I don’t know. Yet.
“ I don’t know - yet”. One word, ‘yet’, was all it took to open another door to a world of possibility.
I had spent the last few years trying to make the I don’t know room look like a comfortable warm place that others could come and sit. Extra fluffs of the pillows to distract them from the mental alarm bells and physical warning signals going off from previous experiences of not knowing.
On the first day when Nora Bateson said "I don’t know - yet", I raised my feet to the ottoman in the I don’t know room, lifted the roof off, and let the light of a thousand stars of possibility shine in.
Listening to the world
A large contributor to my way of bring is listening to nature. This drew me in to the first breakout session - A Voice for Nature. With three places in Aotearoa being granted legal personhood, and my work centred around listening to water bodies (our own included), it was extra delicious to be able to sit in that space without distraction. Pella Theil described her work with such ease, and the confidence when she stated how legal frameworks can listen to nature – if my heart could make an audible sigh of relief, it would have filled the room. She’s it. That’s it. It doesn’t matter what systems we inhabit. The work is to open that system to listen to nature.
[How do you commune with nature? For me it is the ocean. It is not really the act of surfing a wave, but everything that comes before and after. The medicine of entering the water, simultaneously feeling and watching it move over your feet. The immersion. The waiting. The watching. The being. Learning how the water moves over that place, time and time again. Me baring witness to water, and water baring witness to me.]
Rhyming
I had never met or heard of Indy Johar before I saw him speak in circle. Somewhere in that hour, I disconnected from linear time, he spoke from the unified field, and in those collections of moments - I knew him. He spoke of responsibility. How the responsibility of storing carbon could be designed into a wooden building, or a wooden chair. How we all want community but we don’t know how to commune. How we continue to make the same mistakes, not in repetition but in rhyming. And I am not sure this many weeks later, where his words ended and my thoughts began, but I have often spoken with a friend about how we circle around - a time, a place, a person. In this circling, we feel we are so close we can almost touch it, but we can't. It is not a closed loop, but a spiral - a circular rhyming.
It's interesting, how people can enter the same room, hear the same words, and come out with something completely different. Because I did not feel the fear that others expressed - I was elated. Here is this person, a human being I have never met, showing me how he is taking responsibility for listening to nature in the system he inhabits.
That sense of relief was back again. All we need to do is listen. Wherever we are, whatever systems we inhabit, we only need to learn to listen. And it does not matter that your response looks different to my response, in fact it shouldn't. If you listen to the land, of soil, water, and air where you are. And they listen to the land, of soil, water, and air where they are. And I listen to the land, of soil, water, and air where I am… our responses will not be the same - but they will rhyme.
Justice
Of course there are the speakers, but there are also the attendees. That ones who sit next to me, join me in a line, invite me to join a table, introduce me to someone they glimpsed a thread of connection with, become familiar with after we find we’ve attended all the same break outs.
Laura was the last of many beautiful connections. At first we bonded over being married to Irishmen, and how family visits come with an additional level of terror – for your liver. I picked up on her south African roots, and as we moved from the horse meditation zone into the gathering (yes you read that correctly), she spoke of her organisations connections to Aotearoa. The Tūhoe living building Te Kura Whare. A building built by bricks, Tūhoe soil fashioned by tūhoe hands. Somehow in there the word justice was mentioned and I asked Laura, ‘What does justice mean to you?’.
My heart made its way into my throat as she told of the bricks reclaimed from the former prison on Constitution Hill, witness to so much injustice, were used in construction of the new Constitutional Court of South Africa (1995). What spoke to her the most, were these bricks that hadn’t seen justice, were able to in their new form.
And as I sat in the silence, my tongue slightly swollen and my eyes swimming with the horror and beauty of truth, an echo began to form in my heart beat.
Had those bricks bared witness to justice? – not yet.
Is the system you inhabit listening to the world? – not yet.
If your response rhyming with soil water and air? – not yet.
Whakapapa Based Methodologies is an example of how a system can listen to nature.
