Rock Time, Rest Time, Tohu Decision Making Practices.

Tuesday 21 October 2025

I'm hoping that the rhythms of my weeks and months can find some useful waves, some consistency of being, feeling, doing that will allow the research to unfold (be revealed and evolved) from the diverse spaces I inhabit as much as from the focus of an academic 'body'. It's been almost two months of official academic-ing, and somehow I feel like I've not landed. Alys just very kindly supported me to gain a cupboard and a concrete pou in the dance studios offices. I asked Kerry this morning if I could have the whole of Tuesdays. No cooking for me tonight.

I keep asking how I can do these practices with ease, and so far, I've noticed that I have a few strategies. One response to this has been to make sure I'm resting as a part of my practice, or, valuing rest and pleasurable practices such as playing guitar, walking slowly, having baths etc, as a part of an ecology of practice. Talking to others about this idea of rest always brings up judgements of themselves about how much they are not resting. We talk about the conditions of contemporary living - especially in a SuperCity Auckland context – not being particularly conducive to rest, and that I've needed to almost put a dollar value on my rest in relation to what it enables me to do, so I'm paying myself to rest and nourish my whole being, not just my body.

In one way, this works because I am feeling more centered in my body than I used to. In another way, I don't know that resting so that I can 'work better later' is really supportive of changing a paradigm of capitalistic extraction of value from my body and my creative practices. Could I reframe my prioritisation of time for me as something that does not need justification, and still turn up to do the work (of resting/playing/being)? Maybe this is related to ideas of productivity differences in 'colonial'/capitalistic and indigenous communities? In this line of thinking, we could reconsider what constitutes work, what is valued as useful for society, how we should spend our time, and who gets to decide these things.

From the perspective of the rocks, how might they feel time, or the value of their 'being rock'? How could you even start to find boundaries within which to measure time within a body of rock? I guess there's also the question of how to even find the boundaries of a rock body! Could our economies of time accounting and value exchange start to more meaningfully bring in the rhythms and temporal experiences of our deep-time living systems?

The moon is a rock, and so is the earth – an alive, breathing, evolving rock/plant/gas/language/emotion body. Maybe from a living systems perspective, time is only really able to be usefully measured as a relational experience between two or more entities. Maramataka must be coming into this conversation then, as well as other ways of languaging and experiencing time. King et al (2023) review Māori temporalities from a hauora perspective, and reveal that “Māori concepts of time were interconnected, interdependentand complex, with multi-layered and multi-faceted dimensions that also involved multiple possibilities” (p261). Six different themes were discussed, and offer some pathways into developing different modes of being and doing that are relational and rooted in place. Tohu, Hurihanga, Te Taiao, Whakapapa, Te Pūtake and Mana Motuhake are explored as key terms that express something towards an experience of time in te ao Māori.

In a zui with Johnny Freeland, he spoke of the need to return to listening to the tohu of the taiao, that this is a skill we need to reclaim if we are to do the work necessary to regenerating our ecologies and our communities. Tohu is one fundamental kupu to start to understand in terms of how it turns up in our lives at all scales. Can we practice listening to the tohu of our world in ways that facilitate decision making? How would a practice of 'Tohu' decision making support an improvisational performance or choreographic practice?

This morning the tohu was forgetting my phone in the car and having to get off the bus, catch another back to the car, and then start my journey to Uni all over again. I need to carry less, to think ahead more.

This afternoon, the tohu was being in the studio confronted by my image and feeling like there is something I need to address about how I work without looking at myself. Working with my rākau through the mirror, I found the potential to re-pattern not only through feeling, but also through an external eye. Who else might be able to witness this practice? How else could a whenua-based movement practice be evolved in a studio setting? How do I need to spend my time at uni?

What rhythms, what pace, what deeper patterns do we need to pay attention to in order to resource evolutions of practice towards living as regenerative systems?

What rhythms, patterns do we need to pay attention to in a climate of increasing instability?

What potentials do we have as improvisational pattern makers and movers to support our communities to go deep and wide, go up, down, and in – to remember our capacity to respond to the tohu of the wā as a practice of ongoingness?

Right now, today, the tohu is a feeling of accountability to my whānau, to be clear about what I am doing, and what that might offer towards evolving states of ecological and hapū health. So. The time has come to consolidate and clarify this research in relation to what is is doing, where it might live, for whom it is living, and what rhythms will attend to our co-creative potentials.

King, P. T., Cormack, D., Harris, R., Paine, S. J., & McLeod, M. (2022). ‘Never-ending beginnings’: a qualitative literature review of Māori temporal ontologies. Kōtuitui: New Zealand Journal of Social Sciences Online, 18(3), 252–267. https://doi.org/10.1080/1177083X.2022.2138467