our individualised education and employment systems focus on gaining tools an and skill, without the wisdom of where and how to use them.

This requires a mindset shift, to being more human centres, and more focused on the collective than the individual. It requires a focus on how can the team as a whole succeed, and on measuring a wider range of successes.

We really have to redefine success, and we see glimmers in this around the new approaches being sought by government to measure more widely that GDP and solely economic metrics.

The idea that wellbeing and social impacts are equally important.

After all if we go to the origin of the word ‘economy’ it comes from the same root as ‘ecology’ which comes from the Greek word and concept EKOS, which is family.

So the whole point originally, was economics as a system for a family.

So paying attention to the collective, the whole, the organism of an organisation is the new ‘black.’

But we are only taking baby steps towards realising this after entrenched individualism and colonialism for hundreds of years.

The irony and the opportunity and the potential turn of the cycle is to wake up to the fact that all along there have been systems existing in this country that are perfectly suited as a model for a collective way of working, of honouring difference, and recognising the enormous potential when one or I shoud say when ‘we’ fully embrace the innovation, the inclusion and the ingenuity of working in a collective way to achieve far greater results, outcomes and outputs than we can achieve alone.

Aod so this most obvious of systems is Te Ao Māori.

Hello! It is such an absolute no brainer, and yet legislation, ideology, religion, and mainstream culture has repeatedly ignored, dismantled and totally supressed Te Ao Māori systems.

It is a devestatingly crying shame. For what better opportunity does Aotearoa have than to full embrace an ancient and timeless culture as it’s mainstream operating system.
How beautiful, elegant, smart and successful this can be.

Our niche on the world stage, our uniqueness, has always been based on Te Ao Māori, it has just never been acknowledged.

Our history of punching above our weight, of kiwi innovation has always had Te Ao Māori central to it as much as the zeal of European pioneers. And I romantically like to think that on a good day historically, there were no degrees of seperation between innovative pioneesr and an entrepreneurial tangata whenua.

Hello people, wake up. We have this most elegant and smart opportunity right in front of us. The rest of the world sees it and we don’t. We are admired and sought after around the globe and yet we still can’t see it, mumbling into our beards monosyllabically in the cultural cringe anti-tall poppy sentiments giving ‘all credit to the oppposition.’ What?????? How crazy is this false humility?
Really it is just passive-aggressive bullshit.

We can rise up the brilliant opportunities of the tikanga of Te Ao Māori as this main operating systems for our motu and ourselves.

We are gorgeous. And this place is gorgeous.

We can collectively embrace system changes that enable us to be the change we wish to see in the world.

Fundamentally, the changes that will enable more equity for more people to be fulfilled in their life and work will come from a place of love.

The concepts of aroha, of whakawhanaungatanga , of manaakitanga and kaitiakitanga are all about love, a universal love connecting, people, planet and the universe.

Love is about shining light, on ourselves, and on others, seeking the light, seeking the daylight.

So daylighting our selves and our places in love is something that we can all commit to, it is a value beyond question, beyond debate, it is presencing our potential as human beings to evolve in love.

Aue te aroha i ahau, aue
Aue e te iwi e.
E te iwi Māori puritia kia mau,
Utaina ki runga i te waka o te ora
Ka hoe ai ki te tauranga.

Speaking About Spoke, My Longest Ever Post!

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Exactly 14 years ago I quit my job and I have never worked again.

I was in a management role. I woke up one day and realised what I was doing was a complete waste of time.

It was driving me crazy. The work didn’t produce things, anything. I shuffled paper, went to pointless meetings, managed staff who didn’t need it, wrote meaningless reports, strategies and KPIs all of which produced next to nothing.

When I veered into work that actually produced something, like writing stories, having conversations and mentoring people, I was told off. Managers didn’t do anything ‘tactical’. They did ‘strategy’. They went out for expensive lunches with key ‘stakeholders.’ Argggggghhhhhhhhh.   It was all killing my soul.

My partner recalls one morning around this time when the endless meaninglessness of management got to me. I ran through the house, biffing my cellphone onto the couch, ripped off my suit jacket, pulled off my tie (I grappled with that beause the knot got tight) ripped off my white shirt popping all the buttons. I pulled off my suit pants and sat in my underwear and knotted tie on the coach, yelling.

That was it. My days as a ‘suit’ were over.

The day I quit I had no idea where my next dollar would come from. I still had a young family and a large mortgage and I was the main bread winner.

I called up a friend who was a brand and marketing expert and asked him to meet with me so I could set myself up in my own business.

We arranged to meet at a new French café in Kingsland that made wonderful galettes, a buckwheat pancake with yum fillings like my favourite ratatouille.

Unbeknownst to me, my friend had been in an altercation and was suffering a concussion. He never showed up. What was I going to do?

This café also served a wonderful dry cider in teacups, a tradition from some region of France I guess. I ordered some and a galette. They were delicious. It was a cold clear late autumn Auckland day. The sky was dark blue, and on the brick wall in the café’s courtyard, a bougainvillea was laden with dark pink flowers that looked beautiful against the sky.

So I thought, there was nothing to it, I would simply dream up my own brand and business plan.

I’d like to say I wrote the whole thing on the back of a paper napkin, but somehow I think I probably had a note book.

I jotted down a couple of sentences about what I considered I had to offer the world, and the word Spoke jumped up at me.

Spoke. It had two great meanings for me; the spoken word, and the spokes of a wheel that connects the hub to the rim.

That was what I was all about, great communication that connects.

Simple. And so Spoke was born and a 14 year journey into business began.

This journey has taken me to every corner of the world.

I have made ginormous mistakes and had enormous successes.

I have paid business coaches $1000 an hour, and I have earned $1000 an hour. I have earned nothing giving my time to not for profits sometimes for weeks, and I have earned $1 an hour.

I have sat in horror looking at bank accounts sitting on zero with no idea when any cash was coming in, and I have seen my bank balance hit $900,000, albeit briefly, not quite the $1mill.

Why I am telling you all this? Well it is part of my story, and I believe we all have stories to share, that can contribute to others, sometimes in ways that can be unexpected and unintentional. Sometimes we share something we think is useful, and it was actually something else that we talked about that struck a chord with someone.

The exercise of being visible, sharing, showing up, expressing yourself is really the trick.

What is Work?

After my 14 years ‘out of work’ what I really mean by ‘work’?

A good many of us have a very unhealthy attitude to work. We end up thinking that being busy, and ‘doing’ lots of stuff equates to value.

Working is a form of belonging, the most basic of human needs. If we are working we belong some where and to sombody or some people/family. We believe work gives us a worth.

But what is the nature of work?

Work as an employee is soul-less.

Work serving others and giving of yourself is soul-full.

At the beginning of this story I said I have not worked for 14 years. I mean working as an employee. I have come close several times in extended contracts, and then felt my soul withering as I became an employee widget in a system of useless management, and I bailed.

You see we are on the edge of perhaps the biggest revolution in work in the history of humanity.

We have created so many meaningless activities that get described as work, and earn an income. These roles are shortly going to completely disappear.

Traditional professions such as lawyers, accountants, management, and even some roles in medicine and engineering and marketing are no longer needed. We can sort most of this with an algorithm or AI.

It is people, mostly men, in these professions that have ruled the first world for the last several hundred years. But it’s over.

I’m sorry guys, we don’t need you, well at least not in these roles that you perform today.

It could get ugly for a little while. These, predominantly men, many of them middle aged and generally well meaning, much like me, will desperately cling to power and wealth that they have accumulated from these ‘old school’ ways of working, overseeing how others perform useless work.

And I believe we will need a great deal of compassion and kindness to prevail as the legions of these men struggle.

Sadly there will be enormous collateral damage for all those people that these men in power have employed in meaningless work, especially managers and professionals, and the staff that they employ to perpetuate unneeded systems.

So what do we do?

It is time to get very ordinary, and definitely not extraordinary.

The simple things, the little things will be the things that prevail.

We can reinvent community and village economies, trading, bartering and selling and buying things from one another.

We can make things, grow our own food, produce our own power, create our own entertainment.

We can be a nation and a planet of small businesses, family businesses based on community values.

A few years ago I angered an old socialist friend of mine.

I said the best thing I could teach my children was how to write an invoice.

He muttered into his beard that this was an awful capitalist idea.

The thing is, today all my children have written an invoice to charge someone for their services. It is a key to self sufficiency to understand the value you offer, and the exchange you can make for it.

The future of humanity is about building an entrepreneurial spirit in every living being, that is self expressed, conscious of their gifts that they offer the world, and in love with the idea of serving others through what they can provide, and exchanging that for a range of currencies from money, goods and services, to belonging.

The Future is Indigenous

For the new ways of working, that are really a new twist on some ancient ways of working, we can look to a neglected and marginalised part of the world, the world of indigenous people.

Indigenous people have been smashed by the first world for the last few hundred years. But today the very values, practices, and ways of working from these cultures is exactly what is missing and what is needed in the first world systems of work that are failing, and that will soon be obsolete.

Here in my homeland of Aotearoa (New Zealand) the indigenous people, Māori, and close relatives from across the islands of the South Pacific/Oceania, hold the key to the future.

For many it doesn’t look like it right now, because Māori and Pasifika have been excluded, their spirit, their wairua, their joy and their culture crushed by the systems of government and commerce. The cult of the individual and the dysfunction of honouring intellect way above body, heart and spirit has prevailed.

It has been my utmost privilege to work and be accepted to work with Māori and Pasific peoples, and learn the depth and breadth of these beautiful and exquisite cultures, a way of working, a way of loving and a way of living that offers so very much in a time bereft of love and compassion.

The craziest thing in the world is that so many people in the mainstream world cannot see it.

They misunderstand that any dysfunction they see in the Māori and Pasific world is a reflection on their own.

The systems and beliefs of Mãori run deep and hold some significant opportunities for surviving and thriving the fast changing world.

The structures of the culture are universal, and if we look at every culture on the planet back far enough in time, we all share the same beliefs around how the universe is shaped, our place in it, and how we can go about balancing body, mind and spirit.

The Weave

It is these experiences, observations and insights that led me to write The Weave, The Surprising Unity in Difference.

The exercise of writing and teaching The Weave is not about me. It is not my idea, and it is not my expertise. I am the conduit for a way of thinking and being that is humanity’s oldest technology.

Weaving was the first activity that we undertook to shape and make sense of our environment and universe.

To this day, weaving as a practical activity is fundamental to the materials all around us that we take for granted that are absolute staples in the way our shaped environment supports us, from our clothing to our buildings, to the fabrics from many materials that we interact with every day.

To weave is also a powerful metaphor that we also engage with almost daily, as we talk about the ‘fabric’ of the universe, the

‘tapestry’ of life, the ‘threads’ that come together in our lives. It is the conversations, ideas, thoughts, communication and endless day to day activities and interactions. It is our now daily engagement with the World Wide Web, the most omnipresent ubiquitous and infinite weaving humans have created.

It is no wonder that the very invention of the computer came from weaving technology in the 19th century!

To weave is both the most simple of exercises and models, but also a matrix of endless complexity, that we may never full comprehend.

It is a model and a metaphor for our very existence and offers a form for navigating our lives and our worlds.

To weave is to find connection points through threads of things that can occur as disparate or isolated.

In a simple form, individual threads alone are linear. But once they are crossed they immediately start to create a greater whole, a fabric.

The trick of the twists and turns of a weave is the give and the take, that they are held in a tension of movement and moment. Dealing with difference in human beings is the same, there are times when it will be uncomfortable to intersect with someone with a different world view, in order to realise our common humanity. As Hannah Arendt said, it will take imagining another’s world, not having pity, sympathy or empathy for it, and understanding that it may always be different from your own world view.

The warp and the weft of any woven form intersect multiple times in multiple ways. In the spaces in between a picture, a pattern forms and becomes apparent.

Many cultures of the world hold sacred rituals around the practice of weaving for good reason, to honour the ‘magic’ of the creation of the woven form, and understanding that the DNA of the practice of weaving lies in ancient times, and in forms that extend with a thread into the unseen universe, acknowledging energies and connections that are often not obvious to us in a sentient and rational world view.

The interesting fact is that although the practice of weaving threads its way into metaphor and matters that are intangible, it at the same time provides very tangible materials that support us in a very practical way in daily life.

In Māori culture, the harakeke, the flax bush is most often used for weaving. It is honoured as a very important plant because it provides a material to sustain us, not to mention the use of its seeds and juices as a rongoā, a medicine.

The leaves of the flax bush are immensely strong, and are also used to create a story for sustaining planet and people. The story underpins an importance practice to honour and sustain the harakeke, and the ecosystems of environment and people it supports.

Weavers are taught that the leaves of the harakeke form a family, and that the young shoots should never be picked, and should be protected by older shoots, leaving only the most mature leaves to be harvested.

This is a metaphor for family life, where all members across generations are interconnected, and focus on protecting the young in all their interacting and intersecting worlds.

Well, I now have produced the equivalent of an essay. What is joyful for me about this, I have written this with absolute freedom; the opportunity to express myself as I choose, the time to do it, and the inclination to bother.

As I close in on the age of 60, my life delights me. I am honoured, privileged and proud to lead a life where my work is my bliss. I feel myself growing into a sense of wisdom, excited and curious as the next 20+ years unfold.

E koekoe te tui, e ketekere te kākā, e kūkū te kukupa, It Takes Every Kind of People.

Mauri Ora.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Know Your Place

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Navigation is about triangulating where you are.

You identify three points, and you have located where you are.

Knowing your Place is also about understanding a trinity of who you are and where you are from.

1. Your place- geographically
2. Your place – where you welcome others
3. Your place- the legacy you create

Knowing your Place also requires another mighty threesome to be in balance; heart, mind and body.

Knowing your place will ground you in every environment and every interaction.

Why is this important?

Knowing who you are and where you are now, where you have come from, and where you are going are critical to effective engagement with others.

Today people want to know your back story, your current story, and the story of the future you are creating.

Knowing your Place is more than identifying with one geographic spot, that of your birth or your upbringing.

A nomad (both digital and physical) can Know Their Place as much as someone who has lived and worked in one place for many years.

It is about a knowing, a belonging, an identification with place, self and others than will ground you.

Most indigenous cultures start from a place of seeking to know your lineage and where you are from. Many consider our lineage to connect right back to the beginning of time and the creation of the planet and universe. And if you are into metaphysics, you can follow your DNA back to when were were an idea for an atom in the primordial soup.

But that gets very deep.

And that is great, because Knowing Your Place is about taking a deeper look at where you fit.

In English Victorian and Edwardian times the phrase ‘know your place’ was to ‘put you in your place’ in a hierarchy or stratified class system. Today we don’t have to do that. We can connect with our natural world, and the nature of our worlds of family, teams, groups, society and people. And take a journey to identify our place.

Our Place.
Your Place.
This Place

Sense of Place.

Place is a many layered concept.

I think of a metaphor for fly fishing. To be a great fly fisher, you work to cast your line to place it gently on the surface of the water. Your aim is to replicate an insect alighting on the surface of the water. The more attuned you are to your environment, the place you stand, the grace with which you move, your attention to the micro world of insects, and movement of current, and wind, the more you will find the sweetspot of place, to replicate the delicate movement of an insect.

A sense of knowing your place is akin to being ‘comfortable in your own skin’ and the world around you. Knowing your place allows you to embrace uncertainty, diversity and change.

Love Your Neighbour But Don’t Hang Out Together Every Day.

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Neighbors Loud Music Noise

How do we balance out what we want with what others want ?

Doesn’t this just have to be the biggest question we all face as human beings?

Getting what we want, living the life we want, but getting on with others when they might want something quite diifferent from us.

It happens in families, at work, in politics, in religion, in race, everywhere we interact with others. We are social animals, wanting to belong, and then at the same time we get really annoyed with people and don’t want them around. How contrary!

So how do we work it all out and find the perfect answer?

The first answer is that we don’t. Our lives are perpetually evolving. We have to find beauty in the flaws, the challenges the imperfections and the journey both rocky and smooth. Absolute perfection, absolute order, 24/7 happiness is an illusion.

I’ve got neighbours who are very different from me, but we have got on really well for the best part of 20 years.

We don’t live in each other’s pockets like good friends, but we don’t ignore one another either. There have been times we have hung out a lot, and times where we have not said much to each other for days or weeks.

We have not always agreed on things, and in fact sometimes we have some very different and opposing views on things. But we get on. Some where along the line, we have built a deep mutual respect, a respect of difference, and a respect for what we share in common.

There is a love, and you can say in a certain way, it is an unconditional love, the kind you have in families where you might not get on, might not have everything in common, but you are family, and you love one another.

Seems to me to Love Your Neighbour should come from a place of love, of respect that does not mean going out of your own way to the point you are not doing or living the way you want to.

Loving Your Neighbour is being free to disagree with them, to be annoyed by them, to live a totally different life from them, and not tolerate them out of obligation or avoidance because you feel you SHOULD. It will never work.

So the answer to achieving world peace with a better community of diversity in thinking, lifestyle, beliefs, ethnicity and ability is accepting that we always all be different from one another. And in fact we would probably hate it if we were all exactly the same, surely we would be like robots!

As the great community builder, Peter Block puts it:

” Dissent is the cousin of diversity; the respect for wide range of beliefs.

This begins by allowing people the space to say “no”.

If we cannot say “no” then “yes” has no meaning.

Each needs the chance to express their doubts and reservations without having to justify them, or move quickly into problem solving.

“No” is the beginning of the conversation for commitment.

Doubt and “no” is a symbolic expression of people finding their space and role in the strategy.

It is when we fully understand what people do not want that choice becomes possible.

The leadership task is to surface doubts and dissent without having an answer to every question.”

www.abundantcommunity.com

Getting Real About the Real World

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Wood Bookshelf in the Shape of Human Head and books near break wall, Knowledge Concept

What is the ‘real’ world?

I’ve found myself often saying this cliché about people. ‘So and so needs to get into the real world.”

So I’ve wondered why do I, and others keep using this expression?

It is most usually a criticism. Someone is being ‘unrealistic’. They are out of touch, lost in their own world, or not in touch with others.

So here’s what I really think.

Our modern world has made us increasingly separate from one another. And so we think our worlds’ look quite different from each other. We justify our own point of view through judgement and comparison to others.

We spent more and more time, in the western world anyway, doing abstract stuff staying remote in front of screens, not people, using our hands on key boards, a mouse, a remote. We spend more time in the virtual world than the ‘real time’ world.

We are educated to think and act through narrow educational lenses; to regurgitate and not to make things and experience things.
We value how people appear on paper with qualifications and abstract achievements, more than we value people’s experience good and bad.

But actually, our every living moment is the real world. The instant we embrace difference in others, diverse actions and thought, everything becomes one ‘real’ world.

If we are judging others, or even ourselves for not living in the real world, we are not honouring our experience of it, good and bad, happy and sad, failure and success. It’s all pretty goddamn real!!

In an interview David Bowie once answered the question: What is your greatest achievement? His answer was: “Discovering morning.”

Honour every experience.

Get real.

No More Time Out

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iStock_000045645158_XXXLargeI’m thinking about the coming year. It’s the 9th day of 2016. It can’t be helped, whichever way you look at it – it is a new year. And just over one week in, it is a transition time from a holiday into this ‘brand new’ year. I feel like I am emerging from the twilight of a whole lot of ‘time off’, or ‘time out’, over the Christmas and New Year break.

People are trickling back to work. Each day there are a few more cars on the road. Some people look like stunned mullets, adjusting their brains to a different pace, different clothes, different environment. Back to work!  Moving from the glowing twilight post-holiday into the full sunlight! In the glaze of the sun a few things happen. It nurtures and brings life, it warms mind and body, and sustains us. But too much and it will burn and destroy.

Getting the balance right with the powerful elements of nature is the same as getting the balance right with our professional and personal lives. The seasons and the weather are in constant change. And changing too are all the man-made structures that impact our lives. Our time and our days can fill up very, very quickly. We run out of time more than ever, with instant media and communication at our fingertips. There are a myriad of things to pay attention to. Technology has definitely NOT been a time-saving innovation for most of us.

As 2016 starts to settle in, and I get into a work mode, I’m asking:  What do I want more of than I had last year? What do I want less of than I had last year?

Then I get to thinking about the whole measurement of time – be it a year, a month, a day, a moment. And about how much time can expand and contract. How it seems like time can run out, or can go on endlessly. Somewhere I know it is all relative – my relationship to time is all completely made up, by me!

So I have arrived at an idea about Time Off and Time Out. I am eradicating them.

I am having a year of Time On and Time In.

I am going to a place where I will seek more natural rhythms in my energy flows, and seek to not judge when I have more or less energy, to not compare or judge one place or another.

I will move away from segmenting my life into Down Time, Time Off, Time Out, and integrate more balance and flow.

I will get more interested in the cycles of the seasons, of the sun of the moon, and become attuned with them.

I will seek a greater understanding of ebb and flow, in myself and the planet around me.

I will seek balance.

It is my heartfelt belief that when I am in tune with my vision and purpose, when I have it showing up in all my waking and even sleeping moments, I do not need Time Out and Time Off. Time will flow with greater ease. I will rise to the occasions of deadlines and commitments,  because they will be built on the foundation of my vision and my purpose.

Do you know what your vision is? Does it sustain you?

 

Revere

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Judging and comparing is a big part of our lives.
It is automatic. This day is better than that, this movie was better or worse that the last one we saw. This steak tastes fantastic compared to the last one. This car I’ve got is a dog. My last one was really great. The same goes for people. My teacher this year is horrible. I really liked the one I had last year. My girlfriend, well we are great friends, and get on really well, but the girl I went out with two years ago was really the one.
We do it all day and every day; judge, assess and compare. And that’s in our nature.
On one level, there is nothing wrong with that. The contrast, we often believe, is what makes us happy. We can size up our lives, be happy about the good times, because we can compare them to the bad ones. But here there is a flaw. This way is based on life going ‘up and down’, good times and bad times, assessed, fluctuating.

I wonder, really wonder,what it would be like if we were to spend less time judging and assessing the world we live in; what is right and wrong with it, comparing it to the past, and constantly sizing up now, against the past or the future, what it would be like.

I wonder what it would be like to revere life, revere people, revere nature, revere our being and experience each day. I wonder. In awe. With reverence.

You know too, in recent times the word awesome has become popular. We have a hunger, a thirst for life to be awesome. So what is it to be ‘in awe’ of something. It is to wonder, to revere, not to measure, to sink into the bottomless depths of love, connection, peace, and the moment.

Revere.

Even the sound of the word invites contemplation, reflection, awe.

Say it. Speak it. Breathe it. It is a word that spoken can bring you close to the infinite, to reverence, to wonder, to peace.